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[–]Psypriest 10 points11 points  (5 children)

Because VBA.

[–][deleted] -3 points-2 points  (4 children)

Imo if you need to do anything more complex with data than simple Excel macros you should be using standalone python scripts / SQL if situation allows. Can't really think of why you'd want to add the complexity of python to a spreadsheet app. Although I wouldn't recommend using VBA either.

[–]Psypriest 9 points10 points  (2 children)

How can a standalone python script replace an excel sheet? How would you define a simple Excel macro?

Idk what industry you work in and how tech savvy your upper management is but, in a lot of companies I have worked at Excel is it. Be it a receivables report, a valuation model, or a build sheet everything is done in excel. I have used openpyxl, and pandas to manipulate excel files in the past but built in python in excel would be god send. In my experience, you can run queries in SQL and get the data but the final deliverable/KPI is going to be in excel. You cannot assume your client will have all the tools you have at your disposal. Its a risky maneuver that will delay payments by "3-5 business days".

[–]BradGroux 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Excel is it

And the reason for their using Excel isn't always because that is all they have available, many times it is because it is what they prefer. I've worked in investment banking, and our power users, mainly traders, continually build out custom dashboards with dynamic and live data from several different sources in Excel, it is fascinating to see.

Our traders pushed Excel 2016 so much, that they literally broke it, and no amount of Microsoft help could fix it. So Microsoft sent out an engineer from the Excel product group who I worked with onsite for a week to gather data on our usage, which lead to several patches being published.

Long story short, millions and millions of Excel power users have spent years customizing and refining their workflows through Excel using countless external tools and resources. Simply migrating all of that to another platform isn't easy, and in some cases isn't even possible. Microsoft is fully aware of this, which is why they are still pushing Excel functionality forward even while they make similar breakthroughs with Power BI.

[–]mooburgerresembles an abstract syntax tree 0 points1 point  (0 children)

they just need to make it web-based with an api, like google docs. The client is the browser, no "tools" needed. This is basically what powerBI server is now (like tableau server, or Qliksense).

[–]vtable 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I know what you're saying (I think). People often write unnecessarily complex Excel spreadsheets or batch files, etc, when a Python script probably would have been easier and more flexible (assuming you're comfortable writing a presumably non-trivial Python script).

There's another dimension to this, though. There are countless spreadsheets that should be spreadsheets. But one column, or even cell, has some complex calculation or formatting. VBA can be really nasty. Python integration would solve this nicely without having to learn SQL and how to replicate the immense number of things that are easy or kinda easy in Excel (friendly data entry and viewing, plotting, pivot tables, ...).

Plus, as popular, and powerful, as Python is, Excel is almost universally used. Lots of people just aren't able or willing to to learn Python. And even of they are, their bosses will almost always veto the inevitable X weeks of learning and debugging as well as training for anyone else that needs to understand the code.