Millions of professionals use a wonderful tool, spreadsheets, for engineering calculations and financial analysis. It attracts a user-friendly interface and clear data organization. Cell formulas provide rich opportunities for automating calculations. No programming is required. (For example, Microsoft Excel)

But in order to expand the scope of the tool, it is necessary to increase the dimension of the tables and the speed of calculations.It is necessary to create a single, common database for a group of users.Cell formulas should be able to do everything.

MX: Mumps & eXcel Joining - But Why?

At medium and small manufacturing enterprises, there are many technological and financial problems for the solution of which Microsoft Office is traditionally used, more precisely its more engineering part: Excel.

This is not only a tribute to tradition, excel is truly an unsurpassed tool for economic analysis and technological calculations. The number of users is in the millions. And these are only legal installations. In addition, there are analogues in the form of Free Office, Open Office and other.

Excel in many cases competes with a web browser in terms

Download  MX  into folder  C:/mx   (if Windows)

Create the REST application MX in IRIS namespace USER:

• USER> do ^%REST …………
• USER> do $System.OBJ.ImportDir(“c:/mx”,”vmx.ro”,”ck”,,1)
• USER> do $System.OBJ.ImportDir("c:/mx","rest.xml","ck",,1)

Prepare excel sheet - place on it mx-formulas and mumps-commands:

To connect excel correctly, you must first specify the server address and port in MX_CONFI.xlsb sheet 'connections'. Port see in ^|"%SYS"|%SYS("WebServer","Port").

Run MX.XLSB. Commands written on sheet created a test global on the server and the interface buttons. 

To add a new person to

The client part of the code for this game is on the MS Excel sheet and consists of:

1. m-commands  for random arranging ships on the playing field  (21 cells)
2. m-command to enable on-click m-trigger on all 100 cells of the playing field (1), red font
3. m-trigger (1), red font

The server part of the code (vmx.ro) is installed onсе, it not change depending on the task, is the same for IRIS, CACHE, 16, 8-bit encoding, any applications, games, reports.  The server side creates and maintains ‘virtual excel’ in M.

SEA BATTLE can be tested without your mx-server, just download MX and unzip to any

There is a special Query for reporting, it takes one cell of Excel. Example :

?$$omQuery 113^oPeat | Country   Country:Province   Date   Product:Date   Date:Product:-zr   | tn EURO | zrzr| | if Date'<%XD81,Date'>%XD82 |  set zrzr=zr,EURO=summa

The omQuery sets the structure and content of the required documents as well as filters and data processing procedures.

In one request, up to 9 reports are created, with subtotals by group. (5 here , 3 with:subtotals )

All issued documents retain the interactivity property - any manipulations with cells are displayed in excel and in virtual m-excel

In MX any global can be displayed on a sheet in the form of a table.

We will look at the simplest example (work only with  CACHE-2014+ or IRIS)

Upgrade or install  MX.

Start mx.xlsb  and connect to your namespase with vmx-routines.

After opening first sheet, click button  []   ##class(SYS.Stats.Dashboard).Sample()

Then press button [design-mode]   (top of screen ).

You will see something like this in the top four lines:

M-Formulas works in cells in the process of opening this sheet,  step by step :

• - go to the namespace %SYS    ( zn “%SYS” )
• - set dashboard=##class(SYS.Stats.Dashboard).Sample()
• -

Ladies and gentlemen, good news for our town.

It finally happened  - M was put in the cell.

And feels great there. Maybe it not a prison but an Excel cell.

Being there, he leads the whole M-gang. As well as conditional formatting in EXCEL.

Close integration of excel with the database provides a new convenient design tool.

Interactive reports, input forms, diagrams are generated only by m-commands in cells, without classical programming.

More detailed on https://github.com/mx-alex/MX

We will monitor the development of the situation and answer your questions.

best wishes

Alex