Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

Post by buovjaga » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 6:55 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #71

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…

I think in a lot of cases its not even the advanced stuff that keeps people on Excel and other proprietary things. It's the seemingly little things. My biggest beef with LibreOffice's spreadsheet (and with Apple's Numbers) is how they handle copy/paste of discontiguous selections. Consider this 5 row by 3 column set of data: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f Suppose you select the 1 2 3 row, the 7 8 9 row, and the a b c…

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 6:56 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #97

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by buovjaga » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 6:58 PM UTC

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…

Post by rawgabbit » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

guhidalg wrote: post #248

rawgabbit wrote: post #146

Earlier 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…

> What it really needs is full blown SQL with REPL output so the users can see the effects of their SQL. FWIW, I built a version of this at $DAYJOB. You can get REPL-like access and export to Excel using a tool like this: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/data-studio Non-software engineers looked me like I had ten heads for suggesting that people would need to learn a modicum T-SQL to make use of it. I even…

Post by yonatan8070 » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 7:07 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #216

_untra_ wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not asking customers to manage a local python installation is one thing, although I totally understand how excel + python power users would likely be comfortable bringing and maintaining their own python runtime.

Does Excel run in a browser today? There are a lot, I mean a lot apps that support scripting languages and don't need you to manage the language's runtime yourself. Blender's UI is entirely in Python. Civilization games have most game logic in Lua.