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Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

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Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#71

Post by tzs »

nologic01 wrote: post #35

I wish Libreoffice would have smelled the coffee long time ago. In principle scripting using Python is possible but exceedingly cumbersome/ugly and there seems to be no roadmap to improve on this. The same warning applies to the linux desktop and all its apps more generally. Increasingly proprietary platforms will be rolling out advanced "AI" functionality extensions to classic apps that are cloud based, many of them…

I think in a lot of cases its not even the advanced stuff that keeps people on Excel and other proprietary things. It's the seemingly little things.

My biggest beef with LibreOffice's spreadsheet (and with Apple's Numbers) is how they handle copy/paste of discontiguous selections.

Consider this 5 row by 3 column set of data:

  1 2 3
  4 5 6
  7 8 9
  a b c
  d e f
Suppose you select the 1 2 3 row, the 7 8 9 row, and the a b c row, copy them, and paste just below the d e f row. In Excel you get this (first 4 rows omitted for brevity):

  d e f
  1 2 3
  7 8 9
  a b c
In LibreOffice and Numbers you get this (empty cells denoted by "-"):

  d e f
  1 2 3
  - - -
  7 8 9
  a b c
I haven't found a setting to change this. Excel doesn't have a setting for this either as far as I know, so people who do want discontiguous copy/paste to preserve spacing would probably be as irked by Excel as I am by LibreOffice and Numbers. But I don't think I've ever actually wanted the spacing preserved so it is LibreOffice and Numbers that irk me.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#73

Post by stainablesteel »

nologic01 wrote: post #35

I wish Libreoffice would have smelled the coffee long time ago. In principle scripting using Python is possible but exceedingly cumbersome/ugly and there seems to be no roadmap to improve on this. The same warning applies to the linux desktop and all its apps more generally. Increasingly proprietary platforms will be rolling out advanced "AI" functionality extensions to classic apps that are cloud based, many of them…

that's interesting, i see the opposite.

python is so easy to script that imo excel is nailing its own coffin. with an aging and retiring demographic of people that have never used a programming language, anyone who learns to incorporate python into excel will end up preferring python because its both more flexible and scalable.

i have no reason to use excel except for basic drawing board math, if someone demands a spreadsheet out me i automate its generation in python so i never have to deal with it again

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#74

Post by cableshaft »

inglor wrote: post #49
cableshaft wrote: post #13

I wish it wasn't solely powered only by Microsoft Cloud and could support python running locally, but regardless I think this will still be huge and single-handedly modernizes Excel by a large margin. This alone could eliminate the need for websites that just want this sort of data. I can think of a past project at a previous job I did building an analytics website used only by a handful of people internally that cou…

Hi I work on Excel, can you write a summary of why that's important to you and send it to bgruenbaum@microsoft.com ? I'll get it in front of a PM. Alternatively PMs read all the feedback sent via the feedback UI on Excel web and desktop so you can use that instead if you prefer.

I think it's similar to the current generative A.I. trend.

The companies I work for while consulting (mainly financial and health organizations) have been very cautious about any company or PII data going to these A.I. programs, and the cloud in general, and are looking to make their own local run generative A.I. LLMs for their employees to use.

By it's very nature these Excel documents will be filled with company data, so I can imagine these companies would also be a bit cautious sending those calculations to the cloud, especially if they can't control the flow of data from their I.T. departments via web applications.

But I'm just a software engineer at the end of the day, and don't professionally use Excel all that much right now (if anything I use it much more for my hobby of board game design). So I can't speak with too much authority on the matter. Just my observations.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#75

Post by nmstoker »

sneak wrote: post #56
inglor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I work on Excel, can you write a summary of why that's important to you and send it to bgruenbaum@microsoft.com ? I'll get it in front of a PM. Alternatively PMs read all the feedback sent via the feedback UI on Excel web and desktop so you can use that instead if you prefer.

It won't work offline, for one. I use Office exclusively without internet as otherwise who knows what private stuff it's sending back to Microsoft, which then becomes eligible for warrantless surveillance by the federal police. I know it's old fashioned to want local software to only change things on my local file system, but if I didn't want that paradigm, I'd just use Google Docs.

Yes, this is important where you're online but not on a high throughput connection or any part of the connection has intermittent faults.

The disruption from even a few outages is enough to prefer to run things locally. We had issues with people unable to sign into Excel and everyone went mad (rightly so, as Excel was running locally not 365 but it blocked usage)

And on top of that, there are scenarios where you'd want to process substantial amounts of data that would be prohibitive to upload, process and return the results, where locally handling it would take way less time.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#76

Post by eggy »

I am using Acceλerate for MS 365, which brings Visual Scheme for Applications (VSATM) to the MS 365 suite [1]. It can be used in the other MS 365 apps as well and ties in nicely to .NET. That and I unashamedly love Lisp over python even though I know python has the data science corner. I was very disappointed when MIT replaced Scheme with Python as their CS intro language, but such is life. For kicks, I am a big APL fan and found April (Array Programming Re-Imagined in Lisp) which has APL and Lisp united into a super PL! [2]. Maybe an APL for Excel?

[1] https://code-magazine.com/Article/2207071/The-Excellent-Sche...

[2] https://github.com/phantomics/april

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#77

Post by ec109685 »

cardamomo wrote: post #11
hathym wrote: post #3

》Python calculations run in Microsoft’s Cloud No thanks!

That caught my attention too! I'm curious why they would choose this model.

Sandboxing python enough that millions of users could safely pass around excel workbooks is a super hard problem, especially when you allow third party libraries.

Forcing it to run in an isolated environment they control simplifies the problem greatly.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#78

Post by baz00 »

bilsbie wrote: post #25

Off topic but why can’t we all go back to office 97? It basically does all the same stuff and it would be lightning fast on modern machines. You don’t even need internet to use it.

Yeah strangely if you turn the ribbon off it doesn't look much different and doesn't work much differently!

Re: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

#79

Post by john-radio »

sixothree wrote: post #69
inglor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I work on Excel, can you write a summary of why that's important to you and send it to bgruenbaum@microsoft.com ? I'll get it in front of a PM. Alternatively PMs read all the feedback sent via the feedback UI on Excel web and desktop so you can use that instead if you prefer.

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…

The scientific notation ("2.02308E+13") is just how Excel displays a large enough numeric value like your example; it's not doing any conversion, as you can see if you paste that number into Excel, confirm that it's showing the scientific notation, and then click into the cell to confirm that the formula bar still shows the original number (20230822090811).

If you paste your date string in a more standard date format like 2023-08-220 9:08:11, then Excel will correctly infer that it is a date. However, you seem to be saying that Excel should handle ANY numerical strings that way if they are long enough to express a date or datetime, which, while it might make your particular workflow easier (or it might not), it would really mess with people's ability to use Excel with large numerical values...

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