It’s interesting but if you are good enough at Python, can’t you already write to and read from spreadsheets? Maybe moving up a Python excel library like xlrd and openpyxl and making it reactive would be more worthwhile for Microsoft. Writing Python code in that little formula bar as shown doesn’t seem attractive. Writing Python in VSCode and seeing the results appear in the spreadsheet in real time would be great though.
No, you use Excel when you need a data manipulation program quickly and you want to ship it to clients without any installation or training. You just send the workbook to your client and it's done!
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 :)
Great points, since it’s in the cloud it’s no longer self contained. We are already in some hybrid works with extra dependencies.
And if that’s the case, why can’t the .py files live in the cloud too? The need for an interpreter didn’t go away, Microsoft is just hosting it for you.
