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Comment by bdowling | Hacker News Reader

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

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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>

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.

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.

Well, there is PowerPivot...

Doesn’t pandas.read_excel provide this?

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

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...

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

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