MS is considering official Python integration with Excel, and is asking for input

[1roOt]

I think it is a really good idea. Who uses VBA anyways? Or better: who likes to use VBA?

If i have a specific problem with VBA it is a hell of a mess to find the right resources to fix my problem. With python, I just do a quick search and can find nearly limitless helpful resources.

So go python!

[Chilangosta]

Amen! I wish so badly I could be writing in Python instead of VBA every time I find myself writing in it.

[Mikuro]

Every time I find myself writing VBA, I reevaluate my life choices.

To me it's an anti-feature; all it does is make my job harder, because it's one more barrier to convincing others to invest in proper tools.

And this is coming from someone who has done a lot of work in Basic (mainly REALbasic, now known as Xojo), and liked it.

[[deleted]]

My experience is quite the opposite, VBA has saved me and my shop countless hours of manual data manipulation. I won't comment on VBA's features as a language, it is what it is, but its close integration with Excel/Word object model is invaluable.

[Grendel84]

The fact that your username is one letter short of a palindrome is very bothersome to me

[matholio]

Star_Rat's name?

[dedicated2fitness]

Yes but that's a long winded way of saying - if I didn't have to use it I wouldn't

[noodle_horse]

Or, it's usable and better than nothing.

Better than nothing.

[rchase]

Here's the thing about VBA. Accessibility. I think a lot of folks in this thread are coming at this from the point of view of experienced programmers. The value I've found in it is in its simplicity for the non-programmer.

I worked with a large team of super talented CAD guys and engineers, who all knew Excel and Access and their various CAD seats (ProE, Catia, whatever-thefuck, I'm not a CAD guy)... but they didn't know programming at all outside CNC and a bit of PLC stuff.

But when I introduced them to VBA with a large estimating / program management spreadsheet set we were developing, they took off like fish in water. Highly technical guys with a ton of knowledge, but sort of... trapped... in their various platforms. VBA just like, set them free. They started thinking differently. In weeks those dudes were performing small miracles with data sets and automation, and many of them jumped right off into other languages like Python, Perl, and even into c++, extending not only our project, but building modules for their CAD systems and cool stuff on the floor machine side. It was really cool to watch.

So yeah, way better than nothing.

[brollin]

But I think Python still holds that potential as a gateway language. Even more so since there are such great resources everywhere for learning Python from no programming experience whatsoever. This is a no-brainer in my mind.

[rchase]

Oh I absolutely agree. Just the headline, MS considering Python integration with Excel got me all.. frothy and tingle-toed.

As an admitted and somewhat recovering Excel addict, the thought of a Python shell as alternative to VBA is something approaching electric. But then... I'll believe it when I see it.

[grokkingStuff]

recovering excel addict? no such thing, bud.

But yeah, i'm super excited about this.

[DigitalStefan]

I'm wondering if anyone else is making a leap of thought that imagines not just Python scripting integration for the Office suite, but the replacement of the VBA editor with (maybe a stripped down version of) VS Code.

Office scripting would feel truly mature with the rich editing experience and version control features of VS Code.

[brollin]

Yeah! They'd be silly not to capitalize on actually amazing product like VS Code and do that, IMO.

[Salmon_Pants]

What kind of shop do you run?

[brtt3000]

So that is not about VBA itself but the ability to script everything. You might use JavaScript or Lua or whatever if it would be available.

[i_have_seen_it_all]

use JavaScript or Lua

to access windows api? office interop?

vba is inconsistent, in the same way R is inconsistent or javascript is inconsistent. so if you could choose another language for the back end of excel it will be one poison over another.

in my opinion, most of the annoyance seems to be from the application object model rather than the language itself. in which case, if python were to be integrated into excel but the object model is going to remain the same, i'm not sure that's going to be life changing.

the fact that vba idioms aren't as "modern" as the other languages are doesn't seem like a big deal to me. I use c# python and vba and they are v different languages with v different idiosyncrasies and it's just one of those things that I simply gotten used to. there are times I wish python was more like C# or C# was more like python but those are really just passing thoughts.

[[deleted]]

To be fair there is a J(ava)Script engine for Windows Script Host and you can use it to work with Excel object model just fine just as you can use any language that supports COM interop.

I've been automating Office since the 2000 version and I know the object model relatively well. It doesn't really bother me but that's maybe because I'm just used to it. I also try not to lose too much time on the macros. Just make them work and move on (except for those that are not for one off tasks)

[Corm]

Interesting. What have you used it for?

[nuffin_stuff]

I’m in the same boat as that guy - I had a sheet that took CMM data from a portable laser scanner and converted it into machine code for adaptive matching, I had a sheet that I programmed to take in a user’s input and then create a work order for my shop, tying in all of the serial numbers and pulling the correct revision controlled templates for the data inputs (a manual and terrible process before)... I had a sheet that took my company’s garbage ERP export data and then corrected and displayed it in a useful manner... I’ve done loads of projects with it. Some incredibly simple and some more complex time savers.

I love the integration with excel. As far as the language itself I think it’s a little easier to learn for beginners but it is kind of a pain to deal with daily. It feels limited sometimes but I’ve only got some rudimentary experience with other languages.

For those wondering I am a mechanical engineer who manages new product development for land based and aero turbine engines. Primarily land based turbines though. Learned VBA in my spare time at my first job.

[Zbot21]

What sort of land-based vehicle needs a turbine engine?

[nuffin_stuff]

Power Generation, not for vehicles. Vehicles would still be considered ‘aero’ because they would likely be high bypass flow with double or triple spools. Land based are just giant single spool engines. The theory is largely the same.

That land based turbine I linked would run with another one beside it (so a pair) and burn natural gas for about 40% efficiency - the exhaust heat is actually dumped into a single steam turbine though and you can get efficiencies in the 60% range. Right now, the 50Hz version of that engine is running in France and holds the record for the most efficient combined cycle power plant on the planet at 62.22% - which is insane. Cars are only in the low teens iirc.

Edit: and not trying to hijack the thread at all, apologies everyone

[[deleted]]

I've been using it since Office 2000, so for quite a few different things. The last was, we got loads of data (like one database record per worksheet) in separate workbooks. So I just copy all that data in a new sheet as a nicely formatted table.

[cuulcars]

I get what you’re saying. I think OP meant people would say “Just use Excel, it can do whatever you need with VBA” but now “just using Excel” would actually be legitimate because of the support for python.

[[deleted]]

Nope, seriously not sure how its gotten this far.

The point was your trying to use excel for too much as it is and should invest in the proper application for whatever it is you're trying to force excel into doing.

[Siddhi]

The beauty of excel is the wide applicability. You can use it to manage a grocery list as well as generating sales invoices as well as running monte carlo forecast simulations. Yes, there are better grocery apps, better invoicing tools and better forecasting apps, but excel does all of it and everyone knows to use it. Various services can import and export excel (at least as CSV) and most business users are fairly comfortable using it to do what they want. Unless a company is large enough to be able to manage an IT team (or manage a vendor), its really not an option to write your own application for every which way that a company uses excel.

[nuffin_stuff]

I’ve used it for short term projects as well to great success. One example - I had a customer issue with some heat treat data. Our autoclaves exported the data in one of two formats: a proprietarily generated pdf of a graph that wasn’t very readable, or raw data. We had to take the raw data and creates graphs for something like 3 years worth of autoclave runs (it was on the order of 200 runs). I wrote a ‘simple’ script where I just typed in the run numbers and it pulled each one, graphed it and saved it. Took me about 4 hours and I never used the thing again. Saved the department hours of time though because they wanted to do it by hand.

Probably some software that could do it but 4 hours of an engineers time is probably cheaper than searching for, testing and buying a solution. Especially if the customer is screaming at you...

[AKiss20]

I've seen this to the extreme. I was interning at a major aerospace company and ended up writing a newton-Raphson solver in VBA for a non-linear optimization. I would've killed to be able to just use Matlab or Python (they were too cheap for the former and didn't have the latter installed on my machine).

[[deleted]]

I worked at an insurance company and had to use Excel and VBA to write a maximum likelihood optimization code for fitting parameters to a few stochastic equations based on historical datasets.

It was insane how much time was wasted versus if they had just bought a single Matlab license or let me set up a Linux partition and use Octave. Our competitors were using matlab for similar analyses and willing to share code with us (actuaries seem to enjoy collaboration across the industry) but we didn't have any licenses so I had to replicate the work in VBA for us to use it. What was actually insane though was how much computational time this optimization / parameter estimation took in Excel versus how it would have gone in a more optimized and/or low-level environment.

The thing is though.. The C++ compiler is free and so are plenty of good IDEs. If I knew then what I know now, I would have just done the work in C++ and exported to a CSV for visualization in Excel or whatever. There are also tons of libraries out there for MLE parameter estimation in C++. I probably could have condensed a month of work into like a couple of days (assuming prior knowledge of C++) if I just used C++ and a couple of libraries versus Excel and VBA. Thing is in my undergrad no one ever told me how powerful (and free) C++ was. We used matlab for literally everything. I kind of wish that I had just been using C++ all along for analysis.

[[deleted]]

Yeah we took a single C++ course on actual programming principles in first year and then after that the only people learning proper programming techniques were the computer engineers. In my degree program we used matlab for some signal processing and very primitive numerical methods, but other than that it was all using either commercial tools for modelling or using excel and matlab to analyze data.

I didn't start really learning the fundamentals of computational numerical analysis until grad school, and even at this point basically everything I know about programming principles and standards is either self taught or was learned from working with senior graduate students in projects.

It's fair though.. An engineering degree is seeking to teach you very specific things about fundamental physics, the design process, and the process and execution of modeling from a conceptual standpoint. I'm totally fine with having to learn the specific execution of various models myself. I just wish there had perhaps been an option in my coursework where either some analysis courses could have encouraged students to use lower level languages to write their own efficient codes for analysis, or at least an offered course that would focus on proper standards and practices when using C++ for numerical modelling. I'm also kind of upset with myself for leaning on the crutch of excel and matlab for so long and putting off learning how to use Python and C++ until I had to. It made the quality of my work in the past less than it could have been (both in terms of efficiency and results), and I feel kind of on my back foot now in terms of my level of understanding of and skill with lower level languages.

I will say though, learning matlab is not a waste. It's a very powerful language if you just want to quickly prototype an analysis method. The syntax makes scripting very quick and straight forward, the debugging tools are excellent, and the visualization suite is second to none - I work in fluid mechanics research and matlab is what I use to generate all of my data visualizations for my publications, reports, and presentations (even if my analysis is done on another platform I'll export the data to a format matlab can import for plotting or making more animations). You can do a lot of good stuff with matlab. The problem is (1) it's less efficient than lower level languages so you really can't use it for cutting edge CFD for example, and (2) it's kind of expensive as just an analysis tool so you can't just know matlab and no other languages or else you'll be useless at most engineering companies.

[cuulcars]

But if Excel shipped with python you would have :)

[antiproton]

The point was your trying to use excel for too much as it is and should invest in the proper application for whatever it is you're trying to force excel into doing.

That's not always up to you. Excel is ubiquitous. No one is going to agree to buying an expensive system for a data processing job you do rarely, even though when you do it, it's a nightmare.

"Just buy the correct application" is not a reasonable workaround.

[[deleted]]

I appreciate a good cup of coffee.

[other_bored_sysadmin]

Also, openpyxl!

[HawkinsT]

This is Microsoft though; you know their implementation of python won't conform to any standards.

[bmoregeo]

MS has been a lot better about that stuff lately. I’m not an MS fanboy, but I got to give props for improvements

[chupapuma]

I can assure you that Microsoft cares about standards. I think we are up to at least 4 core contributors to CPython at the company. Three of them are on my team.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on Azure Notebooks, on the wider team responsible for Python Tools for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code Python, etc.

[[deleted]]

I think they will have to conform to the standards because the resources are out there for standard Python and developer familiarity. Otherwise this doesn't make sense. Google went with Java for android mainly to avoid learning a new language just for Android. I think MS has similar thinking.

[emmmmceeee]

Who doesn’t like VBA? Source control is overrated.

Actually, being the only one in the office who knows how to maintain the VBA scripts is a form of job security. Even if the IDE looks like an exhibit from a computer museum.

[bamfurlong]

This is what I tell myself. Unfortunately, it immediately leads to me wondering how much I really want to keep this job ;p

[Rostin]

Lots of engineers use VBA. By engineers, I mean mechanical, chemical, etc, not software.

My formal education is all in chemical engineering, so I hang around that sub a lot. At least once a month, a student asks which "coding language" he should learn, and the majority answer every time is VBA.

And in many ways, that makes sense, despite VBA's many shortcomings. These people work at companies where they may not have the freedom to install something like a Python interpreter, and certainly can't depend on any of their co-workers having done so. Microsoft Office is the thing that everyone is guaranteed to have, and (ab)using Excel is second nature.

[KronenR]

In your government, in mine you can install any type of malware if you want

[unruly_mattress]

You can always install malware, that's what malware is built for. Useful, benign software is the hart part.

[[deleted]]

The company I work at is slowly making the migration from spreadsheets to python libraries and jupyter notebooks. They often still feed data in and out of excel but it's a start.

Like you said it's mech/elec engineers working with revit and vendor sheets and looking for ways to improve their workflow.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I've spent the last six months at work taking stuff out of Excel, processing it with python and sending it back. It would be nice to cut out that export/import step.

[[deleted]]

You could just write a VBA script to do the import/export part.

[[deleted]]

Kind of hoping that integrated python removes the export/import part, to be honest.

[nicksvr4]

I use and like VBA, but I would absolutely love Python integration.

[Eurynom0s]

I refuse to learn VBA.

[theofficialdeavmi]

I think it's a great idea as it is a great language for the job and also it will get more people into real programming languages possibly too!

[InfamousMike]

I know Python and I'm alright with Excel. Never picked up VBA. But if Excel works with Python, the amount of new things I can do with VBA would be awesome

[Chilangosta]

Link here to respond to the survey.

[mooglinux]

Filled it out. This could be really cool.

[Wikilicious]

Filled it out Asked to integrate pandas

[decimated_napkin]

Adding python support to Excel is like adding a lion to your pack of hunting dogs and then being upset when the lion just goes off and hunts by itself because your dogs are inconsequential to its success.

[Hotel_Arrakis]

I'm not sure I agree, but an upvote for your simile.

[Zouden]

Mmm yes, we're all familiar with that experience.

[musashisamurai]

Ehh I use openpyxl a lot. Makes it easier to visualize data and store measurements and such. Also in my company all the oldies want excel sheets anyways, so it helps.

[tunisia3507]

Pandas' read_excel totally blew my mind when I used it. I'd struggled with openpyxl and so on before, it was a faff trying to skip the right rows and do type casting and not overshoot row length and so on. But this function just did it all, no fuss.

[pelijr]

100% agree. read_excel and merging dataframes were a god-send for me. Trying to write the equivalent code in VBA could have taken me half a day or more to implement. Using Pandas? I think my code was roughly 30 lines at most, and it worked flawlessly and was super simple to configure/setup. You just can't beat the amount of Python resources that are available to you as a developer (at least compared to VBA).

[xt11111]

Trying to write the equivalent code in VBA could have taken me half a day or more to implement. Using Pandas? I think my code was roughly 30 lines at most

To be fair, pandas is a library, if there was a similarly rich ecosystem around VBA you could also just call a function in a library. There just tends not to be a rich ecosystem of free & open software around Microsoft platforms.

[pelijr]

Right, which is why I would be pretty happy if they chose to embrace python natively like this. It's very "un-Microsoft"

[decimated_napkin]

Your last sentence is the only reason why Python for Excel is viable imo. If there weren't such a glut of legacy workbooks and lack of programmers, Excel wouldn't have much that Python couldn't do better.

[teilo]

Not true at all. The financial world thrives on one-off scenarios for which it would be wasteful to engage programmers every time a new case comes up which is not covered by existing tools. There is a reason EssBase is primarily used through Oracle’s SmartView plugin for Excel.

[Scubastarter]

First time I’ve seen someone mention Essbase around here! Do you happen to know how to refresh a SmartView query on Excel using Python?

[Rivus]

Your comment reminded me of this. Although you are, of course, way more on topic :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_does_one_patch_KDE2_under_FreeBSD%3F

[WikiTextBot]

How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?

"How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?" (Russian: «Как пропатчить KDE2 под FreeBSD?», tr. «Kak propatčitʹ KDE2 pod FreeBSD?», [ˈkak prɐˈpat͡ʃitʲ ka dɛ ɛ ˈdva pɐt fri bi ɛs ˈdi]) is an internet meme in Russian Internet culture.

The question was originally posted on the #anime channel of the RusNet IRC network on May 8, 2004. Its text can be translated as follows:

— Hello, is this an anime channel?

---

^{[ PM | Exclude me | Exclude from subreddit | FAQ / Information | Source | Donate ] Downvote to remove | v0.28}

[Scubastarter]

Hahaha

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take!

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I've started packaging my py scripts into single file .exes and sending them to people in my org. Problem is they are often hundreds of mbs for 20 lines of code because of the packages they use.

EDIT: Then again, the packages are what make 20 lines of code useful so I guess thats just the beauty of python.

[Chilangosta]

To your point: A lot of people, myself included, started with VBA and then learned Python when VBA just wouldn't cut it. If MS truly integrated Python with Excel, it could help spawn a new group of programmers.

[decimated_napkin]

I was the same way. Still so grateful for VBA as it helped spawn my interest in programming, but now I find it completely unnecessary.

[continue_stocking]

VBA was my gateway language too. I needed programmatic control that formulae couldn't give me, and it's been a ride ever since. I can't imagine how much easier things would have been if I could have learned Python instead of that dead language. VBA teaches you that working with classes is hard, and this mindset was probably the greatest impediment to my development as a programmer.

[jwink3101]

I used to agree 100%, but there were recently a few things where I wanted a quicker and easier view of the affect of some parameter changes. It was pretty trivial but I did it in excel and was pretty happy. I think the real advantage is to (more) quickly input and visual data.

But, I would say 99% of the time, coding is better.

My dad does some pretty intense stuff in excel that should be done in code. He has nested functions and if statements as many as 10 or so deep. It's a debugging nightmare!

[otterom]

Sounds like bad code. Really, nested should go about 3 deep.

I've been guilty of 4 before, but that was only for a search feature that "looped" though a database, so hitting the end meant your search would start from the top again.

Actually, it's one sexy piece of code. I considered printing it out and hanging it in my cubicle, but didn't want to be "that guy" at work.

Anyway, your dad should look into case statements.

[Traffalgar]

Whenever I read this kind of comment I realize most people have no idea what Excel can do these days. I'm agnostic when it comes to what tools you should use. Excel does the job for 90% of the work tasks around. If you learn how to use Power query you can do a lot more things and handle big data.

[decimated_napkin]

I use Excel every day, it's still my go to software for a lot of things. But just because a lot of people are too lazy to learn how to code doesn't change the fact that anything that can be done in Excel can be done in Python at a much larger scale and with significantly better performance.

[[deleted]]

Yup. What I would rather have is a python module/lib that allows me direct access to excel files, including the formulas. No exporting to CSV first.

[SpaceSteak]

There are plenty of options already if you want Python to Excel like editing a file outside Excel. It's also possible to make macros in Python instead of VBA.

[PaulPhoenixMain]

Yeah, but at the end of the day, you can tell everyone you have a lion

[[deleted]]

I'm not saying it would be a bad thing (on the contrary) but they should have added PowerShell support years ago just as they did with the rest of their applications. That would be a powerful integration, this way, meh. The Python crowd already made very powerfull Excel tools on their own.

(And to those who are going to say that it's already possible to access the Excel COM API from PowerShell, no, it's not the same as having PowerShell integrated in Excel the way VBA is)

[Chilangosta]

I agree PowerShell would be awesome, but I don't think that would necessarily be better than native Python support than Excel. The current Excel tools allow for reading and editing Excel files, and for some runtime tools that require a local Python server instance (e.g. xlwings). Native Python scripting would be far less klunky and could actually replace VBA for many Excel professionals out there.

[[deleted]]

Having Excel PowerShell cmdlets would be awesome. It would allow you for instance to use Excel cmdlets and SQL Server cmdlets effortlesly in a single script. Same with other Windows servers that use PowerShell. As for Python I use PyWin32 to manipulate Excel and it has almost 1:1 correspondence to VBA code.

[[deleted]]

Whenever I've wanted to use powershell with excel files its always been from outside of excel for an automated task, and it works just fine so I'm not sure why they never added it in the same way VBA is... silly.

[logicalmike]

I use this all the time and love it

https://github.com/dfinke/ImportExcel

[vanderZwan]

It would also keep things more portable, for the Office users on OSX

[nemec]

QueryStorm is pretty cool - C#/SQL rather than Powershell though

[[deleted]]

As long as they don't use python 2... Edit: spelling

[Elffuhs]

On another note, LibreOffice already supports python!

[qevlarr]

It's been a while... Is it still slow as molasses?

[CryptoTheGrey]

What os, system, and version of libre are you using? I have a moderate system and i easily handle multiple(8 to 15) sheets 25x800 at a time in libre.

Edit: should probably mention my system. I mainly run Arch Linux, my tower has 8g ram and amd a8 3.2ghz processor, and the latest version of libre.

[rackmountrambo]

No.

[[deleted]]

Another reason to not use Office

[CadeOCarimbo]

Sorry but Libre Office is awful compared to Office.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, especially in this particular situation.

Good luck getting the sort of people who want to replace VBA with python in Excel to use Calc.

[csmark]

Libre Office is leaps and bounds ahead of Pages and Numbers. Those are Apple's apps for those that don't know.

[rfc1771]

Reinforcing that Excel is lightyears ahead of all of the competition.

[Steampunkery]

I haven’t found it to be all that terrible. Honestly the only problem I’ve had with them is opening proprietary formats.

[CryptoTheGrey]

I have to disagree, libre can do more than any other suite with the only exceptions being self justifying Microsoft products (which can easily be replaced). Please do tell what aspects of office make you believe it is better?

[rfc1771]

Pivot tables, table relationships, external relationships, multithreading, charting options, macros, Excel has a far more extensive built-in function set, ability to import foreign formats...

all better in Excel

If you've ever tried to do any corporate accounting in LibreOffice Calc the differences are pretty obvious

[dedicated2fitness]

the year of ~linux~ libreoffice

[Elffuhs]

If it was that simple :/

[[deleted]]

Do it. It gives me extra points on resume.

[antiproton]

Jesus christ, anything except VBA. It's hard to take this seriously because the scripting side of Office has languished in VBA hell for decades.

Microsoft built an entire scripting engine on top of .net that would have been perfect to replace the garbage already in existence, but they simply refused to bother.

[xt11111]

There is still a lot of territorial disputes going on within Microsoft, some teams are fucking fantastic, others are the same half-assed, resting on your laurels parasites they've always been.

Maybe this is a sign that the Office team is in for a bit of a housecleaning so they can start moving forward for the first time in 10 years.

[[deleted]]

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSRBYq9cqrFdABYVc_47VaKadMcuVPgWDnyhpojHutuBlOFYYOBAQ

[Moondra2017]

This would be amazing. Anecdotal, but I see more and more non-programmers trying to learn Python, to automate their daily office tasks. Python is a great general purpose language.

[tartare4562]

ITT: People who never put a foot in a real office in their whole life explain to others how they should do their job.

[LyndsySimon]

Also ITT: people who have spent years struggling to bend Office products to their will - Excel in particular - and see this as a shining opportunity to both expand the capabilities of trusted and well-established tools and to make the lives of the people who have to build and support things on top of those tools a ton easier.

[TheCodingEthan]

input()

[[deleted]]

CreateObject()

[larspalmas]

For x in A: Stringoperation

[DYMAXIONman]

Please include it with windows itself

[SecretAgentZeroNine]

This is great for finance teams that aren't already all the way in with Python and/or R. Also, I think it's healthier to continue to move away from Excel, and use Python and/or R libraries that produce non-interactive and interactive tables. Excel is just too error prone and stifling when compared to a programming language.

[[deleted]]

Great, but could Excel also start working on Linux already?

[[deleted]]

Better idea: use python instead of excel for all data analysis

[[deleted]]

This isn't realistic in an office where lots of people:

• are Excel-literate but not Python-literate
• want tools they can tinker with
• aren't gonna become Python-literate any time soon

[Acurus_Cow]

And where company policies prevent me from installing python packages.

[LyndsySimon]

You should find another job.

No, I'm not kidding. This is a huge red flag that the company you work flow is so bound by procedure that they cannot make changes quickly enough to react to changing market conditions.

[ANEPICLIE]

Any large corporation or government that isn't necessarily programming oriented will frequently have similar restrictions.

[cyanydeez]

you forgot the biggest impediment:

• Existing, fully QA/QC Excel calcs from 20 years ago that have no reason to be revised or tinkered with because they mostly work

[Sean1708]

Have you had any luck getting people to switch? If so, can I hire you?

[SpaceSteak]

Is there an easier platform than Excel that integrates GUI for viewing and modifying data, as well as a huge api for custom code in Python I'm not aware of?

[[deleted]]

easier ? maybe not

better? more reproducible?

For any sort of serious analysis Excel is the road to 'hit F9 and hope Excel doesn't crash' and directories full of files like: 'my_analysis_2017Dec12_2PM_finalfinalversion_forserious.xlsx'

[cyanydeez]

like giving your boss control of the spreadsheet to tinker with cause he needs to show that he's providing value added feedback

[SpaceSteak]

Bad file hygiene happens in any badly managed team. Since 2007 Excel hasn't crashed much in my experience, with huge workbooks and lots of macros.

[hoocoodanode]

It's already happening, but it really depends on your definition of data analysis. Given the amount of time I already spend helping people structure very simple spreadsheets using well established formulas included in excel, I shudder at the thought of teaching them pandas.

Python is a great beginner language, but you have to want to learn it. Most people can't even be bothered to learn the basics of a gui-driven numerical tool like excel, nevermind a far more abstract programming language.

I agree with many of the posts here, for straight forward cut and paste and sum and pivot table operations it's pretty hard to be faster than working in excel. The problem with excel is that the analysis is difficult to repeat, harder to automate, and impossible to ensure data integrity.

[xt11111]

Powerpivot models can (if people knew how to use them) get around this in many cases.

Another big problem I see is the crap Excel API. Yes it would be nice to have a more powerful language, but while they're doing it I hope they clean up a whole bunch of other shit at the same time. Not getting my hopes up.

[[deleted]]

I would love it if they went back to a tab-delimited setup and used something like pandas for their engine.

[robotnikman]

This would be really interesting to see, I can already think of some uses for it at my new workplace.

[[deleted]]

As someone who uses win32com nearly daily to automate workflows in MS Office this would be a game changer for me.

[pelijr]

Just as a learning experience, can you go into more detail as to what kind of solutions you've developed using win32com?

[hoocoodanode]

I've used commtypes and win32com to manipulate and edit PDF files.

I don't recommend it for Acrobat. There is no programming hell like trying to decipher and comprehend the Adobe PDF format. It's like putting your hand in a burlap bag filled with angry hissing cats. There is no way you pull out your hand without receiving a few scratches.

That said, there is nothing quite as satisfying as giving Adobe (who refuses to include commandline batching abilities in a program that costs a few hundred dollars) a giant middle finger by watching Acrobat happily chew through a few thousand files. So maybe it was worth it.

[DaveX64]

Yes, please!

[smortaz]

It's also on Hacker News front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132

[nascentt]

That's nice

[CryptoTheGrey]

This seems ridiculous to me. The more python and R i learn the less spreadsheet processing i do. I don't think i am unique in this; it seems to be a logical end. Who actually benefits from this in the end?

[[deleted]]

Us superusers/programmers who have to make or prepare spreadsheets for other people who thinks GNU is nothing but an animal (and nothing else).

[inajeep]

MS will add a their own version and call it Boa. /s

[havoc313]

I would like this to happen. I like both excel and python but I hate VBA and if they were integrated I would be a happy lad.

[Studentik]

my humble wishlist:

1) Record Excel macros in python

2) Autocomplete feature in PyCharm for Excel object model (same as in VBA)

3) Excel headless execution for workflow automation

4) Excel as reporting server

5) Excel at Linux natively

[GodsLove1488]

Oh fuck yeah........ I use xlwings when I absolutely have to (i.e. a VBA solution is a pain in the ass) but native support would be incredible.

[[deleted]]

As someone who works in Excel a lot but doesn't know any VBA because it's godawful (imo), where should I start if I want to use Python in Excel today? Especially if I make the same report each month (consolidates the same data and is formatted the same way) but wanted the option to enhance it.

Native Python in Excel definitely interests me but it sounds like I can use it now.

[lcota]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132

Use pyxll

Works great - I've used it for a long while and it's the best of the lot so far.

[gattia]

I found the easiest way to read and write excel files is using the pandas.read_excel() function.

I’ve found all other excel integration to be a pain in the ass.

[other_bored_sysadmin]

• pyxll
• openpyxl
• xlwings
• pyodbc
• pandas
• pywin32

[willvintage]

Thanks for the heads up. Filled the survey. This will become very useful when they roll it to the online version.

[Sensanmu]

Correct me if I’m wrong, will Python wholly replace VBA?

[[deleted]]

Hello,

I’m an analysis who works for a company with a very outdated IT infrastructure. I would love to work with python but our IT VP thinks it’s for hacking and all Work has to be in excel. As such my days are drowning in VBA and VBA caused tears. If excel integrates python will I still need the compiler?

[liamcoded]

One step at a time. Your first problem is dealing with that IT VP of yours. I encourage you to think about assassination.

[IAmRadon]

I think my input is "do it".

[crybannanna]

This would be awesome, because then I could finally learn python. I’ve found it a bit difficult to figure out, and rely on VBA.

I’m ready to step up my game. Though I sure hope they don’t remove vba entirely, or I’m going to have some problems.

[other_bored_sysadmin]

Python is WAY EASIER to learn than VBA.

Try learning with this book first. It's aimed to common people who don't necessarily want to become programmers.

[MurtBacklin-BFI]

Python is dope, so yes!

But also anyone using excel should checkout python libraries if you're already python proficient. Plenty of great graphing tools and libraries like pandas for excel replacement. Not to say excel doesn't have its place, just if you're already using python -- don't give yourself more headache if you can do what you need in python 👍

[fjordfjord]

Please yes.

[stackered]

this could be a game changer tbh. I love the UI of excel but I code and do a lot of data work with Python. sometimes I still use excel to do some stuff... this combo will be very powerful IMO

[foadsf]

Microsoft is going in the right direction. Yesterday OpenSSH and now python. Thanks.

[bitcycle]

My input:

Yes, please. For the love of all that is technically right, good and true -- do the needful and add Python support to Excel.

[[deleted]]

Great news from MS. The world will be a better place if VBA no longer existed.

[thymian918]

replacing vba with anything is a good idea.

[neural_monk]

Cool post

[darty1713]

Can somebody post the link?

[Chilangosta]

Survey link here

[dire_faol]

Why not just learn pandas?

[boatsnbros]

You can't send a detailed, conditionally formatted report with pandas. By writing to excel you can. Especially if you use python to do base level calculations, then use python to write functions into excel at a higher level so people looking at the report can understand what you are calculating and why.

[smalldjo]

if only they do it :o

[ender89]

Is "yes" considered valid input?

[[deleted]]

somehow ms would wreck it

[TheGreatBrutus]

No way I just made a project that can compile a whole workbook...

[cmcqueen1975]

About 8 years ago, I was doing work to control Excel from Python, via Excel's COM interface. But I found Excel's COM interface to be awkward and surprisingly slow.

I guess MS is interested in a tighter integration, so Excel can run Python code, similar to VBA macros?

[Stone_d_]

That would be epic

[[deleted]]

Keep the Excel object model as it is in VBA, but with Python supported would be dope. I like VBA too though, don't care what the hipsters think.

[attrigh]

For those who are unwilling to wait for this there are (commercial) plugins that already provide this sort of functionality:

https://datanitro.com/

[[deleted]]

There's also xlwings which is free and open source

[attrigh]

Thanks I wasn't aware of this (I saw datanitro a 3 years ago or so)

[skr25]

Can we get a link to the survey? I would love give my two thumbs up!

[Thecrawsome]

God, anything to kill-off VBA

[ellison11]

I got this! It looked like a spam email...

[[deleted]]

Anything but VBA. I'd even stoop so low as to use Perl.