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Comment by smortaz | Hacker News Reader

Clickable Link:

https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-...

[disclaimer+bias: on Python team @ msft & would love to see this happen!]

Interestingly, the survey doesn't seem to consider education as a use-case of this - has your team considered that aspect? Spreadsheets are the most common way that school students are introduced to programming, and the only 'programming' that a lot of teachers (and others) do. There are heaps of reasons for this, but any even moderate programming (beyond very simple operations) in a spreadsheet sucks. Something like this (if it's easy out of the box) could revolutionise programming education (and data education for that matter).

Are there plans to get this working with the Excel web-app, or just the desktop version? I'm just having a daydream about Excel, Juypter notebooks, and OneNote Class notebooks...

That's a very good point! I hope you provided that input :).

Our team provides a free service for anyone to run Jupyter Notebooks on Azure. It's currently a big hit with the Edu crowd. We're seeing lots & lots of universities upload & teach courses on it. eg:

http://notebooks.azure.com/richie

There's also an Intro to Python notebook on the front page.

Hopefully the Excel team will consider Jupyter integration, esp for the web-app version! You're right that it's a killer combo. Check out xlwing's video on using Excel+Jupyter - it's brilliant.

I think we will see and are already seeing a move away from using spreadsheets in Education, there are simply much better solutions out there now. Jupyter notebooks being one which allow reading and writing to Excel files. The interface of these is far superior for educational purposes than a spreadsheet. I've already dropped Excel for this reason.

So, would this imply numpy and scipy support in Python for Excel? How about support for Excel worksheets within Jupyter notebooks?

That's for the Excel team to decide. My personal hope is that they'll offer as a base:

* Python 3

* Numpy, SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Altair, ...

* Pythonic bindings for Excel APIs (sheets, etc etc)

* VSCode's Python Editor + Debugger built in

* Some sort of conda based env/pkg mgmt

* Right-click, "Open in Jupyter" (data/code)

* <your wish here>

Transparent access to Excel tables as Pandas Dataframes would be so, so very awesome.

I mean, MS implemented these really nice Tables in excel, but then left us no way to easily query them with something like SQL.

I agree, SQL in Excel would be awesome, Index Match everywhere is a right pain to maintain - to replicate foreign keys. Its amazing what you can do with Sumifs and Countifs, but SQl is better. VBA is OK but NO search across modules makes it such a pain just to find your code, I wish VBA had better support for UDFs so that they can appear the same to users, as built in functions with tooltips. MS have done a really bad job of incorporating Power Pivot, it’s confusing and doesn’t feel like a natural part of Excel. I don’t like Pivot Tables they are too Dynamic and a pain too format.

You can add-in IntelliSense for VBA functions using the (free) Excel-DNA IntelliSense extension. See this detailed write-up by Charles Williams: https://fastexcel.wordpress.com/2016/10/07/writing-efficient...

Someone posted a link to a really nice 3rd part addin on the reddit thread, on mobile so can't find the link unfortunately but was very well done. Shame on Microsoft for half-assing Excel for the last decade.

Possibly querystorm, in case anyone is looking for it. It did look interesting last time I looked at it, but I've never tried it.

That was it:

https://www.querystorm.com

Doesn’t pandas.read_excel provide this?

Well, there is PowerPivot...

Yeah, matplotlib, scipy and numpy are kinda no-brainers there.

Please not matplotlib ... are we really stuck with matplotlib forever ..?

If you've got better suggestions I'm all ears. I've found it pretty great for debugging and being able to understand data in a rapid manner.

ggplot2. Simply better in every way. Hell, even base R is better than matplotlib. Full disclosure: I hate matplotlib so very, very much.

No, watch them pump out some horribly supported python library .

So what's the strategy here re: security? I assume it'd be a fairly stripped-down version of Python ... or will you just design the UI to say "you probably shouldn't execute files from people you don't know" etc?

From a security point of view how is embedding python different from embedding Visual Basic? This is not my area of expertise so I’m genuinely curious.

Potentially different. .NET allows signed binaries / libs / a fully signed execution context, Python has nothing equivalent AFAIK.

Excel VBA is not .Net though. It's plain old VB code in text files inside the .xlsx, and you just have to trust it (or not).

Aaah. Then probably about the same, yea :) Maybe less of a nightmare around dependencies than the pip world...?

I’d rather full fat Python but heavily sandboxed with some form of firewall. “Do you want to allow 2018_Stock_Report_Q1.xlsp to connect to api.erp.corp.mycompany.com?”. Codesigning with my something under my corp CA, manage permissions via Group Policy and let users, on a per-endpoint or per-permission basis, authorise things like filesystem access, network connections, etc.

Challenges exist & will have to be looked at for sure. Incidentally, one of the guys on our team just a gave talk on his PEP for "Secure" Python:

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0551/

There's a YT talk as well.

> @ msft

Well, I guess that explains why you care about Office in 2017.

That and the fact that the vast majority of companies use Office...

Which is also why it is surprising that Microsoft has spent so little time on office in 20 years. Outside of changing the colors regularly, there has been very few new significant functionalities between Office 2003 and Office 2016. And opening the VBA IDE is a nasty reminder.

I'd argue large companies are still running Windows because of Office. The cost of retraining people, redesigning all of these user processes and converting all those documents would be massive. Whereas most new corporate applications in the last 5 years have been mostly web based.

So I am surprised Microsoft under-invest in what is they main strategic lock-in in the juicy enterprise market.

Between 2003 and 2016 they took some massive desktop applications and put versions of them on the web and mobile...

> very few new significant functionalities between Office 2003 and Office 2016

The first release to feature the Ribbon, arguably one of the all-time major changes in Office, was 2007. That took quite a bit for most users to get used to.

An Office suite is not where you add experimental features for the hell of it. People use it to get the job done in so many different scenarios, any change will significantly impact entire industries.

Office programs are the "lawyers" and "accountants" of the software world: their work has been more or less the same since they existed, and any major change to them is a basically societal upheaval, so their approach will always be naturally conservative.

Reshuffling buttons when they added ribbon is what I would classify as "changing the color", not really a new functionality.

There are many things lawyers, bankers, consultants and accountants would need that Office doesn't do. Linking a spreadsheet to a powerpoint document is a nightmare right now. Linking spreadsheets between them too. There should be a way to express a UDF as a spreadsheet so that people who can't code could create their own UDF. I love Apple's Number canvas approach, where a sheet is not a grid but a canvas on which you can add grids or charts, and they overflow with a scrollbar. Etc.

There are lots of new functionalities they could add that would make people's life better. Instead these products barely evolved in 20 years. Click the "fx" button in excel 2016 and you will get the same non resizable dialog box with a tiny listbox and a search box that doesn't search anything than in Office XP.

If you think about it, only 20% if employees can use office at a medium to high level anyways - a lot less people to retrain. The rest are "I click this button then do this thing"

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