Microsoft releases Excel API to developers

Spreadsheet potential for all. Joy.

Microsoft has released its Excel REST API for Office 365 to developers, giving them the ability to add calculation, reporting and data services to their apps.

Microsoft said the API can be used to embed "more than 300 worksheet functions" into apps, including such things as mortgage calculators and "professional dashboards".

The API release is intended to support what Microsoft is still calling "a continuation of our journey to make Office an open platform for developers".

At the heart of it is Microsoft Graph, which the company rather pompously (and nerdishly) describes as "one endpoint to rule them all", and is essentially a unified API manager for development across disciplines.

Microsoft has pulled some short customer use cases into the mix, highlighting Sage, which has apparently integrated its Sage 50 accounting software with Office 365, "leveraging Excel via the... Excel REST API to access and combine business data in Sage 50 with the productivity benefits of Office". It's a far cry from the old days when Sage and Microsoft would have considered each other rivals, but that's arguably part of Microsoft's aim - Office 365 as platform, not product.

Meanwhile, automation firm Zapier is integrating with Excel with "near-infinite use cases", building the capability to suck all connected services data into Excel.

It's still only two years since Terry Myerson announced live on stage at Microsoft Build that C#, TypeScript and Visual Basic - along with compiler Roslyn - were being open sourced. And it's only a few months since the company made Xamarin open source, too.

Subsequent detachment from Microsoft's perpetually tumbleweeding Windows Store is upping the ante for genuinely useful enterprise apps with classic Microsoft APIs, and the addition of Excel can only be very good news in that regard.