The Quandl Excel Add-In allows you to search through, find and download any of Quandl's millions of datasets directly from within Microsoft Excel. It's completely free; usage is unlimited and unrestricted. Currently this Add-in is limited to windows only as it uses features and functions which are only available on the windows version of excel.
A few things that will make your excel development experience much easier:
- Excel is single threaded
- Use Async tasks and don't block with long running code. This will block the Excel UI due to it being single threaded.
- When making calls to excel via ExcelDNA thing of Excel as the
server
and our ExcelDNA app as theclient
. Design your application as if you are makingrequests
of excel which it may or may not fulfill. Also not that the Excelserver
can be busy (overloaded) due to its single threaded nature and you may need to wait and retry your call later to fulfill it.
- Download and install InstallSheild Limited Edition here
- Right click solution file and select
Manage NuGet Packages for Solution
(If you don't have NuGet, please install it at https://dist.nuget.org/index.html) - Select
Newtonsoft.Json
packages and install the latest stable version - Select
Excel-DNA
packages and install the lastest stable version to QuandlFunctions project - Go to the project properties for
Quandl.Excel.Addin
- Click on signing tab
- Click
Create Test Certificate
without a password - Do steps 5-7 for
Quandleild.Excel.Console
- Go to the project properties for
Quandl.Excel.UDF.Functions
- Under
Debug
change theStart Action
fromStart Project
toStart External Program
- Fill in the path to your chosen version of Excel in the Textbox
- Under
Start Options
in theCommand Line Arguments
text field enterQuandl.Excel.UDF.Functions-AddIn.xll
- You should now be able to build the project.
Following steps will create a setup package which works for both Microsoft Excel 32 bit and 64 bit.
- Follow the instructions list in
Development
section above to setup the project and its basic dependencies. - Copy this file [Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6.1 Web.prq](Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6.1 Web.prq) to folder C:\Program Files (x86)\InstallShield\2015LE\SetupPrerequisites
- Ensure the setup project is signed
Quandl.Excel.Addin.Setup -> 6 Prepare for Release => Releases => SingleImage => Signing
- See SIGNING
- Navigate to
Quandl.Excel.Addin.Setup -> 1 Organize Your Setup => General Information
- Change the product code (use the helper -
{...}
) - Bump the version number. * Be sure to leave the upgrade code untouched.
- Navigate to the
Quandl.Excel.Addin -> Properties => Publish
and update the version to match the setup version. - Navigate to the
Quandl.Shared.Modules -> Utilities => ReleaseVersion
and update the version to match the setup version. - Switch your
Run Mode
torelease
instead ofdebug
- Right click solution file and select
Rebuild Solution
- Select the
Quandl.Excel.Addin.Setup
project and in the topbarInstallShield LE
menu selectOpen release folder
to find your setup.exe file.
Things to note:
- UnRegisterAddin must have code
1501
in the.isl
file. - Be sure to bump the version AND change your product code number under
Organize Your Setup
=>General Information
. This is necessary for a seemless upgrade. - Allow of our dependencies have been listed as
web
dependencies to keep our installer small.- Should you need to install them locally you can do that navigating to
Quandl.Excel.Addin.Setup -> 2 Specify Application Data => Redistributables
. You will need to do this in Visual Studio as an admin.
- Should you need to install them locally you can do that navigating to
- we are using Markdown.XAML to generate the flowdocument from the github markup. For more info check out the github page.
For a list of excel exceptions and how to debug them please see: Errors
Excel seems to a have a bug where even when you close all its windows it can leave the main process running in the background. This seems to be for quick preview reasons (when you click an excel file in explorer). When this happens excel unloads all its add-ins to save memory. However this also means that it won't reload them until next time its started properly. To reload the add-in you must forcibly close any remaing excel instances from the task manager details
tab.
This could be a number of things but generally means that our implementation has run into one of the following problems:
- Unhandled excel exception - Excel has many mysterious exceptions that result in COMException errors. If left unhandled they can crash excel or stop the running UDF.
- Threading deadlock - This can happen if we use our threads in a non thread safe way. Basically we are not handling a specific case properly.
- Excel request deadlock - This can occur when excel is busy and we try to make another request to it from a different thread.
- Unhandled server error response - Our server is having issues and after a few retries our code simply gives up.
Double check your installshield limited edition settings. Sometimes it will point to the wrong redistributables folder even after re-installation. In most cases it should be set to C:\Program Files (x86)\InstallShield\2015LE\SetupPrerequisites
See LICENCE file for licence rights and limitations (MIT)