News

Have you tried setting the Formatter on cells, rows, columns or worksheets? It’s a powerful way to change the way values are displayed without changing the values themselves.

For example, let’s say that you have a column full of distances in meters, but want to show them in miles. You can set a formatter like this:

def MetersAsMiles(distance, defaultFormatter):
    try:
        return "%s miles" % defaultFormatter(distance / 1609.344)
    except:
        return defaultFormatter(distance)
workbook["Sheet1"].Cols["Distance"].Formatter = MetersAsMiles

The first parameter to the formatter is the value to format, and the second is a reference to the function that Resolver One would normally use to format the value. Using that default formatter not only makes it easy to handle cases where your own code isn’t relevant (for example, when formatting non-numerical values in your “distance” column like the column header) — it also lets you take advantage of Resolver One’s normal formatting behaviour, for example by taking account of the number of decimal places specified in the “Format Number” dialog.

The formatter only affects the way the contents of a cell are displayed. For example, if a cell contained 18294, it might be formatted to and displayed as “11.37 miles”, but when referenced from another cell, the value would still be 18294.

One of the things we’re always working hard to do is to make Resolver One snappier and more responsive. And one of our most frequently-requested enhancements is to produce versions for Apple and Linux computers. These goals are actually closely related; both depend very much on the grid component we use.

Right now, the raw grid display and editing portions of Resolver One use a third party grid component. It’s a great tool, and we would recommend it highly. However, its general-purpose nature means that it can never be as snappy for us as something we have written ourselves. And, perhaps more importantly, it is very much a Windows grid component, not a .NET one — so without replacing it, we can never run on other operating systems.

So we’re writing our own replacement grid. This will make Resolver One 1.10 much faster and more usable. It will not make it cross-platform straight away — we have a few other Windows dependencies that we need to sort out for that — but it’s the first, and we think largest, step in that direction.

Naturally, there’s a lot to be done to get everything moved over, and we don’t expect to be able to release a beta until at least early May, but if you’re interested in beta-testing Resolver One 1.10 when it’s ready, and seeing how the new grid makes it a better spreadsheet, drop us a line at beta@resolversystems.com.

Have you thought about getting an unrestricted version of Resolver One, but decided against because it was beyond your budget?

On 31 March, for one day only, we are selling full commercial licenses for Resolver One 1.8 for $40 — for people in the European Union, that’s still only $47.60 including taxes — and for people everywhere else, and VAT-registered EU companies, it’s $40, tax-free! This is the full version of the software, with online support and upgrades up to and including version 2.0.

You can buy Resolver One here.

We’re happy to announce the release of Resolver One 1.8! As always, you can download it here.

The big news in version 1.8 is that it supports IronPython 2.6. This not only supports the improved Python 2.6 syntax, but also adds some significant performance improvements, and makes the whole application much “snappier”. It’s well worth trying just for that, but we’ve also added a bunch of other useful features:

• A new workbook property RecalculateAfter, which if set in user code triggers another recalculation after the given number of seconds.
• Support for new statistics functions: NORMDIST, NORMSDIST, ERF and ERFC.
• A new GetExternalWorkbook function to import Microsoft Excel .xls files from user code.
• Various other functions that we were missing for compatibility with other spreadsheet applications.
• And, of course, a number of bugfixes and performance enhancements.

If you want more details, here is a full list of every change in this release.

Don’t forget, we have forums to discuss and ask questions about Resolver One, and there is detailed documentation too.

We have had a number of queries about whether QuantLib works in Resolver One. QuantLib is “a free/open-source library for modeling, trading, and risk management in real-life.” We thought it would be great if we could confirm that it works with Resolver One. The short answer is: “It does!”.

Since a build of QuantLib and the .Net bindings can take most of a day (the bulk of it waiting for builds to complete), we decided to provide pre-built binaries and an example so our customers can try it out immediately.