7+ years ago I had the option of leaving the Excel team. My then boss’s boss knew I had an interest in bringing Python to Excel and offered me a chance to tackle it if I chose to stay. What was meant to be a 6 month project turned into a ~3 year project, the Python part faded away and we ended up enabling JavaScript Custom Functions in Excel instead.
For Python we were also running ‘in the cloud’ (AzureML v1), although there was some back-and-forth on if we should run locally. I think what made the Python part disappear was our partner AzureML team re-orged, re-released, re-hired, we lost a PM and our work caught the attention of another partner team who realised they could use our code to execute their JavaScript out-of-process. And so I spent a lot of time ensuring that feature was successfully shipped at, I guess, the detriment of Python.
I had a lot of help from some strong engineers and learnt a lot. The core of the work was modifying the calculation engine of Excel to allow functions to compute asynchronously, allowing the user to continue working on other parts of their spreadsheet while the remote endpoint (be it JavaScript, Python or something else) was computing. Previously the spreadsheet would lock up while calculations were running, and that wouldn’t be cool for long-running unbounded calculations. Have to wonder if any of the stuff we built made it into this new feature.
Super great to see this and look forward to trying it out.
Recalc or die
Agreed with the friction around getting started. I would like to see it reduced. It’s cool to see you using them to wrap Python functions - I have done something similar before myself, and still need to get around to shimming Haskell into excel at some point.
Another thing I don’t like is how JavaScript Custom Function cell formulas have a horrible string after the _xldudf marker, which becomes noticeable if your workbook doesn’t/can’t load the custom functions addin (or you unload the addin)
Thanks for your comment
IMO deployment is an even harder problem. The Office team makes it incredibly difficult to deploy web add-ins (presumably for business reasons) and accordingly most companies I'm familiar with are still using the ancient, barely-supported COM+VSTO add-in models.
Abandoned now: https://alphawolfxl.com/
I abandoned this when some people I asked to beta test it said "their company wouldn't pay for it" and gave me the impression I'd wasted my time....
....Not sure how to feel about this.....
In general there is a scarcity of working code that you can inspect to see how javascript in Excel works.
Now it is mostly "how to draw an owl"
I have a private github repo called NVBC, the "NecroVisualBasiCon", with all of my favorite VBA-isms.
When I code it, I indent all of the `End *` lines to column 80, to make the VBA look more like python.
Nobody could have anticipated that GPT4 would author Python better than anything else.
Nonetheless, I kind of just want Google Drive except Excel, without adopting anything more than the Office ecosystem, that just works with simultaneous editing.
This alone could eliminate the need for websites that just want this sort of data. I can think of a past project at a previous job I did building an analytics website used only by a handful of people internally that could have been just as well served with something like this, had it existed at the time.
I catch flak for this all the time! Our users just want to be able to use Excel to free-form analyze their data. IT, of which I'm a part of, insists on building web apps to do that for them. They're never happy because all they wanted was Excel.
I keep explaining all we have to do is build a data mart built using SQL Server, and use our ETL tools to keep it populated with the data they need to analyze. Don't let them anywhere near the source data. They keep looking at me like I have ten heads. Instead they want to launch multi-million dollar projects to bring Tableau to our users - and they don't want it! It's asinine!
Excel will import datasets from the Power BI client, and you can refresh the data at any time. The nice part of this arrangement is that the whole model is imported. All the relationships between tables, all the added calculation columns, all the measures are there for use by the end user in Excel.
Power BI has been a great solution for our company (~1000 employees).
IMO, Excel is on the right path with out of the box connectors to Salesforce, Azure databases, etc. What it really needs is full blown SQL with REPL output so the users can see the effects of their SQL. (The way Tableau Prep does it is that it defaults to a sampling of rows to output immediate results). There used to be a Microsoft service called Excel online but it was another thing you had to buy and was super confusing. Excel needs to let users schedule their ETL/datasets in SharePoint online and then let other users subscribe to it. They can call it Excel Super+ and charge a small fortune. I am positive there are people with their wallets open.
I can relate and have experienced this. The result was that they would end up exporting from a series of Tableau/Looker workspaces, and importing into excel and doing their analysis there.
Then continually making enhancement requests on the Tableau/Looker workspaces to get any additional data they need for their excel work.
Then of course, the excel document and its multitude of versions would get emailed around until it hit the attachment size limit, or if there were too many version of it to figure out which one was "actionable".
We finally figured out what they were doing when the enhancement requests for the reporting workspaces got too bizarre.
Insanity.
There are two main issues my org has battled with:
1.People basically turn excel into their own mini databases which causes a support nightmare.
2. This is strongly related to 1) Data provenance is a nightmare because so many people were passing around excel spreadsheets it became very difficult to track down the source of the figures people were using. User A passed their spreadsheet to user B who modified it passed it to User C who further modified it, passed it to User d from there some figures ended up in front of a manager and now we have a problem...
It's not so much a problem with Power users those are the types of people using python (or R) it's the tier of users below that level that cause the damage with excel.
Almost all these tools support exporting to Excel or CSV, so they can do whatever they want in Excel after that.
I mean, that's like >90% of building a CRUD web app. If you truly only need the R in CRUD, your approach sounds reasonable. Otherwise, just go the extra distance and build a CRUD app with csv export / direct SQL access.
Alternatively PMs read all the feedback sent via the feedback UI on Excel web and desktop so you can use that instead if you prefer.
What this means is we'd need to go from just requiring a laptop and a copy of the spreadsheet to requiring redundant internet connections and validating Microsoft's backend meet the regulator's requirements. I'm pretty sure that would unfortunately rule out using it.
The companies I work for while consulting (mainly financial and health organizations) have been very cautious about any company or PII data going to these A.I. programs, and the cloud in general, and are looking to make their own local run generative A.I. LLMs for their employees to use.
By it's very nature these Excel documents will be filled with company data, so I can imagine these companies would also be a bit cautious sending those calculations to the cloud, especially if they can't control the flow of data from their I.T. departments via web applications.
But I'm just a software engineer at the end of the day, and don't professionally use Excel all that much right now (if anything I use it much more for my hobby of board game design). So I can't speak with too much authority on the matter. Just my observations.
I know it's old fashioned to want local software to only change things on my local file system, but if I didn't want that paradigm, I'd just use Google Docs.
It's about the recurring payments, the lock-in, and ultimately literally having the knowledge and business processes of the world economy on their own computers. If this is true, the reason why it is important to run data and scripts locally should be clear, and so is the motivation of your PMs to actively combat any such things.
But if you get a summary in your inbox and show it to your PMs let us know how that goes down.
[1] https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundationLicense...
Can you please just add a button - "unmess this document"? The number of man-hours I've wasted re-creating documents is countless. My job is to do other things not fix excel documents.
(Although, I'm guessing the reason they did it this way is so they could keep the execution model the same for Excel on the web? It's always running on the external service vs sometimes running locally and sometimes running externally.)
With that API, it won't matter whether you want Python, Ruby, Lua, whatever, for your scripting language.
This is nice, but it welds a specific version of Python inside Excel and makes it a gigantic PITA to use your normal development tools on your Python code.
How out of touch with the real world is the Excel team?
- We can guarantee a consistent experience for all users. Imagine having to maintain your own local distribution of Python and guaranteeing that it works with Excel as versions diverge over time? Yikes.
- We make it possible to share your Excel workbook with other users and have the calculation just work. That wouldn't work with random local installs of Python and users would be super frustrated by this.
- Security. Imagine opening an Excel workbook that can execute Python code running locally as you.
Also, I totally agree with your second point. Trying to write an internal app in Python that integrates with all of your existing IT infrastructure is an exercise in frustration at best. Excel is already part of the IT infrastructure virtually everywhere and is a programmable reactive canvas.
Disclosure: I work on the design team for the feature.
A. run python in the cloud (default)
B. specify path to your local python interpreter
When you open a workbook that is using B show a warning before running anything. Then behind the scenes spin up a new venv that installs everything from requirements.txt and executes the code in workbook locally.
I worked on a very early python integration used as a workflow DSL back in 1998 and they had to dump it and write their own DSL in the end.
The cloud execution model does still have an advantage in that it can retain old runtimes in perpetuity for backwards compatibility, though
Moving it from the cloud to local doesn't make it an integral part of the Excel file format. Whatever python service is running in the cloud could just run locally.
There are existing solutions for that, but it would be more complicated for MS to support and secure.
Wasm maybe, full-blown runtime without any sandboxing? Nope.
Have a look at xlwings, which runs on any cloud and also locally.
But Microsoft Cloud is a website!
Step one of any workload will always be "work out how to make the software work again" and that's terrible.
I know this because I have been in that situation several times in the last couple of decades with random Excel, outlook and word add-ins. And those don't even do the processing remotely!
"You will own nothing, and you will be happy" has followed us to... spreadsheets? We can't even own the things we're wageslaving away at our desk for.
But we never owned those things we're wageslaving away at our desk for, that's why its called wageslaving. Whether our employers own them or rent them seems pretty immaterial.
That's the problem.
Not only the cloud, also the subscription. If you cancel the subscription (note that the announcement mentioned it might be a paid module), don't have the subscription (because you got the Excel from a supplier), etc. you already have a problem using this Excel sheet.
Last time I use a cloud spreasheet was a month ago, to download the content into Excel
> I also wouldn't use excel for anything that has a combination of high importance and long lifetime though. It's mostly for some brainstorming or thrown in a presentation as a screenshot.
It's funny but that's exactly how I see online spreadsheet: for unimportant things that may not work at any point in the future if the account is closed. However, the collaborative features make them nice for brainstorming.
This is why it's important to restore your backups once in a while, or in this case, validate your critical files.
Half the things don’t work, customer is sure it worked in X ( now broken and invisible way ) and they really don’t remember that correctly.
It's not a red flag, it's evolution
I'm generally a fan of MS Office products and try to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Please help me think of a plausibly good reason for requiring Python to run in the cloud, that is not just about lock-in.
I think we are about 5 years overdue from bailing from M$. They need to be avoided. Every product from Windows to Office already has anti-consumer features.
http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/01/microsoft-ships-p...
There are a lot, I mean a lot apps that support scripting languages and don't need you to manage the language's runtime yourself. Blender's UI is entirely in Python. Civilization games have most game logic in Lua.
You also have people using Excel on iOS, and Android devices. This allows them to use and read Python in their spreadsheets.
An embedded Python is about 10 MiB. I just checked. Excel could easily have its own separate copy.
(Just for clarity: the team working on this inside Anaconda is entirely separate from the PythonAnywhere team. It would have made a perfect Hollywood-ready story if it had been the same people...)
I'd always kind of assumed that the target audience would have appreciated the IronPython use, as the .net ecosystem would likely have been more valuable to them. Having just looked I see that numpy wasn't available on IronPython until 2010, and I'm sure that would have been useful to have a little earlier.
¹ Pretty sure I've referenced it here a few times too.
A colleague was joking, "I guess even Microsoft itself isn't able to manage local Python installations on Windows…"
But imagine if Microsoft actually managed to finally solve the "setup a local Python environment" situation once and for all and Excel became the standard Python package manager across operating systems!
$ excelpip install fastapi==9.11.23
Searching for fastapi version 11.09.2023…I've been waiting for Microsoft to solve package management on Windows since I played around with debian's apt 20 years. That's not snark, it seemed like Microsoft's product complexity and dedication to backwards compatibility of software would make them the ones to move software management forward. Really dig into the problem space and reinvent the package manager beyond anything that's come out of the open source space.
Instead we've got windows update, windows features, microsoft store, software center and winget (you know, that Microsoft-built package manager for Windows you install from the other Microsoft-built package manager for Windows).
That's precisely why they _didn't_ go with the package manager model of software distribution.
Package managers in most distros assume that everything you download via apt/dnf is a part of the operating system and integrates with whatever dependencies the OS ships with. It's a great system if you're an operating system maintainer, but terrible if you're a third-party software developer who has no interest in dealing with 5-6 different OS's repo formats and dependency versions. On Windows and macOS, you vendor most everything, provide runtime installers for the rest, and that's usually enough to be resilient to bitrot.
Package formats like Flatpak, Snap and AppImage are the only projects who seem to be taking the problem of software distribution on Linux seriously, and of those only Flatpak seems to have the mature tooling and lack of myopia necessary to pull it off. For the times that I do miss apt on Windows, chocolatey is pretty good at installing software and vcpkg works great for linkable libraries.
The same warning applies to the linux desktop and all its apps more generally. Increasingly proprietary platforms will be rolling out advanced "AI" functionality extensions to classic apps that are cloud based, many of them via a Python API.
Its a pity that the various strands of the open source universe are so siloed. The potential of the sum being more than the parts is squandered.
My biggest beef with LibreOffice's spreadsheet (and with Apple's Numbers) is how they handle copy/paste of discontiguous selections.
Consider this 5 row by 3 column set of data:
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
a b c
d e f
d e f
1 2 3
7 8 9
a b c
d e f
1 2 3
- - -
7 8 9
a b c
Not many people care because the most popular use case of any office suite is to interoperate with Microsoft file formats.
APSO script organiser is recommended for running scripts from inside LibreOffice: https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/apso-a...
python is so easy to script that imo excel is nailing its own coffin. with an aging and retiring demographic of people that have never used a programming language, anyone who learns to incorporate python into excel will end up preferring python because its both more flexible and scalable.
i have no reason to use excel except for basic drawing board math, if someone demands a spreadsheet out me i automate its generation in python so i never have to deal with it again
A jupyter notebook is maybe somewhere in between. But even if other interfaces manage to bridge the gap further, I doubt the spreadsheet metaphor is going to go away in the visible future. Pivot tables and the like are like COBOL and mainframes :-) The corporate world would die a sudden death if you were to eliminate it (another reason to always make sure you can run things locally).
This simply isn't true in any way and is completely divorced from modern businesses. Everybody I know who works in an office setting works with Excel. None of them know Python and none of them have touched a programming language. Almost all of them are younger than 30. And if anybody who's 20 starts at one of these companies, they'd better know Excel because that's what the business is built on. Not like that 20 year old is gonna know anything about programming either. 99% of people just aren't programmers and aren't going to learn programming when they just want to futz around with some numbers and the easiest (yet also the most powerful) tool they know for it is a spreadsheet.
If somebody in any business, anywhere, at any point wants to do something with numbers, they're going to use Excel.
Also, imo, Python and whatever random environments and libraries that you'll have to use with it to get your work done, will be in almost every way worse than just using VBA. And if you use VBA, your work will be effortlessly portable. The only problem I have with it is that I have to come up with ways to get the code out of the embedded IDE into source control, but there are scripts that help.
> i have no reason to use excel except for basic drawing board math, if someone demands a spreadsheet out me i automate its generation in python so i never have to deal with it again
I, on the other hand, do it in VBA, and expose every important calculation within clearly labeled spreadsheets so programming-illiterate people can audit them and feel confident about the output.
I think you underestimate the amount of work, globally, done in Excel. If Excel vanished it would be a business/economic extinction level event, It's not going anywhere.
Its so slow.
> Python in Excel is currently available to users running Beta Channel on Windows. This feature will roll out to Excel for Windows first, starting with build 16.0.16818.2000, and then to the other platforms at a later date. [1]
> Python in Excel is available in Excel for Windows. The feature is not available in Excel for Mac, Excel on the web, Excel for iPad, Excel for iPhone, or Excel for Android. On unsupported platforms, workbooks containing Python can be viewed but Python cells display an error when recalculated. [2]
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing...
[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/introduction-to-p...
Maybe they will in the future, but it makes sense to start with the approach that will work in both web and local installs.
At the cost of privacy. Consider msft could sell this to you but they chose to let you borrow it instead.
Forcing it to run in an isolated environment they control simplifies the problem greatly.
I work on Excel but not this feature and am happy to ask around if people are interested.
Doing everything in the cloud massively simplifies deployment and support.
The reason we're doing this is to make money, and nobody wants to buy Excel spreadsheets that don't run in Excel.
If people don't know about it, people won't use it.
If people are accustomed to something different, people will ask for it.
For this feature, there's no question that providing it in the cloud is much, much better for security. Microsoft can now execute the Python code in Firecracker VMs which provide much better sandboxing than your local PC could.
(1) I have hardly seen any company that can do with an off-the-shelf Anaconda distro. Companies usually have an internal Python package that they will need to access. (2) When running Python on the backend, the first question is always "how can we authenticate the user"? Office.js is currently the only platform I know of that allows you to leverage Azure AD identities via SSO or use any other provider (as you have complete freedom to use any JS library/redirect the user to a login form). (3) IT policies: Usually, companies have made their cloud decision: “We're an AWS/GCP/Azure shop, so Python has to run on precisely AWS Lambda/GCP Cloud Run, etc.” Yes, many are on Azure, but even in Azure they may have preference of let's say Azure Container Apps or AKS instead of Azure functions. (4) The other thing that businesses are obsessed about is to securely protect their source code, again, not something that Python in Excel seems to support. (5) And finally, what I see users most excited about in the context of xlwings is being able to run standard User-defined functions (aka "Custom functions) on the server (like the ones we wrote in the good old VBA times or like the new Lambda functions), not sure if that's possible or on the roadmap for the official version.
With the modern xlwings Server, I have taken a different approach: Let users build a 100% standard Python web app using their favorite framework (Django, Flask, FastAPI, ...) including all the standard tools (logging, auth, etc.) while using Excel as the frontend. Users have complete freedom in choosing their tech stack, they can version-control the source code on GitHub, use GitHub actions to run unit tests and deploy the code automatically to their favorite cloud, etc.
So I am probably targeting more professional developers than data scientists, but in my experience, it’s often a professional developer who write the Excel add-in that is then deployed to business users/data scientists.
BTW for clarity: the team working on this inside Anaconda is entirely separate from the PythonAnywhere team. It would have made a perfect Hollywood-ready story if it had been the same people...
That's probably extremely valuable to many people, but it does not seem to be what I hope for whenever I see something about bringing Python to Excel.
What I hope for is something that is like VBA but without the VB. I.e., a Python (or JavaScript) interpreter/JIT/compiler built into Excel exposing all the internal Excel objects and methods that VBA has access to. By "Python" I just mean the language and whatever subset of the standard library makes sense in Excel.
C:\>python
Python 3.10.1 (tags/v3.10.1:2cd268a, Dec 6 2021, 19:10:37) [MSC v.1929 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from win32com.client import Dispatch
>>> xl = Dispatch("Excel.Application")
>>> xl.Visible = True
>>> wb = xl.WorkBooks.Add()
>>> sh = wb.WorkSheets[0]
>>> sh.Range("A1").Value = "Hello World"
>>>[1] https://code-magazine.com/Article/2207071/The-Excellent-Sche...
I haven't found any free, open source solutions around this including any for Jupyter notebooks (my preferred medium).
I don't know if it fits your needs
https://help.libreoffice.org/6.3/en-US/text/sbasic/python/py...
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing...
I haven't tried it yet, nor am I affiliated with Neptyne, but it looks intriguing.
But it looks nice. Looks fun to work with.
On the meanwhile, just a few threads ago there was a (quite fair) browser benchmark where Chrome comes up on top on almost every test. People in the comments instantly rushes in proclaiming how proud they are for using Firefox even if it is technically inferior, solely because it is not owned by Google.
What's up with this divide? Firefox user, btw.
import os
os.rmdir("C:\Windows\System32")Surprising that Microsoft would give users this gateway drug, but I suppose the reasoning is that you can keep your users by making Excel a quasi-IDE.
I suspect HN users in general are different to finance users and so have not seen how Excel is used.
Excel would be well served by replacing VBA with either JS or python because of their ecosystems and high levels of adoption. Python is the better choice because data analysts are more likely to be familiar with it.
I'm tired of it Microsoft. Just fix the darn issue please.
I think I'll stick to VBA.
Javascript in Excel would be nice.
Even better would be native SQL.
As with BASIC morphing into VisualBasic and VBA you lure (beginning) python programmers into Excel. Ultimately those developers will understand and appreciate less and less of vanilla python REPL, jupyter, scripts, etc. And... Welcome to Microsoft's world.
Also, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/resourc...
JS has been one of the supported add-in languages for a while[0], but that's not quite the same thing as the new python offering (which sounds more like jupyter within excel).
Since excel is often (mostly?) used for working with financial calculations, I for one am glad they went with python for this feature instead of a language that insists that an IEEE 754 double is the only kind of number anybody actually needs
Abandoned now: https://alphawolfxl.com/
It allowed python functions to be run on cells and ranges, and also allowed ranges to be filled with sql queries on databases.
I had managed to get also a matlab runner working (via matlab/java connector) and was just getting the R connector finished.
Basically, I made a website showing it working and gave a few people the plugin, and their feedback was "nah, my company won't pay for it, you're wasting your time" - so I shelved the project.
I have no idea what my emotions are doing right now :)
It's depressing seeing someone who has done so much work for the free software community now working to enrich the spyware-laden proprietary product offerings of a megacorp.
Nothing about this is "good for Python" or hackers - it's just good for Microsoft to sell more Excel (and Microsoft accounts). That makes the world worse.
I thought the B stood for benevolent.
It basically does all the same stuff and it would be lightning fast on modern machines. You don’t even need internet to use it.
For one, because people want more than 65,536 rows in their spreadsheets.
But, I'd largely agree that '97 was the pinnacle from a UI perspective. There are changes under the hood that are quite nice, though, especially with the move to xml persistence.
As for why the rest of the world why would do that or not, is their choice, no?
It's very self-contained, what works on your machine is almost guaranteed to work on the client's computer, given that they have the same Excel version. It's also very reliable, VBA apps can work for years without any maintenance or support.
Openpyxl is fine if you want to generate a report and send the results but for anything dynamic you would need to ship an interpreter, plus generate an exe, plus ship a workbook with the data, plus you probably need to write a GUI (users freak out from the cmd). This is much less reliable and requires constant support to users, VBA/excel apps rarely do.
This Python integration is a bit disappointing though as the "killer feature" of Excel is that it's self-contained and now it will rely on MS's cloud. This is yet another integration that will fail to kill VBA (we had JS and .net already but had similar issues), it seems that MS doesn't really understand how people use Excel :)
theres going to be multiple people tackling this problem but I see it as a worthy one, theres no reason we should be needing VBA in the future when we can run Python in browsers.
There's a partial list here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/open-source-libra...
Always one step forward, two steps back, and one to the left.
I remember interviewing in Redmond once and the PM couldn’t understand why Windows Vista wasn’t doing well because it seemed to run excellent on his overpowered PC.
Microsoft 365 subscriptions are paid licenses. This sentence is nonsense.
(which I wish was more widely known/used)
For example: As part of a monitoring system. HR / crm Database. Self serving vacation planner and approving system. Tamperproof GMO(genetically modified organisms) database. As my go to source as a quick and dirty data dump while hacking...
Grist is a great tool!
clearly aimed at big business/enterprise customers, python's ecosystem of scientific & statistical libraries is massive
not so long ago they introduced Office Scripts and Power Automate, in essence coding macros in TypeScript (rather than VBA), again only for business/enterprise license users though.
-> excel cell: rest api call
-> send request to your own python web app: run python function. send back the output.
Should I learn python for Excel instead of Django?
Heck the .xslx file format is fancy XML.
Excel still has a fraction of the power Python does, it's not becoming "de facto" anything that it isn't already de facto for (which is highly interactive data wrangling and making reports by folks who cant/won't use a python env for that task).