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Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

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Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#451

Post by noitpmeder »

darkarmani wrote: post #450
zeratax wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesn't this dependency hell still exist, but just in the cloud?

It's not hell because they carefully curate the set of libraries rather than having end-users attempt to have every combination of packages (and then blame microsoft for the dependency hell / lack of support for their exact configuration.).

You say this as a good thing... but as a data scientist that uses python every day I can assure you their "carefully curated set of third party libraries" definitely will not include most of the libraries I rely upon for my work.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#452

Post by uzerfcwn »

tap-snap-or-nap wrote: post #385
xorcist wrote: post #193

Earlier 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.

I use spreadsheets for all kinds of bookkeeping, and very often there's some data you need to fetch once when a new entry is created, be it stock prices from a webpage or calendar entries from Outlook. LibreOffice's python scripts are great for those cases, because the tooling is just plain better than VB. Alas, VB is still necessary for formulae.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#453

Post by kdeldycke »

gpjt wrote: post #93
petepete wrote: post #32

Finally the Resolver One dream is coming true, just 15 or 16 years late. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6EV2jiKRfc

Interestingly enough, when Resolver One didn't work out in the marketplace, we pivoted to PythonAnywhere. That took off nicely, and was acquired by Anaconda last year. And now Anaconda is realising those old dreams :-) BTW for clarity: the team working on this inside Anaconda is entirely separate from the PythonAnywhere team. It would have made a perfect Hollywood-ready story if it had been the same people...

We were discussing about Resolver One 6 months ago at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34819682

One mystery we did not resolve (pun intended) was why it did not find its audience. Was it too early? Was data science not established enough as a field? Was it because it was not Excel (i.e. the dominant tool)?

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#454

Post by gpjt »

kdeldycke wrote: post #453
gpjt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, when Resolver One didn't work out in the marketplace, we pivoted to PythonAnywhere. That took off nicely, and was acquired by Anaconda last year. And now Anaconda is realising those old dreams :-) BTW for clarity: the team working on this inside Anaconda is entirely separate from the PythonAnywhere team. It would have made a perfect Hollywood-ready story if it had been the same people...

We were discussing about Resolver One 6 months ago at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34819682 One mystery we did not resolve (pun intended) was why it did not find its audience. Was it too early? Was data science not established enough as a field? Was it because it was not Excel (i.e. the dominant tool)?

I think it was a combination of those, plus terrible market timing -- we released it, thinking we could sell to finance types, in 2008. In our sales pipeline spreadsheet, the "notes" column started saying things like "customer has gone bankrupt".

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#455

Post by IIsi50MHz »

rvba wrote: post #274
graypegg wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hacker news comment chain isn’t a great place to follow up on feedback. Email’s alright! I don’t think that’s too out of touch.

Will Excel fix linkages between files on sharepoint? It is horrible.. The amount of lost productivity because "report file" cannot easily connect to "source 1, 2, 3" is very high. In theory you can do it, but it plain does not work in shared sheets.

I've possibly seen some of your breakage with Sharepoint, while supporting an integration product between Excel and some enterprise systems.

Does the problem persist if you ensure the other source files are open before opening "report file"?

If opening the files in the right order solves it, then it may be possible to script this in Excel or in an Excel add-in (optionally, signed).

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