转发个微软关于"Office 自动化"调查，有兴趣的童鞋来做做或者提点意见吧~

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印象中 Office 自动化好像快十年没怎么变了，难得微软借着转 Azure 又重新重视了，大家来支持下吧~
关键词：Office Automation / VSTO / Visual Studio / Azure
问题有点多，不想回全部的童鞋建议讨论这个吧：how you test apps that do Office automation ？
“Tell me about yourself”貌似不适合在这里回，建议跳过。
PS： 转发已征得作者同意，猜想他本人也会来逛逛（如果链接可匿名访问的话），回复调查问题请用英文
调查如下：

Survey Introduction: Hello my name is Uche Nkadi and I am the Program Manager at Microsoft responsible for Office Automation. I want to make the lives of Office Developers easier and to accomplish this, I need learn from devs what kinds of solutions they are building and how they are testing those solutions.  Lastly, I hope you can provide feedback and tell us if the solution I present below would actually solve your current issues. If you want to schedule a chat through Skype or Teams instead of this survey, I would be delighted to set up a meeting with you via https://calendly.com/uchen/officechat. I’m open for the next 2 weeks. Thank you in advance!

# Tell me about yourself:

1. What’s the name of your company and what they work on? (Freelance/Independent is an option)
 
2. What’s your role on the team?

# Tell me about your Office Development

3. What does your app/add-in do?
 
4. What kind of Office development do you do? (VSTO, macros, etc.)
 
5. Which Office Products have you targeted? (Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint)
 
6. Do you use .NET references to Office client libraries for your app/add-in?
 
7. How do you test your app/add-in?
 
8. Do you test on multiple versions of Office and/or Windows? Which versions? 32 bit vs 64 bit?
 
9. Do the differences in version make a difference when testing? Deploying? How so?
 
10. How do you deploy your app/add-in today? (Click once, link on website, etc)
 
11. What is the most annoying aspects of testing your app/add-in in general?
 
# Does this solution help you?

Solution: Over the past few months, our team ran an experiment in which we gave VSTO add-in developers virtual machines pre-installed with Office 2010, 2013, and 365 on Windows 7 and 10. This was a completely managed solution where the developer was able to go to a website, log into any of the 6 VMs, drag and drop their files onto the machine, and test any version. Now as an evolution of this idea, we’re thinking of adding the ability within Visual Studio to publish your add-in directly to a VM with the version of Windows and Office of your choosing

12. Would a solution like this solve your problem?
 
13. Which versions of Windows and Office would you like to see?
 
14. We're thinking about pricing the usage of VMs at 1 dollar an hour. How man hours do you regularly test now?  How many hours do you think you would use this?
 
15. Have you used Azure before? If so, for what?
 
16. If there was a magic solution for testing the Office apps that would provide the most value to you, what would it be?
 
Thank you so much for taking the time to complete my survey. Although we make the products, we need engagement from developers such as yourself to help educate us on how the products are being used and how we can improve them.

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貌似没人回，楼主先来第一份回复（对， 我是来给 Python 和 xlwings 打广告的~ 脱离最新技术好久了，欢迎纠错~）

3. What does your app/add-in do?
4. What kind of Office development do you do? (VSTO, macros, etc.)
7. How do you test your app/add-in?

1). load excel data to python pandas dataframes:
a. for simple sheets batch automation, use pandas ( https://pandas.pydata.org/ ) or dask ( https://dask.org/ )
b. for single sheet live analyzing, use xlwings: https://www.xlwings.org/
( This tool can call windows native excel API directly and don't need to install excel plugins. )

2). live analyzing data and write functions on Jupyter notebook( https://jupyter.org/ )

3). present result
a. for simple result, export to excel with xlwings or pandas
b. for complex result, save to db and create a single page site with python flask and jquery datatable
c. if using SQL server, save to db, and refresh data on excel directly

5. Which Office Products have you targeted? (Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint)
Excel

6. Do you use .NET references to Office client libraries for your app/add-in?
Yes, using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word and Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.

8. Do you test on multiple versions of Office and/or Windows? Which versions? 32 bit vs 64 bit?
Yes but don't care.

9. Do the differences in version make a difference when testing? Deploying? How so?
No.

10. How do you deploy your app/add-in today? (Click once, link on website, etc)
link on website

11. What is the most annoying aspects of testing your app/add-in in general?
PivotTable functions are too complex and hard to use: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.office.interop.excel.pivotcache.createpivottable
Seems can't get raw data from PivotCache directly as far as I know.

12. Would a solution like this solve your problem?
No, as I don't use VSTO.

13. Which versions of Windows and Office would you like to see?
Windows 10. Offce 2016+ and 365 online version.

14. We're thinking about pricing the usage of VMs at 1 dollar an hour. How man hours do you regularly test now? How many hours do you think you would use this?
$1/Hour is too expensive for personal use.

15. Have you used Azure before? If so, for what?
No. Azure didn't accept my Chinese credit card.

16. If there was a magic solution for testing the Office apps that would provide the most value to you, what would it be?
Simplify pivot table/chart related functions in Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel and better provide Python sdk to call them.
Support C# REPL(

) on Azure Notebooks and also for open source Jupyter.