If this is true then it will be amazing and very widely adopted. Pandas in Excel would be cool. Fingers crossed.
Here you go:
https://blog.adaptiverisk.com/post/2023-08-22-dataslicer/
Calculations are local, not in the cloud.
Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
391–400 of 455 posts
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are few key reasons for running in a hypervisor isolated container on Azure with no access to the Internet: - We can guarantee a consistent experience for all users. Imagine having to maintain your own local distribution of Python and guaranteeing that it works with Excel as versions diverge over time? Yikes. - We make it possible to share your Excel workbook with other users and have the calculation just work.…
I think this could be just a toggle in settings: A. run python in the cloud (default) B. specify path to your local python interpreter When you open a workbook that is using B show a warning before running anything. Then behind the scenes spin up a new venv that installs everything from requirements.txt and executes the code in workbook locally.
C. run code in same environment in a local sandbox.
Linux can do this with containers (pick your implementation), I'm certain Windows has similar mechanics.
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Definitely broken for me on Excel version 2302 (build 16130.20714) on an En/US locale.
None of the ISO8601 formats I've tried are recognized. "2023-08-22", "2023-08-22T01:38:22Z", "20230822T013822Z" are all valid ISO8601, but Excel treats them as unformatted text. Inputs with slashes are instantly recognized as a date.
If it works for you, it may be a locale thing. But getting away from that is the whole point of ISO8601.
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
Customer verbatims are like, an incredibly valuable currency. It's all fine to say "I know the product in and out and I think this is important". But it's another thing entirely to say "I know this is important because _this customer right here asked for literally this_".
But how do they not realize that not everyone wants to have the cloud required for a feature in Excel?
"It is difficult to get a man to implement something when his stock options depend on it remaining unimplemented." -- how a modern-day Sinclair Lewis might answer
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you lock down Excel - that is the issue we have where I work and the main reason excel is strongly discouraged. There are two main issues my org has battled with: 1.People basically turn excel into their own mini databases which causes a support nightmare. 2. This is strongly related to 1) Data provenance is a nightmare because so many people were passing around excel spreadsheets it became very difficult to t…
3rd_quarter_draft_final_krf_v3_edits.xslx
We have all been there.
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Umm... Libreoffice has shipped with Python scripting since almost forever. Not many people care because the most popular use case of any office suite is to interoperate with Microsoft file formats.
To be honest, I don't even fully understand what are the use-cases for integrating python with spreadsheets right now. I use both of them separately for different things but cannot see what it can be good at doing in an integrated environment.
Isn't it simply a more mature language replacement for VBA scripting?
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because then you can’t trust it. The only changes to a data mart should be replicated from authoritative upstream systems.
That is quite a generalization, not every data warehouse / mart / workflow is architected in the exact same way.
I honestly can’t imagine the value of a user-editable data mart. Maybe you can educate me?
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
We use Excel for a bunch of "critical" tasks as defined by the financial regulator, which means any of their dependencies also have to be assessed to ensure they meet the required level of stability. What this means is we'd need to go from just requiring a laptop and a copy of the spreadsheet to requiring redundant internet connections and validating Microsoft's backend meet the regulator's requirements. I'm pretty s…
Having seen the quality of “critical” macros, excel spreadsheets, and “dev/prod” SMB drives anyone can mess with it’s absolutely clear no regulator gives a fuck.
Or their concern and that of an engineer don't completely agree, or the reasons they want concerns addressed are different. Both happens a lot.
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can just ship a copy of Python with Excel, no need to ask anybody to maintain their own installation.
Anaconda distributions aren't exactly small. I'd also assume there's some sort of environment isolation, so you're getting multiple copies. Maybe one per workbook?
No need to use Anaconda or any general purpose venv solution. Microsoft screwed this up.
Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel
#400Many comments are criticizing the fact that this only runs in the cloud. And if Microsoft instead announced this would only run locally, they would instead be deploring the massive remote code execution vulnerabilities that this opens. For this feature, there's no question that providing it in the cloud is much, much better for security. Microsoft can now execute the Python code in Firecracker VMs which provide much…
that would be a different set of people though. Some people are fine with cloud everything some of the rest of us aren't and like to work local. Especially for something as basic as a spreadsheet or word doc.