this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
40 points (90.0% liked)
Python
6375 readers
4 users here now
Welcome to the Python community on the programming.dev Lemmy instance!
π Events
Past
November 2023
- PyCon Ireland 2023, 11-12th
- PyData Tel Aviv 2023 14th
October 2023
- PyConES Canarias 2023, 6-8th
- DjangoCon US 2023, 16-20th (!django π¬)
July 2023
- PyDelhi Meetup, 2nd
- PyCon Israel, 4-5th
- DFW Pythoneers, 6th
- Django Girls Abraka, 6-7th
- SciPy 2023 10-16th, Austin
- IndyPy, 11th
- Leipzig Python User Group, 11th
- Austin Python, 12th
- EuroPython 2023, 17-23rd
- Austin Python: Evening of Coding, 18th
- PyHEP.dev 2023 - "Python in HEP" Developer's Workshop, 25th
August 2023
- PyLadies Dublin, 15th
- EuroSciPy 2023, 14-18th
September 2023
- PyData Amsterdam, 14-16th
- PyCon UK, 22nd - 25th
π Python project:
- Python
- Documentation
- News & Blog
- Python Planet blog aggregator
π Python Community:
- #python IRC for general questions
- #python-dev IRC for CPython developers
- PySlackers Slack channel
- Python Discord server
- Python Weekly newsletters
- Mailing lists
- Forum
β¨ Python Ecosystem:
π Fediverse
Communities
- #python on Mastodon
- c/django on programming.dev
- c/pythorhead on lemmy.dbzer0.com
Projects
- PythΓΆrhead: a Python library for interacting with Lemmy
- Plemmy: a Python package for accessing the Lemmy API
- pylemmy pylemmy enables simple access to Lemmy's API with Python
- mastodon.py, a Python wrapper for the Mastodon API
Feeds
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Over a year later and I still do not understand what the use case for this is.
A lot of the examples/documentation that was made by Microsoft for this seems to focus on data analysis and data visualization. Anyone in those fields would probably prefer to get the data out of Excel and into their tool/pipeline of choice instead of running their Python code in Excel. That also makes the big assumption that the data being used is fully contained within the Excel file and that the libraries used within the code are avalaible in Excel (including the library version).
For anyone looking to learn/use Excel better, I doubt the best use of their time is learning a new programming language and how Excel implements that programming language. They would likely be better off learning Excel's formulas, pivot tables, charts, etc. They could even learn Power Query to take things to another level.
For anyone looking to learn Python, this is absolutely a terrible way to do so. For example, it abstracts away library maintenance, could provide modified error messages, and makes the developer feedback loop more complicated.
If you want to automate Excel then this realistically allows for very little new functionality that did not exist prior to this feature. Using other Python libraries like OpenPyxl and xlWings will still be required to automate Excel.
I am sure there are edge cases where this iteration of Python in Excel is perfect. However, this feels like a checkbox filler ("yeah, Excel supports Python now") than an implementation of an actual useful feature. A fully featured and supported Python library that manipulates Excel/Excel files would have been a much more exciting and useful feature - even if it had to be executed outside of Excel, like OpenPyxl.
My biggest issue with it is that it runs everything in the cloud. So you're shipping your data to Microsoft and have latency to run anything. Seems insecure and added complexity to get a bit more out of excel.
I agree with everything you said, but (in Microsoft's eyes) this is a feature - not a bug.
Without this cloud component, how could: