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Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

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Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#271

Post by BSEdlMMldESB »

dragonwriter wrote: post #220
seanw444 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This means that the process is eternally tied to the cloud now. "You will own nothing, and you will be happy" has followed us to... spreadsheets? We can't even own the things we're wageslaving away at our desk for.

> We can't even own the things we're wageslaving away at our desk for. But we never owned those things we're wageslaving away at our desk for, that's why its called wageslaving. Whether our employers own them or rent them seems pretty immaterial.

the 'cool' thing

is that not even the purported 'business owner' owns their own data, what do they actually own? what is even their business?

on the modern trend, all businesses really are: is just a collection of subscriptions to service providers like MS.... where's the actual business???

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#272

Post by fzumstein »

rvba wrote: post #261
vba wrote: post #249

This was a nice surprise to see today as an Ex-Excel developer who worked on trying to bring Python to Excel (and, I guess, failing ;)). 7+ years ago I had the option of leaving the Excel team. My then boss’s boss knew I had an interest in bringing Python to Excel and offered me a chance to tackle it if I chose to stay. What was meant to be a 6 month project turned into a ~3 year project, the Python part faded away a…

Do you know why Microsoft never made proper examples of the new technology? The few examples provided are for programmers only. In general there is a scarcity of working code that you can inspect to see how javascript in Excel works. Now it is mostly "how to draw an owl"

Glad I am not the only one with this impression :)

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#273

Post by enthus1ast »

dsagal wrote: post #211

Grist is a spreadsheet with Python support (I am a founder). Python does make some formulas far easier. Nice to see Excel has data science libraries included from the start, that's something we've had our eyes on for a while. On the other hand, Grist is open source and can be run locally.

Since a few month i use grist extensively.

For example: As part of a monitoring system. HR / crm Database. Self serving vacation planner and approving system. Tamperproof GMO(genetically modified organisms) database. As my go to source as a quick and dirty data dump while hacking...

Grist is a great tool!

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#274

Post by rvba »

graypegg wrote: post #258
bluedino wrote: post #242

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 How out of touch with the real world is the Excel team?

A hacker news comment chain isn’t a great place to follow up on feedback. Email’s alright! I don’t think that’s too out of touch.

Will Excel fix linkages between files on sharepoint?

It is horrible..

The amount of lost productivity because "report file" cannot easily connect to "source 1, 2, 3" is very high.

In theory you can do it, but it plain does not work in shared sheets.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#277

Post by amccarty »

Bostonian wrote: post #101

I am the sole Python developer in a company where everyone uses spreadsheets. With this project, will my coworkers be able to run my Python functions? Or only functions that are built into Python and packages like pandas and NumPy?

If your coworker doesn't have the feature enabled, they will see the last cached values. If they try to run them without the feature enabled, they will get an error.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#278

Post by chrisjc »

taylodl wrote: post #57
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…

> This alone could eliminate the need for websites that just want this sort of data I catch flak for this all the time! Our users just want to be able to use Excel to free-form analyze their data. IT, of which I'm a part of, insists on building web apps to do that for them. They're never happy because all they wanted was Excel. I keep explaining all we have to do is build a data mart built using SQL Server, and use o…

> I keep explaining all we have to do is build a data mart built using SQL Server, and use our ETL tools to keep it populated with the data they need to analyze.

I can relate and have experienced this. The result was that they would end up exporting from a series of Tableau/Looker workspaces, and importing into excel and doing their analysis there.

Then continually making enhancement requests on the Tableau/Looker workspaces to get any additional data they need for their excel work.

Then of course, the excel document and its multitude of versions would get emailed around until it hit the attachment size limit, or if there were too many version of it to figure out which one was "actionable".

We finally figured out what they were doing when the enhancement requests for the reporting workspaces got too bizarre.

Insanity.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#279

Post by xcombelle »

Bostonian wrote: post #101

I am the sole Python developer in a company where everyone uses spreadsheets. With this project, will my coworkers be able to run my Python functions? Or only functions that are built into Python and packages like pandas and NumPy?

It is very likely that your coworkers will be able to use your Python functions.
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