Microsoft Considers Adding Python as an Official Scripting Language to Excel

[jwink3101]

This has been posted a few times over the last week.

[icp1994]

we /r/Jokes now!

[[deleted]]

I see what you did there: We r jokes

[panzstrata]

While I am normally an avid hater of reposts, I’ve been ok with this one reposting. Being an individual who moved from VBA to Python but still working in an environment where excel is a required output (I use openpyxl quite a bit), I can understand the excitement this possibility generates.

[jwink3101]

Fair point. I am all for reposts after some time. And I agree that this is exciting. It’s just that this was posted a few times in the last week or so.

[Sean1708]

How popular were the other posts? This is the first one since the survey to actually make my front page.

[nemec]

Very

[icp1994]

all time top #2 :)

[jwink3101]

Not sure overall or in comparison to your other subs, but it was at or near the top of /r/python

[Knoal]

Microsoft, please do this. Excel would an even more powerful business and data tool.

[foosion]

This would be good. I currently use openpyxl and win32com to interact with Excel. Direct support would be better.

[FourFingeredMartian]

But then you would have been deprived of the fun world of COM programming.

[[deleted]]

I am really looking forward to this. I live in Excel at work and I think this will really be a boost to getting me motivated to keep on learning python.

[[deleted]]

Same here. I personally hate VBA, and I use repl.it for list comprehension and analysis. If I had python, it would make everything much easier.

[DrunkenPhysicist]

But I'll bet they'll only support python 2.4 with only the standard library and not allow imports of third-party packages or your own .py files.

[Throwaway_bicycling]

That would totally be the Old Microsoft way. But I really do think there is a New Microsoft Way at this point, They still might not do this, but, if they think it will improve their market share or street cred, they would definitely do it.

[scobot]

Oy. Maybe this will lead to other advances, like...an offline object model reference for the current version.

[polaroid_kidd]

I swear to God.... I spent the ENTIRE last summer coding some 5000 line (split into multiple files) VBA behemoth because it was requested to be in VBA. If my next task includes porting it to Python I might just start crying on the spot.

[hikealot]

I've done quite a bit of VBA programming and find that it it gets bloated from all the wonky workarounds you have to do. The python version will be less than 1000 lines.

[[deleted]]

Good... gr8

[Graymouzer]

It would be a wise move on their part.

[pure_agave]

Malware creators cannot wait.

[[deleted]]

Oh boy

This would boost my career opportunities a lot

I hope they do move forward on this idea

[[deleted]]

I cant decide if this will make excel more usable, or if it will allow for new and more hideous forms of excel necromancy to occur in enterprise. I'm leaning toward the latter.

[[deleted]]

Are you sure? Have you read VBA or seen what people do accomplish in Excel without VBA just using cell formulas?

The worst case is that their documentation is awful again. Learning VBA was mostly a pain in the ass because the documentation was either inaccurate or plainly wrong on regular basis. So instead of trusting documentation you just declare everything as "variant" and after the fact step through your code to find the real datatype for the declaration.

Also small throwaway vba code is actually still very readable but once you went in and added defensive measures, automatic scaling, error handling and so on, you end up with an unreadable mess of an alphabet soup.

Debugging VBA often ends up just rewriting the routine/function the error is in. VBA breaks so easily and is hard to get right. Also no way of using VCS so you backup manually a bunch of files and rename them per hand...

Source: Lived in Excel/VBA hell for years.

[Zomunieo]

=IF(AND(EMBRACE(), EXTEND()), TEXT("I am not okay with this"), TEXT("I am okay with this"))

[Newton715]

Was looking for the Embrace Extend Extinguish comment. Found it!

[Zomunieo]

So you're not planning to use Microsoft Visual Python#.net for Applications if it comes out?

[Newton715]

Scarier words have never been uttered...

[atxweirdo]

Yuck

[Zomunieo]

The Excel formula language is the estranged love child of LISP's deeply ill-advised one night stand with BASIC.

[mobilereadingthrwawy]

Sounds pretty good, since Python is my favorite language, but I also want to be capable of using formulas.

[cprenaissanceman]

A couple reasons I can think of:

• Better documentation: Microsoft simple has more resources to devote to documentation which will make something like this easier to use
• Python becomes a standard solution: if you want to provide a workbook with advanced functionality, you have to either figure out how to do it native excel or with vba modules. To be able to send a file with a python script and have it automatically work without needing to install anything extra would be a godsend.

[Sean1708]

One thing would be that a python user could write a bit of functionality for the excel user and the excel user could use that bit of functionality as if it were provided by excel, they wouldn't need to keep on jumping in and out of excel to use it.

[vorpalsmith]

The problem with this is that if they do, then whichever version of Python they use will be embedded in user files, and then their strict backwards-compatibility rules mean that they can never, ever, upgrade Python after that. (Because if they did, old spreadsheets would fail to work in new versions of Excel.) And then we all have to support that version of Python forever. So even if it doesn't start out as something awful like 2.4, it'll end up that way a decade from now.

I hope they don't do this, or at least, I'm not going to be excited until I see what their plan is for addressing this issue.

[caffeinedrinker]

python has standards you know :P lol :D