For someone working outside IT but who has coding skills, it's great. My previous work computers have been tightly controlled by IT and installing libreoffice on them wouldn't have been permitted.
Beacuse anyone with a budget had Excel already - and had to use Excel to be able to use other peoples' spreadsheets. LibreOffice is not bug compatible with Excel.
Look what Excel had tro do to replace Lotus 1-2-3. Including making 1900 a leap year beacuse Lotus had the error.
I love free software as much as anyone, but when I'm forced to use a spreadsheet I'm glad we get office at work. The UI/UX of LibreOffice could use a lot of improvements
Probably because Excel runs in a web browser nowadays and they want to avoid creating a separate way of running Python locally for a locally installed copy of Excel.
Maybe they will in the future, but it makes sense to start with the approach that will work in both web and local installs.
Looking at what they're doing with Outlook I'd bet money that they intend to replace the desktop version of Excel with the web version sooner or later.
I agree but expect that Excel will be the very last app of the suite that they make web-only. Excel heads like my wife absolutely hate the web version.
That's got to be the death-knell for Excel. It might be better in every conceivable way but going web-only only makes Sheets look more attractive to the people doing the buying. And you can run JS in your Sheets right now.
I'm positive they've at least toyed with the idea of running a Python interpreter in a WebAssembly module, which should work in both environments _and_ provide some isolation. The telemetry settings, I guess, wouldn't need to be changed to call home about performance/errors.
I can't attest to the performance of such technique for now, though, or guess why they could have deemed it not worth pursuing at the time being.
A lot of people who use excel heavily are not really “programmers” and don’t have strong fundamentals or an appetite to manage their own software stack. This also simplifies development on MS end by only needing to validate a single python version.
This seems like the only solution. Do not copy all of Python’s warts, but offer a curated experience. Microsoft Experience (TM) with fixed APIs, no package management or dealing with ecosystem churn.
It will never work because Python is the ecosystem. Having Python without the ability to tap the huge catalogue of existing software makes the integration worthless. The first thing someone will want to do is use Pandas on a live spreadsheet.
The use case is someone in Excel who does not want to write VBA. You do not need to offer the entire ecosystem, just a slightly better language to handle more sophisticated modeling needs.
The answer is in the question. They chose this model so that Python calculations would run in the Microsoft cloud, operating on data that resides in the Microsoft cloud. When your code runs on the cloud, they get paid. When your data lives in their cloud, they get paid.
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 security isolation (they don't want a repeat of VBA malware) it's a mini-VM focused to run on top of Hyper-V (the Windows Hypervisor) itself. That's a really complicated install process on the average machine (like installing WSL2) that sometimes involves flipping entire Windows Features on, so also something unlikely to be a smooth experience out of the box for Excel.
It might be neat if they made that an optional install and let users have offline support, but it sounded like they wanted to focus on online and collaborative UX first.
Python data science containers are on the order of GBs.
> And who said it must be installed by default?
I did end my comment with thoughts that I think it would be nice to have as an optional install. Mentioning why it isn't likely a default install is relevant because they want this Python feature to be accessible to everyone and they want people to collaborate and the UX for an optional install isn't what they were looking for and would complicate things. (That's not an argument against also supporting the optional install, but a reasoning for why the optional install is a harder feature to support and doesn't make the "version 1" cut.)
> Python data science containers are on the order of GBs.
Yes. And SSDs are on the order of 100s and 1000s of GBs.
> Mentioning why it isn't likely a default install is relevant because they want this Python feature to be accessible to everyone and they want people to collaborate and the UX for an optional install isn't what they were looking for and would complicate things.
How do you know these things?
It won't be accessible to everyone until it's installable. Collaboration is not cloud exclusive. The UX isn't what they were looking for is circular.
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.
1) I agree, which is I why I did end my comment that I think it would be nice to see an optional install offered for offline usage.
4) I don't think they are using Docker, but they are using containers. (They mention running directly on top of Hyper-V so they might not even be considered by some developers as containers in the Docker sense but closer to "mini" VMs.) The container they are using for security/sandboxing reasons. The Excel team likely still has nightmares from the worst years of VBA macro malware and this Python system seems built specifically to sandbox all the running Python code to an execution environment (container/VM) that is easy to refresh/rebuild/recycle/tear-down. I agree that Python on Windows is usually great and most of the Python ecosystem is great at cross-platform support, but I also understand why Excel would want to sandbox any Python it runs to containers that are isolated from the host machine/user and it can easily reboot.
Looking at all the packages available, I'm sure that's why. You make it a much simpler thing to just develop that runtime for a known environment that you control vs a browser/local that requires a lot more engineering effort to make sure it works correctly for everyone.
My guess is that it makes it easier to work on large files which is common without downloading the whole file and it makes CoPilot related efforts much easier.
I work on Excel but not this feature and am happy to ask around if people are interested.
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.
Windows has it's own implementation of containers, and with a docker-like structure, and xlsx being a zip file, excel could simply have a dockerfile like structure "FROM excel-python:2023" "COPY xlsx:scripts/" etc. new versions of excel could keep the last few 'base' containers, or if they are in love with the cloud, the signed, verified base images could be pulled on request.
As soons as nonsense like this comes about you can tell straight away that it's not in user's favor.
It's probably to tie you into subscription, data mining, selling mined data to ad companies and squeez every single dollar they can out of you
DataNitro! I knew very little about programming and was trying to create examination schedules for the faculty I was working at. I managed to convince the dean to buy a license and it pretty much changed my life (granted it was mostly Python that changed it but DataNitro made it even more accessible it to me back then).
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).
Maybe this is not so much about bringing Python to Excel, more about bringing Excel to Python. But only if you do it the way Microsoft wants you to.
As with BASIC morphing into VisualBasic and VBA you lure (beginning) python programmers into Excel. Ultimately those developers will understand and appreciate less and less of vanilla python REPL, jupyter, scripts, etc. And... Welcome to Microsoft's world.
JS has been one of the supported add-in languages for a while[0], but that's not quite the same thing as the new python offering (which sounds more like jupyter within excel).
Since excel is often (mostly?) used for working with financial calculations, I for one am glad they went with python for this feature instead of a language that insists that an IEEE 754 double is the only kind of number anybody actually needs
Financial calculations are also sometimes already used to doing math in integral pennies (or eighths of a penny) for performance/storage reasons. That works just fine with one BigInt. Or you can build arbitrary-precision rationals from just two BigInts. (There are some JS libraries out there already for that.)
"You can build arbitrary-precision rationals" is a far cry from saying, "this is a language designed for precision arithmetic." You can technically build arbitrary-precision rationals without BigInts using arrays, but it's not exactly ergonomic.
Even if we stipulate that users will be cognizant of floating point limitations and convert everything to integers, JS still requires all literals to be suffixed with n to avoid silently losing precision when integral values exceed 2*52.
Many languages that are considered "precision" languages have some form of suffix to denote large/long/arbitrary-sized literals. (C# there's a big useful difference if a literal ends with `m` or `l`.) Most languages you have to be aware of your data types and use the appropriate data types.
No one is saying that "JS is a language designed for precision arithmetic", everyone is saying "JS is a language with the tools today to do precision arithmetic (whether you like it or not)".
> Many languages that are considered "precision" languages have some form of suffix to denote large/long/arbitrary-sized literals. (C# there's a big useful difference if a literal ends with `m` or `l`.)
The failure mode is significantly different when comparing JS to other mainstream languages. Most languages have a "checked" mode (either opt-in or mandatory) so that expressions like `4611686018427387904 + 4611686018427387904` can raise an error, whereas JS will just give you the wrong answer. Python is the most ergonomic for beginners or non-developers because the runtime will convert an integral type to an arbitrary precision integer on overflow.
Yes, there are alternative primitives that can be used, but you need to know they exist. We're talking about a tool that is explicitly designed for people who are not professional programmers, and JS's behavior here is surprising unless you understand the underlying data model. I would personally much rather give beginners a tool incorporating as few footguns as possible.
> JS is a language with the tools today to do precision arithmetic (whether you like it or not)
Arbitrary precision arithmetic has been possible in JS since the language was invented, but it has always been a pain. The bignum NPM package[0] predates the BigInt numeric primitive by 9 years. The addition of `BigInt` to ES2020 was important for performance (since implementing an arithmetic primitive in JS makes calculations dog slow), but it didn't add any fundamental affordances to the language.
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 could have been just as well served with something like this, had it existed at the time.
It sort of makes sense to limit it to the cloud, because making Python an integral part of the Excel file format would reduce its portability and introduce all sorts of compatibility headaches going forward.
Excel already has versioned file formats with significantly different affordances, and hasn't appeared to have all sorts of compatibility headaches as a result.
Integrating a whole separate language ecosystem is one or two orders of magnitude more complex though. It’s more like HTML5/WHATWG suddenly adding Python as a first-class scripting language besides JavaScript, and web browsers having to integrate that.
It’s different because WASM is much more strictly defined and has a more limited scope than Python. Thanks to WASM, browsers don’t have be able to understand Python/PyScript. The trade-off is that you can’t, for example, view/edit the Python code in the browser’s devtools.
A WASM-like approach wouldn’t work very well for Excel, because you’re supposed to be able to edit the source code/formulas within the Excel application.
Whether it runs in the cloud or locally, the included python source will be written for a specific runtime version and environment. If excel were to run python locally, it would presumably bundle an interpreter (+ any needed pip packages) rather than relying on whatever was installed locally.
The cloud execution model does still have an advantage in that it can retain old runtimes in perpetuity for backwards compatibility, though
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?
Computers are computers. Potentially new Excel would be incompatible with old cloud Python environments. Potentially new Excel would be compatible with old local Python environments.
If you've ever dealt with AWS Lambda you will know what a versioning and upgrading shit show this is going to be wherever you stick it, be that client or cloud.
I worked on a very early python integration used as a workflow DSL back in 1998 and they had to dump it and write their own DSL in the end.
> It sort of makes sense to limit it to the cloud, because making Python an integral part of the Excel file format
Moving it from the cloud to local doesn't make it an integral part of the Excel file format. Whatever python service is running in the cloud could just run locally.
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.
I eventually gave up on it because of the locals vs cloud differences. The documentation for the whole thing was terrible as well. I think they’re in transition (assuming cloud only). In my case, I just went and used Calc from LibreOffice.
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 not fix excel documents.
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...
Do you _really_ think I've spent the past 10 years getting files like this and I still don't understand the reason. I didn't ask for an explanation. I asked for a fix. What are you doing here??
I can provide instructions on how to do this until the cows come home. I will still get files with these issues. Is that not obvious?
Do you really think I want to examine _tens of thousands of rows_ in documents that are 100 cells wide looking for a single exponent value!?!?!?! Is that really what you're suggesting as a fix here?
My my, why so angry? You're expecting something that Excel doesn't support for good reason. The string you used as an example might be a date string to YOU, but to Excel and many of its users it's just a large integer. Lots of regular use cases would break if Excel would interpret that string as a datwle
If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601
It’s one of the most infuriating and dangerous behaviors I have ever encountered. Excel silently truncates data. The anger is warranted. The problem isn’t assuming a display format for data, it is that a poor assumption actually mangles data. Excel doesn’t fail safe.
Numbers in Excel only maintain 15 digits of precision. Leading zeros are also truncated. If you haven’t experienced this you are lucky (or just didn’t notice) but it is real.
> If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601
You don’t always control the upstream system. Your response can be considered rude because it implies you think you know more than the person expressing pain. This is especially insulting with such a widely known problem in Excel.
This behavior burned me with billing system IDs. Logically they are strings, we would never do math on them. For performance they were implemented as BIGINTs in the DB. Excel truncates everything after the 15th digit. Our IDs were all over 20. So accounting couldn’t reconcile our reports with the billing system.
> It’s one of the most infuriating and dangerous behaviors I have ever encountered. Excel silently truncates data.
That's a problem, sure, but not the one sixothree is complaining about.
> The problem isn’t assuming a display format for data
Your problem might not be, but that’s exactly the problem sixothree is complaining about that the post you are responding to addresses, so while your post references a valid complaint, it is a complete non-sequitur as a response.
> Do you _really_ think I've spent the past 10 years getting files like this and I still don't understand the reason. I didn't ask for an explanation. I asked for a fix.
I don’t believe you’ve been doing it that long and haven't found the fix.
Apply appropriate formatting if you have long strings of numeric digits [as long as they can’t have leading zeroes] that you want stored as numbers but displayed without scientific notation. (Not the best choice for what is semantically a date, in your case, but...that’s a whole bigger issue and, well, babysteps.) You don't have to look at anything, just do it for the ranges where that is the kind of data:
The text import wizard does work. The problem with it is that everyone has to use it and if anyone doesn’t then your data is silently mangled.
In the past I have added an apostrophe to the front of any integer that should be displayed as a string. Excel will not display that leading single apostrophe. It of course taints that data forever but I consider “Exported to Excel” a terminal state anyway.
I cannot remember the last time I had some long number and thought to myself, "You know what will be helpful, convert this number into scientific notation!"...
It's asinine Excel has this behavior with any large number. Try to work with a list of EAN/UPC codes... it'll wreck every single one every single time, unless you take significant care to guard against it via formatting, special characters that trick it into using a string, etc. Try working with a spreadsheet full of database id's... same thing. It's asinine.
By the very nature of Excel, large numbers belong as-is... ie. you're studying something and need the values. Approximations (what scientific notation gives you in the best case) are an exception to what people need nearly every time.
> I cannot remember the last time I had some long number and thought to myself, "You know what will be helpful, convert this number into scientific notation!"...
Okay, so set formats appropriate to what is useful for your data.
Defaults don't cover all cases, otherwise there would be no non-default options.
> It's asinine Excel has this behavior with any large number. Try to work with a list of EAN/UPC codes...
Codes aren’t numbers they are strings, even if the code is a sequence of digits. They should be formatted as text. For actual numbers that shouldn't be displayed in scientific missions, the appropriate numeric format does that.
> it'll wreck every single one every single time
If its any code that can be safely stored as a number, it won't wreck it. It’ll just look bad until its fixed. If it, say, has significant leading zerores, yes, it’ll wreck it, because excel defaults to dealing with numbers, not text, and there is a difference between text made up of digits and actual numbers.
> unless you take significant care to guard against it via formatting, special characters that trick it into using a string, etc
Knowing the shape of data you are entering and selecting a column and applying an appropriate format (including “text” as an option) before you enter any data (usually, to a whole column) isn’t that arduous.
The defaults should be sane - that's the point. What percentage of Excel users actually want data automatically converted into Scientific Notation? Close to zero I'd wager.
Your offered work-arounds only apply in a very narrow workflow. I work with Excel nearly every day, all kinds of files (CSV, TXT, XLS/X, etc). There's so many ways this issue can bite you unexpectedly - causing you to save and permanently destroy data.
If I type/paste/import/download/whatever `01234567890987654321` into a cell, 100% of the time I do not want `1.23+E18`. I don't want to even see that, I want to see the original value I entered.
It's asinine.
Excel may be the most used Office Suite app, but it's by far the most painful to use. The Excel Team has a long history of justifying downright perplexing behavior. Remember when Excel was the only Office app that didn't support Snap-To back in the Win Vista/7 days? Joel had a long-winded explanation that boiled down to "just cause"... it was perplexing even at the time. It really makes one wonder how bad the rat nest of a codebase Excel is.
"There's ways around our astonishing default behavior so just deal with it". That's not a great answer.
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 ISO8601.
The way you fix this is using the text import tool or better yet power query and specifying the column type to be text. With power query you can repeat this for as many files as you need to import.
If he's recieving excel files with this issue from other people, the text import tool isn’t a solution and Power Query is a bit circuitous to solve what can be addressed by formatting the range with this kind of data.
However, to my eyes, and probably most people, 20230822090811 does not look like a "date string", it's a number. It's correct to display it as scientific notation if it's too many digits to fit into the width of a cell. Please let's not encourage them to interpret more things as dates and randomly break people's workflows.
Excel should preserve all the digits you enter in the cell even if it doesn't display them, though. That has nothing to do with dates. It's a problem with things like product numbers or keys that can end up with many digits.
Are you saying that excel does preserve digits? I must be doing something very wrong (entirely possible), cause once the document is saved, the digits are gone.
+1. I just discovered this, and it's happily eliminated at least half my use case for Excel, and does a better job at it too. That is, visualize CSV files without messing with the data.
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.
> 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.
This is exactly what I see when talking to users about xlwings: it needs to run on their end, behind their firewall, in exactly the cloud they have picked (AWS, GCP, Azure).
I do a lot of work with US state governments, it's the same story mostly. It's possible to get the approvals required for data to be shipped off to some "cloud" but it has to be FedRAMP certified and no data can move outside the contiguous 48 states.
We use Excel for a bunch of "critical" tasks as defined by the financial regulator, which means any of their dependencies also have to be assessed to ensure they meet the required level of stability.
What this means is we'd need to go from just requiring a laptop and a copy of the spreadsheet to requiring redundant internet connections and validating Microsoft's backend meet the regulator's requirements. I'm pretty sure that would unfortunately rule out using it.
Having seen the quality of “critical” macros, excel spreadsheets, and “dev/prod” SMB drives anyone can mess with it’s absolutely clear no regulator gives a fuck.
I can put this in an email if you want, but one good reason would be that my laptop is probably faster than the cloud compute that they are willing to give away to 365 subscribers. I can do much more inefficient things in a single cell if I know my laptop can pick up the slack :)
(Although, I'm guessing the reason they did it this way is so they could keep the execution model the same for Excel on the web? It's always running on the external service vs sometimes running locally and sometimes running externally.)
Not OP but I would never want to use this if I was running a security minded business. Why would it be okay to send out my entire dataset to the Microsoft cloud to run a few simple queries. How long is the data stored on your servers? Since it’s operating on the data directly, it’s not possible to anonymize or redact the contents of the data.
Practically speaking, if you are running recent versions of Windows (I don't remember when exactly this trend started, with 2000? XP?), you have basically no control over what data you send to them and when. You can try to block traffic but it will interfere with normal Windows operations. You can try to investigate and play cat and mouse game with Microsoft, but they will always be one step ahead of you - unless you decide to turn off automatic updates and make your system less secure.
It makes little difference if it's a VM or bare metal - what matters is network connectivity. If it's on, you lose control over the data leaving your computer. In Linux, BSD and others, you can control it in a very precise way.
Is there any technical reason excel couldn’t ship with Python? The license allows it [1] and it would probably solve the issue of all users being able to open any document like the cloud solution, but still run locally.
The Cloud, and therefore the integration of as much as possible in it, is core Microsoft strategy.
It's about the recurring payments, the lock-in, and ultimately literally having the knowledge and business processes of the world economy on their own computers. If this is true, the reason why it is important to run data and scripts locally should be clear, and so is the motivation of your PMs to actively combat any such things.
But if you get a summary in your inbox and show it to your PMs let us know how that goes down.
Yeah, but they also make money on the office subscriptions. So you also want current working data scientists who would not touch excel to give it a chance because they can use their existing python back-end. Eventually, there would be a service that is Microsoft exclusive, but they have to compete on services.
Idk, it's really up to Microsoft's business units. Office could be the loss leader to get cloud business, but it could be the other way too. Either way, I would hazard that they want people to actually use this integration feature.
Customer verbatims are like, an incredibly valuable currency. It's all fine to say "I know the product in and out and I think this is important". But it's another thing entirely to say "I know this is important because _this customer right here asked for literally this_".
"It is difficult to get a man to implement something when his stock options depend on it remaining unimplemented." -- how a modern-day Sinclair Lewis might answer
How about an actual API that lets you drive Excel from Python rather than the other way around?
With that API, it won't matter whether you want Python, Ruby, Lua, whatever, for your scripting language.
This is nice, but it welds a specific version of Python inside Excel and makes it a gigantic PITA to use your normal development tools on your Python code.
> 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 our ETL tools to keep it populated with the data they need to analyze. Don't let them anywhere near the source data. They keep looking at me like I have ten heads. Instead they want to launch multi-million dollar projects to bring Tableau to our users - and they don't want it! It's asinine!
To be fair, Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep, and Tableau Cloud are great if expensive products. With Tableau Prep, you get a visual ETL tool. Being technical, I prefer SQL, but for business folks Tableau Prep is more of a REPL so they see what their actions are going to do. They can schedule these Prep flows in Tableau Cloud which will ETL and produce daily datasets which users can then interact via the dashboards on Tableau Cloud.
IMO, Excel is on the right path with out of the box connectors to Salesforce, Azure databases, etc. What it really needs is full blown SQL with REPL output so the users can see the effects of their SQL. (The way Tableau Prep does it is that it defaults to a sampling of rows to output immediate results). There used to be a Microsoft service called Excel online but it was another thing you had to buy and was super confusing. Excel needs to let users schedule their ETL/datasets in SharePoint online and then let other users subscribe to it. They can call it Excel Super+ and charge a small fortune. I am positive there are people with their wallets open.
That last part is almost exactly what we do with Power BI. We import tables from a SQL data warehouse into Power BI. We then build a data model (creating relationships between tables, adding calculated columns to those tables where needed, and creating measures to summarize the data). We then create reports based on those datasets. Most of our users are content with what they see in the Power BI web client.
This is the killer feature, however: power users can access those same datasets through Excel and import the entire model. All the relationships, all the calculated columns, and all the measures are there for the power users to mix and match and filter however they want in Excel. It's been a phenomenal success for our business.
>This is the killer feature, however: power users can access those same datasets through Excel and import the entire model.
I had this once. Then someone decided it was 'dangerous' and locked us out. I went back to exporting the data from the ERP and loading it into Excel...because I was allowed to do that
Non-software engineers looked me like I had ten heads for suggesting that people would need to learn a modicum T-SQL to make use of it. I even volunteered to write all the views for them! The lesson learned for me is that horrible expensive ERPs/ETLs tools are never going to be replaced with Excel + a database because even the (non-software) engineers at a large company are not interested to learn how to write basic SQL statements.
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 arrangement is that the whole model is imported. All the relationships between tables, all the added calculation columns, all the measures are there for use by the end user in Excel.
Power BI has been a great solution for our company (~1000 employees).
There’s also the Power Query add-in for Excel that’s super steezy.
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.
> I keep explaining all we have to do is build a data mart built using SQL Server, and use our ETL tools to keep it populated with the data they need to analyze.
I mean, that's like >90% of building a CRUD web app. If you truly only need the R in CRUD, your approach sounds reasonable. Otherwise, just go the extra distance and build a CRUD app with csv export / direct SQL access.
Google’s ecosystem makes this incredibly simple.. all you need is to populate BigQuery with the datasets of interest, and Sheets can pull it in via a connector that’s configureable in a GUI. I sincerely hope my org never migrates to MS for this reason alone.
You're probably asking for something impossible. It's common for the raw data to not fit in excel. You have to do some sort of aggregation or filtering, which means having that app where you aggregate and filter.
Almost all these tools support exporting to Excel or CSV, so they can do whatever they want in Excel after that.
In multiple orgs now I've had raw access to data warehouses (DB2 and SQL Server based) that had aggregates of petabytes of data from ETL that I was free to access via Excel PowerQuery, direct SQL tools, Python or R, or even PowerBI.
I didn't mean aggregate as in summarized data, but aggregate as in a common repository of multiple different data sources as a single massive data warehouse. If I needed to group or summarize the data, I had to do it in my own queries.
My point wasn't that you should never give people access to raw data, but that the raw data won't fit in excel rows. You have to do aggregation or filtering somewhere to get the data within the row limit.
> I keep explaining all we have to do is build a data mart built using SQL Server, and use our ETL tools to keep it populated with the data they need to analyze.
I can relate and have experienced this. The result was that they would end up exporting from a series of Tableau/Looker workspaces, and importing into excel and doing their analysis there.
Then continually making enhancement requests on the Tableau/Looker workspaces to get any additional data they need for their excel work.
Then of course, the excel document and its multitude of versions would get emailed around until it hit the attachment size limit, or if there were too many version of it to figure out which one was "actionable".
We finally figured out what they were doing when the enhancement requests for the reporting workspaces got too bizarre.
How do you lock down Excel - that is the issue we have where I work and the main reason excel is strongly discouraged.
There are two main issues my org has battled with:
1.People basically turn excel into their own mini databases which causes a support nightmare.
2. This is strongly related to 1) Data provenance is a nightmare because so many people were passing around excel spreadsheets it became very difficult to track down the source of the figures people were using. User A passed their spreadsheet to user B who modified it passed it to User C who further modified it, passed it to User d from there some figures ended up in front of a manager and now we have a problem...
It's not so much a problem with Power users those are the types of people using python (or R) it's the tier of users below that level that cause the damage with excel.
Are you using Power BI? If it is easy to find and use ground truth data I find that people will start using that. Encourage sharing reports, but make it "official" by sharing them through Power BI.
Oh the cloud part is going to be a huge deal breaker in so many industries. This will automatically be blocked by default at my work place for certain.
I too would love this, but I can tel you, even in a sandbox python would be very easy to abuse from a security perspective. Consider how much havoc on humanity (no exaggeration!) VBA Macros have caused.
What's the difference between Python and VBA in that respect? Do you open Excel files now? Pretty sure that wild Office macros were once one of the main sources for computer herpes.
There are few key reasons for running in a hypervisor isolated container on Azure with no access to the Internet:
- We can guarantee a consistent experience for all users. Imagine having to maintain your own local distribution of Python and guaranteeing that it works with Excel as versions diverge over time? Yikes.
- We make it possible to share your Excel workbook with other users and have the calculation just work. That wouldn't work with random local installs of Python and users would be super frustrated by this.
- Security. Imagine opening an Excel workbook that can execute Python code running locally as you.
Also, I totally agree with your second point. Trying to write an internal app in Python that integrates with all of your existing IT infrastructure is an exercise in frustration at best. Excel is already part of the IT infrastructure virtually everywhere and is a programmable reactive canvas.
Disclosure: I work on the design team for the feature.
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.
> games have been skipping with Python scripting for decades
That only works if there is a forever fixed version of Python embedded in your game. The value of Python in this context is its ecosystem and folks will need to install additional packages and libraries into the execution environment. Now you're managing a local distribution of Python.
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, the critical library you need is either in or out, but there is nothing you can do about it.
Admittedly, here I'm assuming Microsoft won't let you install things into the environment yourself since that basically means hosting virtual machines running arbitrary code and putting the Excel brand in front.
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.
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.
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.
Could you not achieve the same by shipping the required tools with Excel and running them inside a Windows Sandbox?
Isolation isn't as good, but it probably protects users against the threats you/they care about?
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.
It running in Microsoft Cloud is precisely what I think will actually allow this to be useful functionality for my company in ways that macros aren't, because macros are seen here to present a vector for running malware on client machines, whose utility doesn't justify the risk.
Just wait for someone to run malware on your mystery cloud instance of Excel. Have you seen the cross-instance and cross-domain security holes Microsoft has been running into? The latest and greatest was on their Power Platform ("Excel-like"). Nothing like silently shipping your data off to a remote location for inspection by blackhats. Microsoft cloud security is torn apart and laying all over the floor right now...nevermind all the half baked features that let you get kneck deep in a project before you see the grande middle finger from project hellscape.
Yeah, making python a first-class browser scripting language to displace JS. I think we all know it's time. Even if it takes a decade for ubiquity, it'll be worth it.
Definitely check out PyScript if you haven't already. It works pretty well and is being actively developed. (Full disclosure: I work for Anaconda, which is the primary developer.)
Wait just a moment. Libreoffice had python for years, but nobody cared and instead complained about needing 100% compatible VBA for "real work". Where are those people now?
Not offended that Excel can do more, but potentially still inconvenienced by Libreoffice not having the thing they are familiar with or are forced to work with?
By having Python in Basic, it becomes available to cells too, since Basic macros are callable from cells.
Note that you may need to reduce the security level to 'medium' in the drop down Tools->Options->Libre Office->Security->Macro Security. When LibreOffice opens, it will ask you whether you want to enable macros or not.
I would happily use Libreoffice if any of my clients did. But nobody does.
Compatibility would be nice so I can write stuff in Libreoffice Calc on Linux (Excel has 0 Linux support) and ship it to clients without issues, but this even close to be possible.
Right here. It's also not about 100% compatible VBA, it's about learning an entirely new API in order to write VBA-backed Excel spreadsheets that won't run in Excel. If Libreoffice VBA were compatible with Office VBA, I'd have no reason to always keep an outdated Windows system in the closet somewhere.
The reason we're doing this is to make money, and nobody wants to buy Excel spreadsheets that don't run in Excel.
None's stopping you to use MSOffice '97. I still use it from time to time and current MSOffice is happily recognizing the format and converts it on the fly. Also there is a tool that you can install and see current formats to be able to open them in MSOffice '97.
As for why the rest of the world why would do that or not, is their choice, no?
Thank you. Yes, I could get ELT to accept a “RAD” Access app built and shipped during the time it takes to pitch to choose just the CRUD library or JS Framework alone.
For one, because people want more than 65,536 rows in their spreadsheets.
But, I'd largely agree that '97 was the pinnacle from a UI perspective. There are changes under the hood that are quite nice, though, especially with the move to xml persistence.
I'm a developer. People have often come to me with Excel sheets that were really slow because it was just too much for Excel. Almost all of the times IMHO a specific solution should have been developed for it. I'm curious to see if this makes it better or actually worse.
Conway's law. Unless those people have devs or data engineers embedded in their group, they're going to keep on with less than ideal solutions. Management will accept those inefficient solutions because they don't come with dev pricetags.
I don't doubt that you have, but in my experience the reason they're slow is because updates haven't been turned off while the macro was running, or naïve algorithmic choices (that a query planner might fix in the realm of normal programming, but python wouldn't help with.)
I hope this is the start of a wholesale python replacement for VBA. Python has turned into what VBA always tried to be: A ubiquitous language for data and scripting (among other things).
Excel would be well served by replacing VBA with either JS or python because of their ecosystems and high levels of adoption. Python is the better choice because data analysts are more likely to be familiar with it.
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...
Wow, thank you for replying. I'm so glad it worked out in the end.
I remember being blown away by the ResolverOne demonstration video, and if I recall correctly, some others you posted showing some of the other features and functionality.
The fact VisiData (my current 'spreadsheet' of choice) has acquired a sizeable following in that niche, and now Excel is following suit suggests you might have just been a little too far ahead of the curve.
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".
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 via a Python API.
Its a pity that the various strands of the open source universe are so siloed. The potential of the sum being more than the parts is squandered.
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.
The only thing I can think of is macOS clipboard manager somehow interfering with the copied data. Was testing on Linux kf5 UI.
Also, I can preserve the empty row, if I paste with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+V (Edit - Paste Special - Paste Unformatted Text). This opens the Text Import dialog.
I turned off the clipboard history app I use and now LibreOffice pastes like Excel.
The history app I use is 10 years old and I see that the company that made it apparently is no longer around (or at least their domain no longer works) so I guess I should get a newer clipboard history app.
To me Excel's behaviour is way more problematic here. I carefully select the data I want, and it silently includes irrelevant data as well. I don't want the spacing preserved, but I really don't want other random data included.
It doesn't include other random data. You select N rows, contiguous or discontiguous, and those are copied to N consecutive rows starting at the paste point.
It includes things that aren't selected, which is other random data. If I select, copy, and paste, the only desirable outcome is that I get a copy of my selection.
I don't understand what you mean. In my example I select the cells that contain 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c, then copy, then go somewhere else and paste, and Excel pastes 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c. I don't see an other data.
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
I see spreedsheets more as an UI. An extremely intuitive (and reactive!) way of spatially decomposing computation. Yes, this creates lots of problems (you can not easily validate it etc.) but it is also very enabling. For sure more people are now exposed to programming, but how many are actually comfortable doing even simple stuff directly using code is a question mark.
A jupyter notebook is maybe somewhere in between. But even if other interfaces manage to bridge the gap further, I doubt the spreadsheet metaphor is going to go away in the visible future. Pivot tables and the like are like COBOL and mainframes :-) The corporate world would die a sudden death if you were to eliminate it (another reason to always make sure you can run things locally).
> with an aging and retiring demographic of people that have never used a programming language
This simply isn't true in any way and is completely divorced from modern businesses. Everybody I know who works in an office setting works with Excel. None of them know Python and none of them have touched a programming language. Almost all of them are younger than 30. And if anybody who's 20 starts at one of these companies, they'd better know Excel because that's what the business is built on. Not like that 20 year old is gonna know anything about programming either. 99% of people just aren't programmers and aren't going to learn programming when they just want to futz around with some numbers and the easiest (yet also the most powerful) tool they know for it is a spreadsheet.
If somebody in any business, anywhere, at any point wants to do something with numbers, they're going to use Excel.
Not a chance. There's nothing scary about VBA (except its inflexibility and lack of a lot of modern features), and people aren't learning that either. Of course, the last decade of vaguely threatening to remove it from Office completely (in favor of js and now python?) hasn't helped people think VBA would be a good investment of their time to learn. A required internet connection and having Python only work on Windows doesn't make it look like much better of an investment.
Also, imo, Python and whatever random environments and libraries that you'll have to use with it to get your work done, will be in almost every way worse than just using VBA. And if you use VBA, your work will be effortlessly portable. The only problem I have with it is that I have to come up with ways to get the code out of the embedded IDE into source control, but there are scripts that help.
> 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
I, on the other hand, do it in VBA, and expose every important calculation within clearly labeled spreadsheets so programming-illiterate people can audit them and feel confident about the output.
This comment seems out of touch with why people use Excel. The fact is, Excel is popular because it manages to be pretty easy to use, while also being extraordinarily powerful and flexible. For most users, they'll ask "why would I program something in Python when Excel has a built in function to handle that?"
> i have no reason to use excel except for basic drawing board math
I think you underestimate the amount of work, globally, done in Excel. If Excel vanished it would be a business/economic extinction level event, It's not going anywhere.
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.
This sounds like it provides a way for Excel to hand a bunch of data to Python code for processing and get back results, and vice versa.
That's probably extremely valuable to many people, but it does not seem to be what I hope for whenever I see something about bringing Python to Excel.
What I hope for is something that is like VBA but without the VB. I.e., a Python (or JavaScript) interpreter/JIT/compiler built into Excel exposing all the internal Excel objects and methods that VBA has access to. By "Python" I just mean the language and whatever subset of the standard library makes sense in Excel.
win32com.client uses Windows' COM machinery, which supports event-driven feedback from Excel to the script. Switching to PowerShell because I'm not familiar with that in Python and from a quick Google, Python needs some more complex multithreadding handling:
Now when you change a cell in the spreadsheet GUI and press enter, the PowerShell "write-host" runs and prints the message. Another comment mentioned "using Excel as a GUI for Python" and the COM interfaces have the machinery to do that. It looks like xlWings has something like this, but may need an add-in installed in Excel to trigger Python code from Excel? https://docs.xlwings.org/en/latest/quickstart.html and https://docs.xlwings.org/en/latest/addin.html#xlwings-addin
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.
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.
> “I’m excited that this excellent, tight integration of Python and Excel is now seeing the light of day,” says Guido van Rossum, Python’s creator and now a Microsoft distinguished engineer.
It's depressing seeing someone who has done so much work for the free software community now working to enrich the spyware-laden proprietary product offerings of a megacorp.
Nothing about this is "good for Python" or hackers - it's just good for Microsoft to sell more Excel (and Microsoft accounts). That makes the world worse.
Even installing Python seems to a hurdle for many employees. They need to get approval from IT, and it seems not to get done. They use Excel, and if they can use Python within Excel without installing anything extra, it will increase the user base of Python. After getting a taste of Python they may install Python locally and use it outside Excel. So I think this will be "good for Python". Certainly integration of VBA into Excel has been good for VBA.
A lot of people are taught Excel early on in school. I wonder if this would result in more people learning or being introduced to Python at an early age?
Now if they could only fix the issue where dates are converted into scientific notation. For the past 10 years I've been getting a steady stream of excel files with sometimes thousands of dates that are formatted incorrectly. And there is literally no "easy" way to fix this.
I'm tired of it Microsoft. Just fix the darn issue please.
Seems cool, and a bit awful. Writing elaborated python-code in that little text-field must be a nightmare of its own. Where can I connect a VS Code or vim to the sheet for coding in comfort?
No one seems to know that an VBA IDE is part of Office. It's important to remember when you're working on an extremely locked-down system and you want to do something complicated.
My thoughts too. Not having to install outside software is treated as a feature, but it is a lost opportunity: Excel with tight VSCode integration sounds like a killer app for decades to come. Two best-of-class (respectively) programs, each in realms dominated by Microsoft. Combine the two and unique possibilities unlock, bridging the gap between business and development.
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?
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 441 ms ] threadhttps://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing...
https://help.libreoffice.org/6.3/en-US/text/sbasic/python/py...
Look what Excel had tro do to replace Lotus 1-2-3. Including making 1900 a leap year beacuse Lotus had the error.
The calculations in the cloud?
If it was on the client side, I'd be rolling it out to users the moment it was available.
Maybe they will in the future, but it makes sense to start with the approach that will work in both web and local installs.
I really don't see them killing the desktop version.
Sharepoint and web-shared files make it very difficult to link spreadsheets between each other, even one way around.
In theory it works, in practice it doesnt. (PowerQuery is an inconvenient stopgap to simple links)
Have her try Excel 2010 or 2007 running on Wine (whether using WSL or natively)
For people who want their spreadsheet offline, it's wonderful: fast and stable.
I can't attest to the performance of such technique for now, though, or guess why they could have deemed it not worth pursuing at the time being.
The list of what snacks people are bringing to the potluck is in excel online (or google sheets).
The excel sheet that is pulling information from a database, mashing it up, displaying it in a dozen different pivots... that is going to be local.
At the cost of privacy. Consider msft could sell this to you but they chose to let you borrow it instead.
Doing everything in the cloud massively simplifies deployment and support.
Another complication is they claim the container isn't just "a docker container", but for increased security isolation (they don't want a repeat of VBA malware) it's a mini-VM focused to run on top of Hyper-V (the Windows Hypervisor) itself. That's a really complicated install process on the average machine (like installing WSL2) that sometimes involves flipping entire Windows Features on, so also something unlikely to be a smooth experience out of the box for Excel.
It might be neat if they made that an optional install and let users have offline support, but it sounded like they wanted to focus on online and collaborative UX first.
Hyper-V is enabled by default on supported hardware.
Python data science containers are on the order of GBs.
> And who said it must be installed by default?
I did end my comment with thoughts that I think it would be nice to have as an optional install. Mentioning why it isn't likely a default install is relevant because they want this Python feature to be accessible to everyone and they want people to collaborate and the UX for an optional install isn't what they were looking for and would complicate things. (That's not an argument against also supporting the optional install, but a reasoning for why the optional install is a harder feature to support and doesn't make the "version 1" cut.)
Yes. And SSDs are on the order of 100s and 1000s of GBs.
> Mentioning why it isn't likely a default install is relevant because they want this Python feature to be accessible to everyone and they want people to collaborate and the UX for an optional install isn't what they were looking for and would complicate things.
How do you know these things?
It won't be accessible to everyone until it's installable. Collaboration is not cloud exclusive. The UX isn't what they were looking for is circular.
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.
4) I don't think they are using Docker, but they are using containers. (They mention running directly on top of Hyper-V so they might not even be considered by some developers as containers in the Docker sense but closer to "mini" VMs.) The container they are using for security/sandboxing reasons. The Excel team likely still has nightmares from the worst years of VBA macro malware and this Python system seems built specifically to sandbox all the running Python code to an execution environment (container/VM) that is easy to refresh/rebuild/recycle/tear-down. I agree that Python on Windows is usually great and most of the Python ecosystem is great at cross-platform support, but I also understand why Excel would want to sandbox any Python it runs to containers that are isolated from the host machine/user and it can easily reboot.
I work on Excel but not this feature and am happy to ask around if people are interested.
Forcing it to run in an isolated environment they control simplifies the problem greatly.
https://www.pyxll.com/docs/introduction.html
I haven't found any free, open source solutions around this including any for Jupyter notebooks (my preferred medium).
I don't know if it fits your needs
I think I'll stick to VBA.
Javascript in Excel would be nice.
Even better would be native SQL.
Also, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/resourc...
As with BASIC morphing into VisualBasic and VBA you lure (beginning) python programmers into Excel. Ultimately those developers will understand and appreciate less and less of vanilla python REPL, jupyter, scripts, etc. And... Welcome to Microsoft's world.
JS has been one of the supported add-in languages for a while[0], but that's not quite the same thing as the new python offering (which sounds more like jupyter within excel).
Since excel is often (mostly?) used for working with financial calculations, I for one am glad they went with python for this feature instead of a language that insists that an IEEE 754 double is the only kind of number anybody actually needs
Even if we stipulate that users will be cognizant of floating point limitations and convert everything to integers, JS still requires all literals to be suffixed with n to avoid silently losing precision when integral values exceed 2*52.
No one is saying that "JS is a language designed for precision arithmetic", everyone is saying "JS is a language with the tools today to do precision arithmetic (whether you like it or not)".
The failure mode is significantly different when comparing JS to other mainstream languages. Most languages have a "checked" mode (either opt-in or mandatory) so that expressions like `4611686018427387904 + 4611686018427387904` can raise an error, whereas JS will just give you the wrong answer. Python is the most ergonomic for beginners or non-developers because the runtime will convert an integral type to an arbitrary precision integer on overflow.
Yes, there are alternative primitives that can be used, but you need to know they exist. We're talking about a tool that is explicitly designed for people who are not professional programmers, and JS's behavior here is surprising unless you understand the underlying data model. I would personally much rather give beginners a tool incorporating as few footguns as possible.
> JS is a language with the tools today to do precision arithmetic (whether you like it or not)
Arbitrary precision arithmetic has been possible in JS since the language was invented, but it has always been a pain. The bignum NPM package[0] predates the BigInt numeric primitive by 9 years. The addition of `BigInt` to ES2020 was important for performance (since implementing an arithmetic primitive in JS makes calculations dog slow), but it didn't add any fundamental affordances to the language.
[0]: https://github.com/justmoon/node-bignum
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 could have been just as well served with something like this, had it existed at the time.
A WASM-like approach wouldn’t work very well for Excel, because you’re supposed to be able to edit the source code/formulas within the Excel application.
The cloud execution model does still have an advantage in that it can retain old runtimes in perpetuity for backwards compatibility, though
I worked on a very early python integration used as a workflow DSL back in 1998 and they had to dump it and write their own DSL in the end.
Moving it from the cloud to local doesn't make it an integral part of the Excel file format. Whatever python service is running in the cloud could just run locally.
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 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.
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.
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 not fix excel documents.
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...
I can provide instructions on how to do this until the cows come home. I will still get files with these issues. Is that not obvious?
Do you really think I want to examine _tens of thousands of rows_ in documents that are 100 cells wide looking for a single exponent value!?!?!?! Is that really what you're suggesting as a fix here?
If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601
Numbers in Excel only maintain 15 digits of precision. Leading zeros are also truncated. If you haven’t experienced this you are lucky (or just didn’t notice) but it is real.
> If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601
You don’t always control the upstream system. Your response can be considered rude because it implies you think you know more than the person expressing pain. This is especially insulting with such a widely known problem in Excel.
This behavior burned me with billing system IDs. Logically they are strings, we would never do math on them. For performance they were implemented as BIGINTs in the DB. Excel truncates everything after the 15th digit. Our IDs were all over 20. So accounting couldn’t reconcile our reports with the billing system.
That's a problem, sure, but not the one sixothree is complaining about.
> The problem isn’t assuming a display format for data
Your problem might not be, but that’s exactly the problem sixothree is complaining about that the post you are responding to addresses, so while your post references a valid complaint, it is a complete non-sequitur as a response.
Because they have been dealing with the same bug for 10 years, I thought that was obvious.
I don’t believe you’ve been doing it that long and haven't found the fix.
Apply appropriate formatting if you have long strings of numeric digits [as long as they can’t have leading zeroes] that you want stored as numbers but displayed without scientific notation. (Not the best choice for what is semantically a date, in your case, but...that’s a whole bigger issue and, well, babysteps.) You don't have to look at anything, just do it for the ranges where that is the kind of data:
https://help.godatafeed.com/hc/en-us/articles/360049916591-H...
In the past I have added an apostrophe to the front of any integer that should be displayed as a string. Excel will not display that leading single apostrophe. It of course taints that data forever but I consider “Exported to Excel” a terminal state anyway.
It's asinine Excel has this behavior with any large number. Try to work with a list of EAN/UPC codes... it'll wreck every single one every single time, unless you take significant care to guard against it via formatting, special characters that trick it into using a string, etc. Try working with a spreadsheet full of database id's... same thing. It's asinine.
By the very nature of Excel, large numbers belong as-is... ie. you're studying something and need the values. Approximations (what scientific notation gives you in the best case) are an exception to what people need nearly every time.
Okay, so set formats appropriate to what is useful for your data.
Defaults don't cover all cases, otherwise there would be no non-default options.
> It's asinine Excel has this behavior with any large number. Try to work with a list of EAN/UPC codes...
Codes aren’t numbers they are strings, even if the code is a sequence of digits. They should be formatted as text. For actual numbers that shouldn't be displayed in scientific missions, the appropriate numeric format does that.
> it'll wreck every single one every single time
If its any code that can be safely stored as a number, it won't wreck it. It’ll just look bad until its fixed. If it, say, has significant leading zerores, yes, it’ll wreck it, because excel defaults to dealing with numbers, not text, and there is a difference between text made up of digits and actual numbers.
> unless you take significant care to guard against it via formatting, special characters that trick it into using a string, etc
Knowing the shape of data you are entering and selecting a column and applying an appropriate format (including “text” as an option) before you enter any data (usually, to a whole column) isn’t that arduous.
Your offered work-arounds only apply in a very narrow workflow. I work with Excel nearly every day, all kinds of files (CSV, TXT, XLS/X, etc). There's so many ways this issue can bite you unexpectedly - causing you to save and permanently destroy data.
If I type/paste/import/download/whatever `01234567890987654321` into a cell, 100% of the time I do not want `1.23+E18`. I don't want to even see that, I want to see the original value I entered.
It's asinine.
Excel may be the most used Office Suite app, but it's by far the most painful to use. The Excel Team has a long history of justifying downright perplexing behavior. Remember when Excel was the only Office app that didn't support Snap-To back in the Win Vista/7 days? Joel had a long-winded explanation that boiled down to "just cause"... it was perplexing even at the time. It really makes one wonder how bad the rat nest of a codebase Excel is.
"There's ways around our astonishing default behavior so just deal with it". That's not a great answer.
This burned me frequently when I was generating tax audit reports for accounting. The billing system IDs were all BIGINTs but had over 20 digits.
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.
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 ISO8601.
However, to my eyes, and probably most people, 20230822090811 does not look like a "date string", it's a number. It's correct to display it as scientific notation if it's too many digits to fit into the width of a cell. Please let's not encourage them to interpret more things as dates and randomly break people's workflows.
Excel should preserve all the digits you enter in the cell even if it doesn't display them, though. That has nothing to do with dates. It's a problem with things like product numbers or keys that can end up with many digits.
Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
Excel: The glass is January 2nd.
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.
This is exactly what I see when talking to users about xlwings: it needs to run on their end, behind their firewall, in exactly the cloud they have picked (AWS, GCP, Azure).
What this means is we'd need to go from just requiring a laptop and a copy of the spreadsheet to requiring redundant internet connections and validating Microsoft's backend meet the regulator's requirements. I'm pretty sure that would unfortunately rule out using it.
(Although, I'm guessing the reason they did it this way is so they could keep the execution model the same for Excel on the web? It's always running on the external service vs sometimes running locally and sometimes running externally.)
There’s a world of difference between having a file stored locally in Windows and one purposefully uploaded to Office 365 for data analysis.
[1] https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundationLicense...
It's about the recurring payments, the lock-in, and ultimately literally having the knowledge and business processes of the world economy on their own computers. If this is true, the reason why it is important to run data and scripts locally should be clear, and so is the motivation of your PMs to actively combat any such things.
But if you get a summary in your inbox and show it to your PMs let us know how that goes down.
Idk, it's really up to Microsoft's business units. Office could be the loss leader to get cloud business, but it could be the other way too. Either way, I would hazard that they want people to actually use this integration feature.
Python -> Excel sounds great.
Cloud Python -> Cloud Excel sounds too much like a privacy and security disaster waiting to happen.
How out of touch with the real world is the Excel team?
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.
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).
With that API, it won't matter whether you want Python, Ruby, Lua, whatever, for your scripting language.
This is nice, but it welds a specific version of Python inside Excel and makes it a gigantic PITA to use your normal development tools on your Python code.
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 our ETL tools to keep it populated with the data they need to analyze. Don't let them anywhere near the source data. They keep looking at me like I have ten heads. Instead they want to launch multi-million dollar projects to bring Tableau to our users - and they don't want it! It's asinine!
IMO, Excel is on the right path with out of the box connectors to Salesforce, Azure databases, etc. What it really needs is full blown SQL with REPL output so the users can see the effects of their SQL. (The way Tableau Prep does it is that it defaults to a sampling of rows to output immediate results). There used to be a Microsoft service called Excel online but it was another thing you had to buy and was super confusing. Excel needs to let users schedule their ETL/datasets in SharePoint online and then let other users subscribe to it. They can call it Excel Super+ and charge a small fortune. I am positive there are people with their wallets open.
Take our money! The entirety of the Fortune 1000 would license it on day one!
This is the killer feature, however: power users can access those same datasets through Excel and import the entire model. All the relationships, all the calculated columns, and all the measures are there for the power users to mix and match and filter however they want in Excel. It's been a phenomenal success for our business.
I had this once. Then someone decided it was 'dangerous' and locked us out. I went back to exporting the data from the ERP and loading it into Excel...because I was allowed to do that
FWIW, I built a version of this at $DAYJOB. You can get REPL-like access and export to Excel using a tool like this: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/data-studio
Non-software engineers looked me like I had ten heads for suggesting that people would need to learn a modicum T-SQL to make use of it. I even volunteered to write all the views for them! The lesson learned for me is that horrible expensive ERPs/ETLs tools are never going to be replaced with Excel + a database because even the (non-software) engineers at a large company are not interested to learn how to write basic SQL statements.
Excel will import datasets from the Power BI client, and you can refresh the data at any time. The nice part of this arrangement is that the whole model is imported. All the relationships between tables, all the added calculation columns, all the measures are there for use by the end user in Excel.
Power BI has been a great solution for our company (~1000 employees).
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.
I mean, that's like >90% of building a CRUD web app. If you truly only need the R in CRUD, your approach sounds reasonable. Otherwise, just go the extra distance and build a CRUD app with csv export / direct SQL access.
Another good reason to not migrate to MS is that they are a security disaster.
Almost all these tools support exporting to Excel or CSV, so they can do whatever they want in Excel after that.
I can relate and have experienced this. The result was that they would end up exporting from a series of Tableau/Looker workspaces, and importing into excel and doing their analysis there.
Then continually making enhancement requests on the Tableau/Looker workspaces to get any additional data they need for their excel work.
Then of course, the excel document and its multitude of versions would get emailed around until it hit the attachment size limit, or if there were too many version of it to figure out which one was "actionable".
We finally figured out what they were doing when the enhancement requests for the reporting workspaces got too bizarre.
Insanity.
There are two main issues my org has battled with:
1.People basically turn excel into their own mini databases which causes a support nightmare.
2. This is strongly related to 1) Data provenance is a nightmare because so many people were passing around excel spreadsheets it became very difficult to track down the source of the figures people were using. User A passed their spreadsheet to user B who modified it passed it to User C who further modified it, passed it to User d from there some figures ended up in front of a manager and now we have a problem...
It's not so much a problem with Power users those are the types of people using python (or R) it's the tier of users below that level that cause the damage with excel.
Wasm maybe, full-blown runtime without any sandboxing? Nope.
- We can guarantee a consistent experience for all users. Imagine having to maintain your own local distribution of Python and guaranteeing that it works with Excel as versions diverge over time? Yikes.
- We make it possible to share your Excel workbook with other users and have the calculation just work. That wouldn't work with random local installs of Python and users would be super frustrated by this.
- Security. Imagine opening an Excel workbook that can execute Python code running locally as you.
Also, I totally agree with your second point. Trying to write an internal app in Python that integrates with all of your existing IT infrastructure is an exercise in frustration at best. Excel is already part of the IT infrastructure virtually everywhere and is a programmable reactive canvas.
Disclosure: I work on the design team for the feature.
That only works if there is a forever fixed version of Python embedded in your game. The value of Python in this context is its ecosystem and folks will need to install additional packages and libraries into the execution environment. Now you're managing a local distribution of Python.
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, the critical library you need is either in or out, but there is nothing you can do about it.
Admittedly, here I'm assuming Microsoft won't let you install things into the environment yourself since that basically means hosting virtual machines running arbitrary code and putting the Excel brand in front.
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.
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.
Linux can do this with containers (pick your implementation), I'm certain Windows has similar mechanics.
Have a look at xlwings, which runs on any cloud and also locally.
There are existing solutions for that, but it would be more complicated for MS to support and secure.
But Microsoft Cloud is a website!
If people don't know about it, people won't use it.
If people are accustomed to something different, people will ask for it.
* https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Macros/Python_Guide/Call...
By having Python in Basic, it becomes available to cells too, since Basic macros are callable from cells.
Note that you may need to reduce the security level to 'medium' in the drop down Tools->Options->Libre Office->Security->Macro Security. When LibreOffice opens, it will ask you whether you want to enable macros or not.
The reason we're doing this is to make money, and nobody wants to buy Excel spreadsheets that don't run in Excel.
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.
As for why the rest of the world why would do that or not, is their choice, no?
For one, because people want more than 65,536 rows in their spreadsheets.
But, I'd largely agree that '97 was the pinnacle from a UI perspective. There are changes under the hood that are quite nice, though, especially with the move to xml persistence.
Excel would be well served by replacing VBA with either JS or python because of their ecosystems and high levels of adoption. Python is the better choice because data analysts are more likely to be familiar with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6EV2jiKRfc
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...
I remember being blown away by the ResolverOne demonstration video, and if I recall correctly, some others you posted showing some of the other features and functionality.
The fact VisiData (my current 'spreadsheet' of choice) has acquired a sizeable following in that niche, and now Excel is following suit suggests you might have just been a little too far ahead of the curve.
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)?
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 via a Python API.
Its a pity that the various strands of the open source universe are so siloed. The potential of the sum being more than the parts is squandered.
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:
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): In LibreOffice and Numbers you get this (empty cells denoted by "-"): 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.Also, I can preserve the empty row, if I paste with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+V (Edit - Paste Special - Paste Unformatted Text). This opens the Text Import dialog.
I turned off the clipboard history app I use and now LibreOffice pastes like Excel.
The history app I use is 10 years old and I see that the company that made it apparently is no longer around (or at least their domain no longer works) so I guess I should get a newer clipboard history app.
Re: a new clipboard app, I often see people recommending CopyQ, which is cross-platform: https://github.com/hluk/CopyQ
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
A jupyter notebook is maybe somewhere in between. But even if other interfaces manage to bridge the gap further, I doubt the spreadsheet metaphor is going to go away in the visible future. Pivot tables and the like are like COBOL and mainframes :-) The corporate world would die a sudden death if you were to eliminate it (another reason to always make sure you can run things locally).
This simply isn't true in any way and is completely divorced from modern businesses. Everybody I know who works in an office setting works with Excel. None of them know Python and none of them have touched a programming language. Almost all of them are younger than 30. And if anybody who's 20 starts at one of these companies, they'd better know Excel because that's what the business is built on. Not like that 20 year old is gonna know anything about programming either. 99% of people just aren't programmers and aren't going to learn programming when they just want to futz around with some numbers and the easiest (yet also the most powerful) tool they know for it is a spreadsheet.
If somebody in any business, anywhere, at any point wants to do something with numbers, they're going to use Excel.
Also, imo, Python and whatever random environments and libraries that you'll have to use with it to get your work done, will be in almost every way worse than just using VBA. And if you use VBA, your work will be effortlessly portable. The only problem I have with it is that I have to come up with ways to get the code out of the embedded IDE into source control, but there are scripts that help.
> 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
I, on the other hand, do it in VBA, and expose every important calculation within clearly labeled spreadsheets so programming-illiterate people can audit them and feel confident about the output.
I think you underestimate the amount of work, globally, done in Excel. If Excel vanished it would be a business/economic extinction level event, It's not going anywhere.
Not many people care because the most popular use case of any office suite is to interoperate with Microsoft file formats.
Its so slow.
APSO script organiser is recommended for running scripts from inside LibreOffice: https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/apso-a...
That's probably extremely valuable to many people, but it does not seem to be what I hope for whenever I see something about bringing Python to Excel.
What I hope for is something that is like VBA but without the VB. I.e., a Python (or JavaScript) interpreter/JIT/compiler built into Excel exposing all the internal Excel objects and methods that VBA has access to. By "Python" I just mean the language and whatever subset of the standard library makes sense in Excel.
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.
It's depressing seeing someone who has done so much work for the free software community now working to enrich the spyware-laden proprietary product offerings of a megacorp.
Nothing about this is "good for Python" or hackers - it's just good for Microsoft to sell more Excel (and Microsoft accounts). That makes the world worse.
I thought the B stood for benevolent.
I'm tired of it Microsoft. Just fix the darn issue please.
[1] https://code-magazine.com/Article/2207071/The-Excellent-Sche...
[2] https://github.com/phantomics/april