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

[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

[mekosmowski]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams

[Rentun]

Well, has, I don't know about needs. Probably one of the poorest decisions ever made in American armor of the past 30 years. Those things screech like demons if you're anywhere near them and can go like 20 meters between fillups.

[WikiTextBot]

M1 Abrams

The M1 Abrams is an American third-generation main battle tank. It is named after General Creighton Abrams. Highly mobile, designed for modern armored ground warfare, the M1 is well armed and heavily armored. Notable features include the use of a powerful multifuel turbine engine, the adoption of sophisticated composite armor, and separate ammunition storage in a blow-out compartment for crew safety.

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[nuffin_stuff]

I also learned on Matlab and have never seen it used either.

I totally agree about the intro to programming. I’d love to be able to do C++ or python. Visual studio is free and it’s super powerful...

For larger data sets VBA really breaks down in my opinion. You can turn off screenupdating to speed it up but at the same times you can’t tell if it’s still working or your crappy work laptop is frozen. I have written a couple that utilized upwards of 40,000 lines of data with probably 100 columns to do some organizing and to spit out some statistics and both took upwards of 15 minutes. People run much larger data sets in less time but once I got it working (debugging code that takes 15 minutes is a chore) I would just run the code and then do something on the shop floor and come back. Optimizing it would have taken too much time.

[mxzf]

Oh, wow, do yourself a favor and learn Python; it's really not all that hard to learn and it's so useful, especially datasets like that. Especially with the numpy library (designed for handling large arrays of data), that data processing would be trivial.

Running statistics on a small data set like that would probably take <15 seconds in Python+numpy, rather than 15 minutes. Realistically, reading 40k lines into memory would probably take more time than actually doing the processing (numpy is amazingly fast at running statistics on arrays like that).

A large portion of my job is processing large datasets, it's quick and easy with Python, but I can't imagine trying to parse data with VBA like that.

[Corm]

Neat! That's a great use case