MicrosoftWill there be a "DataType supplier" interface at some point? For example, the industry standard for some sectors of the financial markets is Bloomberg, which has its own API for accessing data. Ideally one would be able to create a "Bond" datatype (for example) and have its details (ISIN code, coupon, maturity, yield and price history) loaded from Bloomberg.
Put another way, what does a data source have to do to make itself accessible to the new DataType functionality?
Is the compound data saved with the Workbook, or does Excel have to reload each time the Workbook is opened?
Will DataTypes be accessible/understood by VBA or the C-API? ie can we programme with them? Currently if I try to pass a range containing one of the new DataTypes to VBA, the parameter simply contains an error code (2015).
Maybe this is the first step towards Excel being able to hold "state"? Developers of financial (and other) analytic software aimed at Excel usually have to build a "handle" layer, whereby the reference to a complex structure held in memory (eg might be a simulation result set, or a yield curve etc) is stored in an Excel cell (most commonly as a string with a calculation counter). This handle is then passed to the analytics function, which uses it to find the object's data in memory. It is clunky but necessary as Excel is (was?) restricted to holding single built-in types in a cell.
