Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 455 posts

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#421

Post by pid-1 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #227
pid-1 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft could ship its own Python distro within Excel. The biggest problem is that historically Guido / the Steering Council have avoided being involved in how py libs are distribuited, so there are many ways to do everything. But if you do have an opinion and means to enforce it, mantaining a Python environment can be a quite smooth experience.

A complication here is how large the Python distro this appears to be using is. I don't know if you've ever set up a container with all of anaconda, scikit, statsmodels, pandas, Matplotlib, seaborn, and more but it gets pretty big. A lot of people would complain about the bloat if Excel installed it by default. Another complication is they claim the container isn't just "a docker container", but for increased securit…

Yeah my day job involves deploying Python containers to K8s so I get where you are coming from. GB sized images are not uncommon. However:

1 - That could be an optional component, behind a "Install Python for Excel " button.

2 - You need to install Python to code in Python anyway, with or without Excel.

3 - Bloat is the norm nowadays and I'm not sure whether users care. A clean Visual Studio install takes 10 GB of disk or something. Office itself takes several GB as well.

4 - Not sure why Docker would be needed. Using Python in Windows is fine nowadays. There are caveats with libs that are very reliant on POSIX (Airflow comes to mind,) but, again, if you control your distro you can limit the libs users can install.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#422

Post by pid-1 »

fullstop wrote: post #123
pid-1 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft could ship its own Python distro within Excel. The biggest problem is that historically Guido / the Steering Council have avoided being involved in how py libs are distribuited, so there are many ways to do everything. But if you do have an opinion and means to enforce it, mantaining a Python environment can be a quite smooth experience.

Doesn't Guido work for Microsoft now?

He does

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#423

Post by gpjt »

JNRowe wrote: post #338
vegabook wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a great product - I remember your pitch and indeed we met a few times at the London python for finance meetup (remember the "Enthought Python Distribution"?). The only issue is that Resolver was IronPython-based so there were a bunch of libs that kinda didn't work.

I have to second that, it seemed to be a great tool. I've often wondered why it couldn't get traction¹. I can recall people gushing about it at what may have been the same Python meetup in London, and also people being impressed enough by it at a Haskell meetup that they were lamenting an imagined lost opportunity to shove a "real language" in to a spreadsheet ;) I'd always kind of assumed that the target audience wo…

Right, the lack of support for C extensions in IronPython was a problem; we kicked off the IronClad project [1] to fix that -- looks like someone else picked it up later and updated it for Python 2.7 [2]. Not sure where it went after that, or whether MS fixed the underlying issue later on.

[1] https://code.google.com/archive/p/ironclad/ [2] https://github.com/IronLanguages/ironclad

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#424

Post by pasc1878 »

narcraft wrote: post #114
xxs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it will be amazing and very widely adopted. The calculations in the cloud?

Why would the vast majority of Excel users even notice or care about this?

Because they have financial data on it and putting financial information outside computers your company controls is a massive risk.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#425

Post by pasc1878 »

xcombelle wrote: post #265
hyperpl wrote: post #10

My main dependence on Excel is being able to interact with pivot tables. I also have some VBA macros to help with formatting which I would welcome to be in python - alas it looks like what they're bringing is for the cloud only? I haven't found any free, open source solutions around this including any for Jupyter notebooks (my preferred medium).

python pandas has pivot tables https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.pivot_ta... I don't know if it fits your needs

So you can click and drag the columns around in the pivot table to get a better view?

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#426

Post by pasc1878 »

icapybara wrote: post #89
curiousgal wrote: post #39

Meh, as an advanced user on a trading floor we don't need Python for Excel to run on the cloud, we need it to run locally so we can tap into our in-house C++ library and KDB databases. Third-party solutions have so much overhead.

Sounds like you're doing something too sophisticated for Excel.

You don't know what Excel does.

This is normal Excel use.

Most large organisations use an Excel front end to their enternal services and the uses uses VBA to put them together. - Basically Excel is the finaciers web browser.

Unfortunately they also have large Excel spread sheets that are passed around between users with no control. An examplke was in UK reporting of some COVID information, it was underreported as they were using Excel which only allows 64K (number chnages per version I think it was 256 originally) rows and so when exporting data rows were just lost.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#427

Post by pasc1878 »

diarrhea wrote: post #118
curiousgal wrote: post #39

Meh, as an advanced user on a trading floor we don't need Python for Excel to run on the cloud, we need it to run locally so we can tap into our in-house C++ library and KDB databases. Third-party solutions have so much overhead.

C++ FFI from Python from Excel. Now this is podracing.

Probably not needed as if you need that you already doing Excel C FFI.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#428

Post by pasc1878 »

danten12 wrote: post #206

When I worked at a hedge fund being introduced to Python after years of working in spreadsheets was a revelation. ChatGPT/Copilot have dramatically reduced the cost of switching to the IDE for bankers/investors/consultants who make up Microsoft 365's core user base. Surprising that Microsoft would give users this gateway drug, but I suppose the reasoning is that you can keep your users by making Excel a quasi-IDE.

Excel was already a quasi IDE 30 years ago even without VBA. Excel macros and the C FFI interface worked.

I suspect HN users in general are different to finance users and so have not seen how Excel is used.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#429

Post by CivBase »

skrause wrote: post #270
_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.

You can just ship a copy of Python with Excel, no need to ask anybody to maintain their own installation.

Agreed. They could have easily shipped it with something like MicroPython.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#430

Post by reportgunner »

xcombelle wrote: post #265
hyperpl wrote: post #10

My main dependence on Excel is being able to interact with pivot tables. I also have some VBA macros to help with formatting which I would welcome to be in python - alas it looks like what they're bringing is for the cloud only? I haven't found any free, open source solutions around this including any for Jupyter notebooks (my preferred medium).

python pandas has pivot tables https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.pivot_ta... I don't know if it fits your needs

imho using pandas for pivot tables is like using a cannon to shoot sparrows
Post reply on HN