It’s interesting but if you are good enough at Python, can’t you already write to and read from spreadsheets? Maybe moving up a Python excel library like xlrd and openpyxl and making it reactive would be more worthwhile for Microsoft. Writing Python code in that little formula bar as shown doesn’t seem attractive. Writing Python in VSCode and seeing the results appear in the spreadsheet in real time would be great th…
I've worked at places where we were not allowed to install Python, nor were we allowed to run executables that weren't greenlighted by IT beforehand.
It’s one of the most infuriating and dangerous behaviors I have ever encountered. Excel silently truncates data . The anger is warranted. The problem isn’t assuming a display format for data, it is that a poor assumption actually mangles data. Excel doesn’t fail safe. Numbers in Excel only maintain 15 digits of precision. Leading zeros are also truncated . If you haven’t experienced this you are lucky (or just didn’t…
> It’s one of the most infuriating and dangerous behaviors I have ever encountered. Excel silently truncates data. That's a problem, sure, but not the one sixothree is complaining about. > The problem isn’t assuming a display format for data Your problem might not be, but that’s exactly the problem sixothree is complaining about that the post you are responding to addresses, so while your post references a valid comp…
I look forward to seeing this get abused. Having worked with a psychometric analysis program entirely implemented in VBA, I genuinely wonder how Excel/Python will live alongside R in academia - at least for the people who are really conservative about the tools they use.
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…
This comment seems out of touch with why people use Excel. The fact is, Excel is popular because it manages to be pretty easy to use, while also being extraordinarily powerful and flexible. For most users, they'll ask "why would I program something in Python when Excel has a built in function to handle that?"
JS has BigInt now, and it almost works like you'd expect. Need to put 'n' after all of your numbers though.
True, but financial calculations tend to involve non-integral numbers. Python has arbitrary-precision decimals via: https://docs.python.org/3.11/library/decimal.html
Financial calculations are also sometimes already used to doing math in integral pennies (or eighths of a penny) for performance/storage reasons. That works just fine with one BigInt. Or you can build arbitrary-precision rationals from just two BigInts. (There are some JS libraries out there already for that.)
The scientific notation ("2.02308E+13") is just how Excel displays a large enough numeric value like your example; it's not doing any conversion, as you can see if you paste that number into Excel, confirm that it's showing the scientific notation, and then click into the cell to confirm that the formula bar still shows the original number (20230822090811). If you paste your date string in a more standard date format…
Except Excel doesn't recognize ISO timestamps either.
Are you sure? It seems to for me, which is annoying because by recognizing them it changes them to a localized date format which then breaks when sent overseas.
If I type "2023-08-22" into a cell in Excel I see "8/22/23" in the cell and "8/22/2023" as the value.
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…
It running in Microsoft Cloud is precisely what I think will actually allow this to be useful functionality for my company in ways that macros aren't, because macros are seen here to present a vector for running malware on client machines, whose utility doesn't justify the risk.
Just wait for someone to run malware on your mystery cloud instance of Excel. Have you seen the cross-instance and cross-domain security holes Microsoft has been running into? The latest and greatest was on their Power Platform ("Excel-like"). Nothing like silently shipping your data off to a remote location for inspection by blackhats. Microsoft cloud security is torn apart and laying all over the floor right now...nevermind all the half baked features that let you get kneck deep in a project before you see the grande middle finger from project hellscape.
This seems like the only solution. Do not copy all of Python’s warts, but offer a curated experience. Microsoft Experience (TM) with fixed APIs, no package management or dealing with ecosystem churn.
It will never work because Python is the ecosystem. Having Python without the ability to tap the huge catalogue of existing software makes the integration worthless. The first thing someone will want to do is use Pandas on a live spreadsheet.
If you read TFA, you'd see that the python env comes with a bunch of the favorites (pandas, matplotlib) baked in.
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.
> 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 f…
My mind can't help think of the following problem... would Microsoft have to freeze an LTSC set of packages? How would $GOV_AGENCY using a version of Excel one generation behind collaborate with the world?