401–410 of 455 posts
Back in 2005, some friends and I started a company called Resolver Systems to build a Python-enabled spreadsheet, which we called Resolver One. Sadly, it never took off in the marketplace, and we had to pivot; we would up creating PythonAnywhere, an online coding and hosting environment, which worked out pretty well and was acquired by Anaconda last year. And now, the circle is closed :-) (Just for clarity: the team…
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Can you just please fix the issue with date strings (such as "20230822090811") being converted into scientific notation? I've received literally hundreds of these documents over the past decade. And as long as this problem exists, I will keep receiving them. Can you please just add a button - "unmess this document"? The number of man-hours I've wasted re-creating documents is countless. My job is to do other things n…
You may want to try a CSV editor: https://www.moderncsv.com - it's helped me already.
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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.
It's the dependency hell problem as packages are added to the sandbox environment. If they were just shipping python (standard library), it would be fine, but all of the useful libraries have large numbers of dependencies.
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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, th…
Dependency hell may be an issue if you install arbitrary libraries into the container at runtime. Note that this feature isn't currently available in the preview. On versioning: we freeze the container image that your Workbook was authored against. You need to manually accept (and validate things continue to work) updates to that container image as we roll forward.
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…
Appropriate username
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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 ISO…
I have to see some red flags here. The very nature and power of Excel comes from the fact that workbooks can stand alone. This means that the process is eternally tied to the cloud now. So when you, 3 years down the line, have to open a workbook from your deceased colleague, you are at the whim of the vendor supporting the existence of this integration. Step one of any workload will always be "work out how to make th…
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> 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…
Our company uses Power BI for this very reason. Most of our users are content with what's available in the reports we've built in Power BI. However, a few power users directly connect to the datasets we've created (that also feed the Power BI reports) and can mix and match that data in Excel. Excel will import datasets from the Power BI client, and you can refresh the data at any time. The nice part of this arrangeme…
It’s like a light Power BI.
Honestly even thought I can make interactive report webapps, that stuff needs to be built and maintained so I rather have people use Excel or a BI tool. Even I rather use Excel or a BI tool than write code.
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Making software available for download perpetually is less complex than making software available for cloud execution perpetually.
Under the model you're proposing, would I potentially need to download an old copy of Excel because the sheet I'm trying to load relies on an older python runtime?
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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.