Reading through the Foundry docs. We have a solution that implements a monte carlo simulation with an excel add on.
Is there a way we can Make an input from Workshop to push data to an input within excel(run the monte carlo addon in excel), then take the excel simulation output back into Foundry?
Also, is anyone aware of running a monte carlo simulation within Foundry? Would you have to use typescript to interact with the objects? Or would you use a python module ? Perhaps a vega graph that has monte carlo? Thoughts?
Wild ideas
A couple thoughts, all of which would need validating:
If the Excel add-on can be hit via an API endpoint, then you could rig up a webhook-powered Action that a user in Workshop could use to send the data to the add-on. I don’t know Excel well enough to know if that’s possible.
If you can embed an Excel sheet in an iFrame, then you might be able to use Slate and pass stringified messages between Slate and Excel. Assuming you have a way of generating a new Excel for each user session and that you’re OK using Slate instead of Workshop.
If this is for just one or two users, you could also consider streamlining the manual copy/paste process as much as possible and accept the inconvenience.
Sane idea: Live model
One thought that I’m more confident in, but which would be a little bit of work, would be to host a live model that runs the monte carlo simulation. If there’s a TypeScript monte carlo implementation out there then you could use a Function, but I would start to wonder about timeout restrictions.
In general
In general, my take on Excel and Foundry is that if you’re leveraging Excel’s UI/UX then you should enable your users to use Excel in the most streamlined way. But if you’re leveraging logic in Excel then you should strive to port that to Foundry (or some other system). That’s not always possible, especially with financial models, but it’s a good rule of thumb.