News

We are pleased to announce the release of Resolver One, version 1.2.  Once again, we’ve a mixture of cool new features and usability enhancements.

Some of the highlights:

• RunWorkbook.  This is the feature we’re most proud of - a new function that allows you to “call” one spreadsheet from another.  For example, if you have a spreadsheet that works out the tax payable on a product based on the product’s details, you can use it from within another spreadsheet to calculate the tax on a whole set of other products.  This lets you get the kind of capabilities that programmers get from writing functions, without forcing you to write code (of course, for people who want to write code, that option will always be available too).  We’ll be putting up some screencasts and in-depth examples of how to use this feature over the coming week.
• Cached worksheets.  One problem some people encountered with previous versions of Resolver One was that there was nowhere they could store data so that it wasn’t recalculated every time the spreadsheet was run.  Now, you can create special worksheets that persist between recalculations.
• Improved dropdowns.  Dropdowns previously were not very easy to use from your own user code; we’ve improved them so that you can use any Python iterable to initialise them, and can control the selected item from your own code.
• Frozen Rows and Columns, Drag-fill, Paste Special, and Percentages.  Quite a few people pointed out that Resolver One lacked these useful features.  We’ve fixed that - they’re all there in this release.

We’ve put together a four-minute screencast outlining all these changes, and there is also a full list of every change in this release.

As always, you can download the software from our downloads page.

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

Here’s the full press release.

Today Resolver Systems announces that it has delivered Resolver One™ Financial to its first New York corporate client, SAFDIE Investment Services, to replace Microsoft Excel™ for stock performance analysis. Resolver One Financial provides Safdie with a state of the art data analytics tool, which integrates market data, databases, code and the traditional spreadsheet interface to create a powerful and easy-to-use solution.

Portfolio Analysis in Resolver One Financial

Patrick Kemmis, Head of Services at Resolver Systems, commented: “Safdie was looking for a robust and elegant solution to replace Microsoft Excel to deliver end of the month stock performance analysis. We used the rapid application development facility of Resolver One Financial, and combined simple program code with the familiar spreadsheet interface to deliver an easy to use and easy to maintain Resolver One spreadsheet. Our goal was to create a solution that - unlike traditional Excel spreadsheets - does not deteriorate over time.”

Jean Viry-Babel, Head of Sales at Resolver Systems, added: “Resolver One changes the way businesses think about and use spreadsheets, and we are thrilled to have Safdie Investment Services as the first New York customer for the Financial Edition of our product.”

Jonathan Hartley, a developer here at Resolver Systems, has contributed to the set of Python Success Stories at Pythonology.org with a description of how we’ve benefited from using Python - and in particular IronPython.   It’s well worth a read, especially if you’re interested in how we develop the application.

We’re just finishing off the last few features for release 1.2.  It’s shaping up to be a fantastic release, with a lot of great new features.  Here’s a list of everything that’s finished:

Major new features

• REDACTED: Headline feature: we’re keeping this one under wraps for now.
• #1081 Dropdown cells based on cellranges (or iterables) created in user code
• #860 Paste special: paste formulae/values/formatting/comments
• #1037 Box at the bottom right corner of the selected range that you can drag down to fill a larger range with auto-incrementing values
• #1380 Percentage formatting - numbers are multiplied by 100 and get a “%” at the end.
• #768 Percentages allowed in formulae or directly as cell values.
• #1103 Persistent state saved from recalc to recalc
• #1373 Support access to cells in other Resolver One files

Minor enhancements

• #1353 Header lookups should be by value and work with integer headers
• #1332 Allow slicing work on .Rows and .Cols iterators for Worksheets and CellRanges - for example, worksheet.Rows[3:12] will return rows3 through 11 inclusive.  Also works using headers.
• #1349 Wait cursor when running click handlers for users’ buttons
• #1351 Ability to make visible changes to the grid during a button handler
• #1463 Custom Numeric Types right aligned in grid and used by SUM (recognised because they define __abs__)
• #1235 Performance boost - upgrade to PLY 2.5
• #1241 STDEV function
• #1242 COUNT function
• #1243 COUNTA function
• #1244 ISERR function
• #1341 NPV, EXP, LN, SIN, ASIN, COS, ACOS, TAN, ATAN, INT functions
• #1261 The ‘ABS’ function doesn’t appear in the API documentation for the ‘Compatibility’ module.
• #1167 Resolver One Web Server should print out version and build number on startup
• #1238 BDP function (Financial Edition only)
• #1239 BLP and BDP Bloomberg overrides (Financial Edition only)
• #1240 Arrays returned from BLP and BDP (Financial Edition only)
• #1253 Problem with Bloomberg functions when parameter cells are formatted (Financial Edition only)
• #1262 ParallelBloombergRequests doesn’t handle BLP requests with > 2 params (Financial Edition only)
• #1295 Fixed typo in ParallelBloombergRequests doctstring (Financial Edition only)

Bugfixes

• #598 Button click handlers swallow exceptions - should be printed to output pane.
• #778 Formula not visible in cell, and not editable there, when editing a cell with an error cross.
• #1298 Inserting/deleting rows does not always update names.
• #1335 Crash when deleting rows.
• #1338 Missing viewstate makes files un-openable.
• #1357 Copying result-only cells doesn’t copy quite the right values.
• #1364 Attempt to make button current cell fails softly.

We are pleased to announce the release of Resolver One, version 1.1. We’ve made quite a lot of changes, hopefully making the program more responsive and pleasant to use as well as adding cool new features.

Some of the highlights:

• Significant improvements to performance and memory usage.
• Cutting and pasting is now more “spreadsheet-like”.
• For the financial edition, we’ve added Thomson Dataworks Enterprise connectivity and a number of great enhancements to Bloomberg access.
• Better coverage of standard spreadsheet functions.
• Auto-indent in the code editor.
• Comments in cells.

We’ve put together a three-minute screencast outlining all these changes, and there is also a full list of every change in this release.

As always, you can download the software from our downloads page.

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