This happens to me too often, and on different computers: when posting some reply on this site, my answer ends up being substituted by someone else's post...
So, here I am with my second try:
What I wanted to say is that I would really love to see in the (near) future the capacity to call a LOCAL Wolfram Kernel from Excel, in an easy way.
I understand the potential of cloud calls, and that it covers a new market. But I really believe that the old market (local computations) has been kind of neglected for far too long... A huge percentage of the world engineering in done in Excel (even if we may all agree that some of it shouldn't), and this format is actually extremely powerful to do lots and lots of stuff. Linking with the cloud is fine for few calls, but paying for a processor far away, and waiting for the answer, when mine is at idle, is not optimum. Making thousands of calls to the cloud, when a spreadsheet is filled up with thousands of user defined functions, and the user is simply changing values, or editing it, is not realistic.
I really think that the Enterprise/Free Player vs Player Pro notion should be used here. Enterprise signed calls to the local free player kernel should be as easy as what is currently being presented for the cloud calls, and non Enterprise signed calls would be possible for the Player Pro kernel.
