Aw, shoot. I thought I would be able to have fun sending coworkers: import os os.rmdir("C:\Windows\System32")
shutil.rmtree, unless their System32 is empty
Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
281–290 of 455 posts
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#282This 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…
Thanks for your work on that! I use custom JavaScript functions to hit our internal analytics API. It was really nice to work with.
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep, and Tableau Cloud are great if expensive products. With Tableau Prep, you get a visual ETL tool. Being technical, I prefer SQL, but for business folks Tableau Prep is more of a REPL so they see what their actions are going to do. They can schedule these Prep flows in Tableau Cloud which will ETL and produce daily datasets which users can then interact via the dashboards on T…
That last part is almost exactly what we do with Power BI. We import tables from a SQL data warehouse into Power BI. We then build a data model (creating relationships between tables, adding calculated columns to those tables where needed, and creating measures to summarize the data). We then create reports based on those datasets. Most of our users are content with what they see in the Power BI web client. This is t…
>This is the killer feature, however: power users can access those same datasets through Excel and import the entire model.
I had this once. Then someone decided it was 'dangerous' and locked us out. I went back to exporting the data from the ERP and loading it into Excel...because I was allowed to do that
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you _really_ think I've spent the past 10 years getting files like this and I still don't understand the reason. I didn't ask for an explanation. I asked for a fix. What are you doing here?? I can provide instructions on how to do this until the cows come home. I will still get files with these issues. Is that not obvious? Do you really think I want to examine _tens of thousands of rows_ in documents that are 100…
My my, why so angry? You're expecting something that Excel doesn't support for good reason. The string you used as an example might be a date string to YOU, but to Excel and many of its users it's just a large integer. Lots of regular use cases would break if Excel would interpret that string as a datwle If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601
My my, why so angry?
Because they have been dealing with the same bug for 10 years, I thought that was obvious.
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with point 3, but points one and two don't make any sense because games have been skipping with Python scripting for decades and this is never a problem. The python interpreter is embedded into your program as a library and it doesn't have any dependency on the whatever python version the user installed.
> games have been skipping with Python scripting for decades That only works if there is a forever fixed version of Python embedded in your game. The value of Python in this context is its ecosystem and folks will need to install additional packages and libraries into the execution environment. Now you're managing a local distribution of Python.
Yeah, but if the big value is supposed to be in the libraries you sort of have to accept dependency hell? Otherwise you're in the world where a small set of libraries can deliver all the functionality ever needed.
Of the currently available solutions, "cloud environment made by Microsoft" doesn't sound that different from "software update made by Microsoft" in terms of how it solves the dependency hell: basically, the critical library you need is either in or out, but there is nothing you can do about it.
Admittedly, here I'm assuming Microsoft won't let you install things into the environment yourself since that basically means hosting virtual machines running arbitrary code and putting the Excel brand in front.
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#286Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
"You can build arbitrary-precision rationals" is a far cry from saying, "this is a language designed for precision arithmetic." You can technically build arbitrary-precision rationals without BigInts using arrays, but it's not exactly ergonomic. Even if we stipulate that users will be cognizant of floating point limitations and convert everything to integers, JS still requires all literals to be suffixed with n to av…
Many languages that are considered "precision" languages have some form of suffix to denote large/long/arbitrary-sized literals. (C# there's a big useful difference if a literal ends with `m` or `l`.) Most languages you have to be aware of your data types and use the appropriate data types.
No one is saying that "JS is a language designed for precision arithmetic", everyone is saying "JS is a language with the tools today to do precision arithmetic (whether you like it or not)".
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't used a non-cloud spreadsheet in probably 7 years. I also wouldn't use excel for anything that has a combination of high importance and long lifetime though. It's mostly for some brainstorming or thrown in a presentation as a screenshot.
There is probably a trillion dollars flowing through Excel spreadsheets.
Likely a gross underestimate, given all the financial (both investment and risk) modeling done with excel.
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#289This 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…
Thanks for your work! The async JS functions are amazing and allowed me to ship rock-solid Custom functions with xlwings and Python. The problem with Office.js is that it’s just simply too hard to get started with all the npm bloat for the average Excel user (even more professional devs struggle). Well, I am pretty happy how I am saving users from having to use Node.js: https://docs.xlwings.org/en/latest/pro/server/o…
Oh this must be Felix! I saw and played with xlwings many years ago and was impressed :)
Agreed with the friction around getting started. I would like to see it reduced. It’s cool to see you using them to wrap Python functions - I have done something similar before myself, and still need to get around to shimming Haskell into excel at some point.
Another thing I don’t like is how JavaScript Custom Function cell formulas have a horrible string after the _xldudf marker, which becomes noticeable if your workbook doesn’t/can’t load the custom functions addin (or you unload the addin)
Thanks for your comment
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#290Nice, waiting for the new machine on HackTheBox :-D