June 2020 - Syntax Byte

Firefox Extension Development: Storage and Browser Button

In this article I am going to expand on our knowledge of Firefox Extension Development from last article. In that article we looked at content scripts and web requests. If you are new to Firefox Extension Development, I recommend starting there. In this article we will look at using the storage API and adding a browser button with a popup. Our extension will track what domains the user visits and the amount of time they visit them for. Then, it will expose that information in the browser button interface.

Excel Live Currency Exchange Rate with Web Query

If you want to create a table of exchange rates that can be updated live in Excel, you have come to the right place. In this article you will learn how to retrieve exchange rates using a Get & Transform web query, also known as a PowerQuery query. You will also learn how to turn that query into a function that can be used in another query to populate a table of exchange rates.

The API I will use to do this is the currency.com API. You can find the documentation at https://currency.com/api. For a free API I find this is pretty good. There is no need to authenticate yourself to get a rate. More expensive APIs such as XE.com might be of interest if you need to retrieve more niche currency pairs or more recent data.