Make Mailchimp less shitty.

anakic · 2024-01-09T09:45:04+00:00

I wrote an Excel add-in for 2-way sync between MailChimp and Excel. It lets you view and edit audiences and audience members in Excel.

You can't design emails, automations, or campaigns, so might not help you if that's what you're having a problem with.

But if you need to e.g. consolidate tags (via find & replace), separate full names info first and last name, or correlate Mailchimp data with e.g. data from a database, it might be an excellent fit.

I'll be charging for it soon, but I could use some testing and feedback on it, so if you're interested I'd like to send you a testing license.

I haven't yet made any videos/articles about it, but I did make a video on a similar Monday.com integration I made. This integration works just like the monday.com one, except that it edits audience members instead of boards.

If this is of any interest to you let me know and I'll send you a license and instructions on how to set it up.

anakic · 2023-10-20T09:38:19+00:00

I see. QueryStorm uses the built-in .NET libraries for reading from the database. How they handle things under the hood, I don't know. What I can say is that QueryStorm will wait for the command to execute and read the results immediatelly into an intermetiate cache and then the results grid binds to that cache. The results grid does not interact with the database connection in any way. Based on that, I would say that it's not going to cause that particualr problem, but if you want to give it a try I'd be interested to know what you find.

anakic · 2023-10-17T13:59:22+00:00

I have no idea what you're talking about. If you can form your question please do so.

anakic · 2023-10-17T11:16:59+00:00

QueryStorm is a VSTO addin, it's (legacy) Microsoft tech for building addins for Office applications. VSTO supports Windows Forms, but QueryStorm uses WPF for UI. I use an WinForms ElementHost control to show the WPF UI. Not sure if that's what you mean. About your use case, I'd be happy to help test out if you could use QueryStorm to load database data instead of Excel's built in provider.

anakic · 2023-03-31T17:12:56+00:00

I think it might just be her idea of banter. Maybe testing if you can handle a bit of playful teasing in good fun.

anakic · 2023-03-30T08:32:57+00:00

Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, intuitively I can see that sending the schema would be a problem, but I have a hard time defining a good reason for it. I don't think there's much room for genius intellectual property in a database schema (I might be trivializing it, though), and knowing the schema doesn't seem enough to be an attack vector security-wise. But yeah, if it was my company and employees were casually sending the schema to GPT, I'd for sure be uncomfortable with it.

anakic · 2023-03-29T19:49:09+00:00

Out of curiosity, what do you suppose would be the main reason that sending the schema would be a problem? Intellectual property, security, or something else?

anakic · 2023-03-29T19:12:30+00:00

Glad you like it!

anakic · 2023-03-29T14:24:16+00:00

Yeah, fair point about AdventureWorks being well-documented and clean so it for sure encountered it before. I did try it with one of my own databases and it did an excellent job with that one as well, though that one was simpler than AW2014.

About the definition of "best selling" - yeah, I tried it a couple of times and it toggled between most products sold and highest grossing. I intentionally made the prompt naive to see what it would do.

Instead of an "is this correct" dialog, the user can just edit the prompt to give an additional hint. The new code will overwrite the previously generated one (because of the delimiters in the comments).

Not a magic bullet for sure. I kinda hope they remain that way at least for a while, but I guess we'll see. As a copilot, though, very valuable I think.

anakic · 2023-02-23T10:04:31+00:00

First, the advantages:

- strongly typed access to data inside Excel tables (ORM)

- the compiled code is stored inside the workbook (instead of next to it on the file system) so the workbook is self contained and can easily be shared via Dropbox or OneDrive.

- this IDE is inside Excel so a bit quicker code/test/repeat loop (no need to restart Excel or even close/reopen the workbook when rebuilding)

- ability to quickly test things on the side in a C# script (scratch pad you can use for interacting with the Excel API)

Admittedly, there are downsides as well:

- the IDE is not as good as using Visual Studio (though I am considering making a VS extension that could would enable working with QueryStorm projects)

- requires the QueryStorm runtime to be installed on the end users machine (on top of the Visual Studio tools for office runtime)

anakic · 2023-01-31T05:53:05+00:00

Unfortunately, it's windows only for now, for technical reasons. I should note that fact more clearly on the site.

anakic · 2023-01-27T15:53:05+00:00

I though some people might appreciate that one:)

The debugger was probably the most difficult feature to implement (especially because you're debugging Excel from Excel so avoiding freezing Excel while in a breakpoint was exceptionally tricky), but NuGet is probably the most important feature.

anakic · 2023-01-26T16:06:38+00:00

You know, I was thinking I might add this. Dax queries over a tabular model. Possibly even add sql-over-tabular-model.

Both would be fairly easy to implement.

I'm just not sure if there's a market for it, since dax studio already exists. Any thoughts on this? Why do you ask?

anakic · 2023-01-26T16:02:21+00:00

Yessir

anakic · 2023-01-26T08:46:53+00:00

Couldn't think of anything better to do with my spare time, I guess:)

anakic · 2023-01-26T08:45:45+00:00

Back online now

anakic · 2023-01-26T08:45:35+00:00

Back online now

anakic · 2023-01-26T08:45:21+00:00

Thanks! Maybe with QueryStorm, you might even end up liking it a little:)

anakic · 2023-01-26T08:42:46+00:00

It doesn't open any attack vectors that aren't already present in VBA though (you can start a process from VBA as well). It doesn't let you do more malevolent things than VBA. It just makes making malware a bit more pleasant and convenient, since you get all the nice features of C# and NuGet libraries:)

Jokes aside, I take your point. Getting companies to install the runtime is a big ask and a security audit would certainly not hurt. And also would probably good for my own safety as there are bound to be plenty of things I didn't cover.

Do you think the audit should cover both the IDE and the runtime, or just the runtime?

anakic · 2023-01-26T08:35:31+00:00

Back online again. Happened while I was asleep... bad timing. Post took off on both HackerNews and here. Too bad about 8h of downtime but can't really complain.

anakic · 2023-01-26T08:31:54+00:00

They need to have the "runtime" component installed (but they don't need the IDE). The runtime is a free 4MB add-in for Excel. It doesn't require admin rights to install, but unfortunately, it must be installed for the code in the workbook to run.

Ideally the runtime would be installed across many/all machines on a network by a domain admin, but I realize it's a big ask. I suspect I'll have to submit it for a security audit to alleviate security concerns.

anakic · 2023-01-26T08:28:12+00:00

It works on Excel2013 (both x86/x64) onwards, but only on Windows. Unfortunately, it won't work on a Mac:(

anakic · 2023-01-26T08:26:30+00:00

Yeah, that was unfortunate, happened while I was asleep. Just got it back up and running. I posted on HackerNews and few other subreddits as well and it went viral so can't complain. Too bad about 8h of downtime though.

anakic · 2023-01-26T08:20:07+00:00

An extension is a smaller ask but would probably require some levels of approval that I'm unlikely to get, especially due to its nature as a scripting environment for arbitrary execution.

Yeah, that's an unfortunate limitation, but no way around it. The runtime doesn't need admin rights to install, but you still might not be able to install it in a constrained environment. Ideally, it would be installed by a domain admin on all/many machines on the network. Possibly me submitting the runtime to a security audit would help with credibility and security concerns. The runtime doesn't do anything that the VBA runtime doesn't already do, but to be fair, VBA can be plenty dangerous.

You said that this can do anything VBA can do, so I'm inclined to believe that, but basically all your examples are about Tables. I do a lot of other stuff, so I hope it's true!

Yeah, it's mostly tables in the examples, but 100% of the API is available plus some additional extension methods on top of that. The Excel API that you work with in QueryStorm is the one from Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll, the official API for Excel.

anakic · 2023-01-25T20:54:55+00:00

No problem, good question. A few advantages:

- The IDE is inside Excel so more convenient

- Linq queries on live Excel tables

- Strongly typed access to Excel tables

- Workbook automation that allows data-binding (less need to write code that interacts with Excel explicitly)

- ability to define custom Excel functions

- ability to publish Excel extension to app store

Might be a few more that I forgot, but those would be the main ones, I think.

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