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Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

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Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#111

Post by nologic01 »

stainablesteel wrote: post #73
nologic01 wrote: post #35

I wish Libreoffice would have smelled the coffee long time ago. In principle scripting using Python is possible but exceedingly cumbersome/ugly and there seems to be no roadmap to improve on this. The same warning applies to the linux desktop and all its apps more generally. Increasingly proprietary platforms will be rolling out advanced "AI" functionality extensions to classic apps that are cloud based, many of them…

that's interesting, i see the opposite. python is so easy to script that imo excel is nailing its own coffin. with an aging and retiring demographic of people that have never used a programming language, anyone who learns to incorporate python into excel will end up preferring python because its both more flexible and scalable. i have no reason to use excel except for basic drawing board math, if someone demands a sp…

I see spreedsheets more as an UI. An extremely intuitive (and reactive!) way of spatially decomposing computation. Yes, this creates lots of problems (you can not easily validate it etc.) but it is also very enabling. For sure more people are now exposed to programming, but how many are actually comfortable doing even simple stuff directly using code is a question mark.

A jupyter notebook is maybe somewhere in between. But even if other interfaces manage to bridge the gap further, I doubt the spreadsheet metaphor is going to go away in the visible future. Pivot tables and the like are like COBOL and mainframes :-) The corporate world would die a sudden death if you were to eliminate it (another reason to always make sure you can run things locally).

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#112

Post by Qem »

pipo234 wrote: post #43
garyclarke27 wrote: post #12

Why does Excel need to run Python calculations in the Cloud? I think I'll stick to VBA. Javascript in Excel would be nice. Even better would be native SQL.

Maybe this is not so much about bringing Python to Excel, more about bringing Excel to Python. But only if you do it the way Microsoft wants you to. As with BASIC morphing into VisualBasic and VBA you lure (beginning) python programmers into Excel. Ultimately those developers will understand and appreciate less and less of vanilla python REPL, jupyter, scripts, etc. And... Welcome to Microsoft's world.

A Microsoft classic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#113

Post by benterix »

alexk307 wrote: post #104
inglor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I work on Excel, can you write a summary of why that's important to you and send it to bgruenbaum@microsoft.com ? I'll get it in front of a PM. Alternatively PMs read all the feedback sent via the feedback UI on Excel web and desktop so you can use that instead if you prefer.

Not OP but I would never want to use this if I was running a security minded business. Why would it be okay to send out my entire dataset to the Microsoft cloud to run a few simple queries. How long is the data stored on your servers? Since it’s operating on the data directly, it’s not possible to anonymize or redact the contents of the data.

Practically speaking, if you are running recent versions of Windows (I don't remember when exactly this trend started, with 2000? XP?), you have basically no control over what data you send to them and when. You can try to block traffic but it will interfere with normal Windows operations. You can try to investigate and play cat and mouse game with Microsoft, but they will always be one step ahead of you - unless you decide to turn off automatic updates and make your system less secure.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#114

Post by narcraft »

xxs wrote: post #18
bigfudge wrote: post #2

If this is true then it will be amazing and very widely adopted. Pandas in Excel would be cool. Fingers crossed.

> it will be amazing and very widely adopted. The calculations in the cloud?

Why would the vast majority of Excel users even notice or care about this?

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#115

Post by diarrhea »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #72

Seems cool, and a bit awful. Writing elaborated python-code in that little text-field must be a nightmare of its own. Where can I connect a VS Code or vim to the sheet for coding in comfort?

My thoughts too. Not having to install outside software is treated as a feature, but it is a lost opportunity: Excel with tight VSCode integration sounds like a killer app for decades to come. Two best-of-class (respectively) programs, each in realms dominated by Microsoft. Combine the two and unique possibilities unlock, bridging the gap between business and development.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#117

Post by jasonjayr »

ec109685 wrote: post #77
cardamomo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That caught my attention too! I'm curious why they would choose this model.

Sandboxing python enough that millions of users could safely pass around excel workbooks is a super hard problem, especially when you allow third party libraries. Forcing it to run in an isolated environment they control simplifies the problem greatly.

Windows has it's own implementation of containers, and with a docker-like structure, and xlsx being a zip file, excel could simply have a dockerfile like structure "FROM excel-python:2023" "COPY xlsx:scripts/" etc. new versions of excel could keep the last few 'base' containers, or if they are in love with the cloud, the signed, verified base images could be pulled on request.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#118

Post by diarrhea »

curiousgal wrote: post #39

Meh, as an advanced user on a trading floor we don't need Python for Excel to run on the cloud, we need it to run locally so we can tap into our in-house C++ library and KDB databases. Third-party solutions have so much overhead.

C++ FFI from Python from Excel. Now this is podracing.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#119

Post by nerdponx »

inglor wrote: post #49
cableshaft wrote: post #13

I wish it wasn't solely powered only by Microsoft Cloud and could support python running locally, but regardless I think this will still be huge and single-handedly modernizes Excel by a large margin. This alone could eliminate the need for websites that just want this sort of data. I can think of a past project at a previous job I did building an analytics website used only by a handful of people internally that cou…

Hi I work on Excel, can you write a summary of why that's important to you and send it to bgruenbaum@microsoft.com ? I'll get it in front of a PM. Alternatively PMs read all the feedback sent via the feedback UI on Excel web and desktop so you can use that instead if you prefer.

Part of the reason I still like Excel over Google Sheets is that I can use it completely offline.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#120

Post by twobitshifter »

sixothree wrote: post #69
inglor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I work on Excel, can you write a summary of why that's important to you and send it to bgruenbaum@microsoft.com ? I'll get it in front of a PM. Alternatively PMs read all the feedback sent via the feedback UI on Excel web and desktop so you can use that instead if you prefer.

Can you just please fix the issue with date strings (such as "20230822090811") being converted into scientific notation? I've received literally hundreds of these documents over the past decade. And as long as this problem exists, I will keep receiving them. Can you please just add a button - "unmess this document"? The number of man-hours I've wasted re-creating documents is countless. My job is to do other things n…

The way you fix this is using the text import tool or better yet power query and specifying the column type to be text. With power query you can repeat this for as many files as you need to import.
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