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Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

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Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#201

Post by hospitalJail »

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…

LibreOffice has plenty of other problems to knock out first.

Its so slow.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#202

Post by codethief »

> Python calculations run in the Microsoft Cloud

A colleague was joking, "I guess even Microsoft itself isn't able to manage local Python installations on Windows…"

But imagine if Microsoft actually managed to finally solve the "setup a local Python environment" situation once and for all and Excel became the standard Python package manager across operating systems!

    $ excelpip install fastapi==9.11.23
    Searching for fastapi version 11.09.2023…

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#204

Post by wredue »

rjmunro wrote: post #147
sixothree wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Excel makes a total mess of many kinds of imports, assuming they are dates when they are not or assuming US vs UK formats dates etc. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... However, to my eyes, and probably most people, 20230822090811 does not look like a "date string", it's a number. It's correct to display it as scientific notation if it's too many digits to fit into the width of a cell. Ple…

Are you saying that excel does preserve digits? I must be doing something very wrong (entirely possible), cause once the document is saved, the digits are gone.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#205

Post by pessimizer »

starquake wrote: post #28

I'm a developer. People have often come to me with Excel sheets that were really slow because it was just too much for Excel. Almost all of the times IMHO a specific solution should have been developed for it. I'm curious to see if this makes it better or actually worse.

I don't doubt that you have, but in my experience the reason they're slow is because updates haven't been turned off while the macro was running, or naïve algorithmic choices (that a query planner might fix in the realm of normal programming, but python wouldn't help with.)

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#206

Post by danten12 »

When I worked at a hedge fund being introduced to Python after years of working in spreadsheets was a revelation. ChatGPT/Copilot have dramatically reduced the cost of switching to the IDE for bankers/investors/consultants who make up Microsoft 365's core user base.

Surprising that Microsoft would give users this gateway drug, but I suppose the reasoning is that you can keep your users by making Excel a quasi-IDE.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#208

Post by pessimizer »

Spinnaker_ wrote: post #105
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?

Excel has an editor. Try hitting alt+f11. "Open in vscode" would be an excellent feature though.

No one seems to know that an VBA IDE is part of Office. It's important to remember when you're working on an extremely locked-down system and you want to do something complicated.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#209

Post by hermitdev »

bilsbie wrote: post #25

Off topic but why can’t we all go back to office 97? It basically does all the same stuff and it would be lightning fast on modern machines. You don’t even need internet to use it.

> why can’t we all go back to office 97?

For one, because people want more than 65,536 rows in their spreadsheets.

But, I'd largely agree that '97 was the pinnacle from a UI perspective. There are changes under the hood that are quite nice, though, especially with the move to xml persistence.

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