Office Scripts now Generally Available in Excel for the web

Microsoft has recently announced that Office Scripts in Excel for the web is now Generally Available for all “eligible users”.

For those that may sound a little underwhelmed by this news, Office Scripts is an automation feature-set in Excel for the web that allows users with various levels of programming experience to automate their repetitive workflows. Unfortunately, I can’t yet get it to work correctly for preparing this flamin’ newsletter.

To get started, you should use the Action Recorder to record the actions you wish take in Excel (obviously, the Excel for the web version!). These actions are then translated into a script that you can run at any time. No programming experience is required and you can use the Code Editor afterwards to edit the resulting scripts, analagous to the actions we all take with VBA, for example. This uses a TypeScript-based editor directly within Excel for the web, and you may further implement it to edit your existing scripts or to create new ones using the Office Scripts API.

This may be used in conjunction with Power Automate to create a Flow to schedule your Office Script to run at a certain time or to trigger a script to run based upon the creation of a new file in a SharePoint site, etc. Power Automate also allows you to trigger scripts based upon events from other applications and services to create cross-application workflows.

Office Scripts is currently available for all users that have a commercial or EDU license that gives access to the Microsoft 365 office desktop apps (e.g. Office 365 E3 and E5 licenses). If you have an eligible license, you’ll find the Office Scripts feature-set in the Automate tab in the Ribbon. Please note that if you do not have the Automate tab in Excel for the web, your administrator may have disabled the feature so you will need to go and talk to them nicely.