41–50 of 123 posts
- make a python library/driver for Excel sheets that imitates Pandas Dataframe API but (a) has reactive cells (b) imports equations from Excel
- make a notebook IDE that integrates excel spreadsheets. Make everything reactive. Have a split notebook/spreadsheet view.
A little off-topic but it would be rad if Excel had more Airtable/Baserow/Grist features.
I agree with xlwings about this but for different reasons. MS are a company wot makes money. Python was added to Excel cos R and Python and so on - market share. I suggest you do what my brother does and unanswer the question! He works for quite a large firm and is surrounded by quite a lot of data. He is a Windows user by routine and asked me for some help. I got Python + MS Visual Code installed and integrated for…
We built our spreadsheet ( https://rowzero.io ) from the ground up to integrate natively with Python. Bolting it on like Microsoft did, or as an add in like xlwings, just feels second class. To make it first class, we had to solve three hard problems: 1. Sandboxing and dependencies. Python is extremely unsafe to share, so you need to sandbox execution. There's also the environment/package management problem (does the…
do you have a desktop app in the works?
Without interacting with it myself, none of this is surprising. I have used excel in the past, and I am a long term python user. But if you asked me today what I really wanted to make my life easier and ultimately a product or business better using only excel? I would ask for lua or scheme. I don’t need a batteries included environment embedded into a spreadsheet. I just want sane syntax for common functionality whic…
>excel is too bleh >python is too blah >myLanguageOfChoice is just right. We can't all be special snowflakes, python and excel are lingua francas.
I get why they chose Python for this and it's not all that hard to embed, well the interpreter anyway, compiled modules are another story.
We built our spreadsheet ( https://rowzero.io ) from the ground up to integrate natively with Python. Bolting it on like Microsoft did, or as an add in like xlwings, just feels second class. To make it first class, we had to solve three hard problems: 1. Sandboxing and dependencies. Python is extremely unsafe to share, so you need to sandbox execution. There's also the environment/package management problem (does the…
looks cool! do you have a desktop app in the works?
I agree with xlwings about this but for different reasons. MS are a company wot makes money. Python was added to Excel cos R and Python and so on - market share. I suggest you do what my brother does and unanswer the question! He works for quite a large firm and is surrounded by quite a lot of data. He is a Windows user by routine and asked me for some help. I got Python + MS Visual Code installed and integrated for…
I agree with xlwings about this but for different reasons. MS are a company wot makes money. Python was added to Excel cos R and Python and so on - market share. I suggest you do what my brother does and unanswer the question! He works for quite a large firm and is surrounded by quite a lot of data. He is a Windows user by routine and asked me for some help. I got Python + MS Visual Code installed and integrated for…
That workflow sounds so painful. Why not get a BI tool that can integrate directly into your data warehouse and do reporting through that?
If there are some self service BI, most likel self service is only by name.
Add some variants related to security, max number of licenses allowed (hilarity ensures if IT bears the cost on behalf of the business without being able to charge back), etc
One should note that this comes from xlwings, a Python-in-Excel plugin with a $1,490 professional lifetime license. Excel's changes will end up eating their reason to exist.
We built our spreadsheet ( https://rowzero.io ) from the ground up to integrate natively with Python. Bolting it on like Microsoft did, or as an add in like xlwings, just feels second class. To make it first class, we had to solve three hard problems: 1. Sandboxing and dependencies. Python is extremely unsafe to share, so you need to sandbox execution. There's also the environment/package management problem (does the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could, but a lot more people already know Python than Lua.
Most Excel users (not the power users, just the 1.1 billion everyday ones, including many of the enterprise ones) don't know how to program in any language. You're coming at this with a HN mindset. "Python vs Lua" is not even on their radar. And even if it was, their criteria would be dominated by platform lockin and compatibility with other licenses (e.g. commercial SQL, Tableau, MSFT, etc.). Not by "which open-sour…