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Comment by fzumstein | Hacker News Reader

Book author and xlwings creator here. Thanks for posting this link! Funny enough, about 10 days after sending the book to the printer (March 11), Microsoft updated the feature request ("Python as en Excel scripting language") on their UserVoice page with a comment that looks like official support could eventually happen: "Thank you for the continued interest in this space. While we don’t have specific plans to announce at this time, we have been researching the topic, conducting customer interviews, and are working with the Python team at Microsoft so we can build a plan that we think can address the scenarios you told us about and ensure it can run wherever Excel runs." Fingers crossed! See https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-...

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Thank you soooo much! Your library saved me 100's of hours when i was working at Tesla. Showed the whole CapEx Team and they loved it. Will definitely be buying this book.

Haven't they been saying that for years?

Seem to recall a ~2017 article about it...

Yes, that is standard Microsoft speak for "thanks, we will think about it, just not now".

I guess they really get a lot of pressure there.

Putting Python in Excel can potentially lift more analysts to proper developers or at least make the code base more robust. A lot of analysts' first language is VBA and then they move on to more serious development and land on a developer job.

I'm one of those examples. My first language was VBA and I dig a bit deeper into it (e.g. reading about moving pointers and general coding best practice, downloading rubberduck extension for VBA, etc.) and taught myself C++ and Python. Eventually I landed a BI developer job.

I have seen many move to VB by following that path on life science research labs that tend to be Windows based, as per reading devices and laboratory robots.

So they went Excel => .NET, and were served by .NET and COM APIs in Excel.

In modern Excel you also have Lambda, JavaScript and PowerQuery as an inbox option.

I thought about moving to C# but we didn't really need the power so I didn't bother.

PowerQuery is also very good for data cleaning. Learned a few tricks here and there.

What's even more surprising to me is that (unless I missed something) MS hasn't pushed anything significant in terms of R integration to Excel. I just assumed that was one of their end-goals after they bought up Revolution Analytics.

I know they've done some R integration with PowerBI, but it's mind boggling how they ignore the two most popular programming languages that heavy Excel users would also be interested in.

Thanks for writing this book. I’m on the fence about going down this road or learning Power BI instead. Can you recommend a beginner resources on using Python in Excel? I’d rather use Excel and learn Python, for sure!

I have used Power BI and let's say Python (or any other programming language that has a graphic lib) gives you way more freedom.

Power BI and Tableau are favoured by analysts who do not necessarily want to put down a lot of efforts to learn programming (which is fine).

That was a very helpful distinction, thanks!

What do some of these tools do to the portability of an Excel doc? Will some things not work if I send the file to someone else who doesn't have python or xlwings?

Hi man I hope they can buy you out.

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