Missing a key component: Ability to install it.
Much of the Excel target audience - office workers - don't have much control over their work computer let alone ability to install stuff like pip allowing downloads from an unvetted repo
Much of the Excel target audience - office workers - don't have much control over their work computer let alone ability to install stuff like pip allowing downloads from an unvetted repo
VBA is terrible, but it is the only programming-like option for most office workers outside of IT/Engineering
At work, we want to build a simple database and app to interface against it. Asked our boss, asked the IT guys, got the same answer:
A : "Sure, but it has to be MS Access"
Q : "Why though, PostgreSQL / SQLite/ etc. works fine"
A : "Because we already have MS Access"
Q : "OK - could we at least get [programming language + frameworks] for the interface part"
A : "Use Excel and VBA. We already have that"
I am on a mission to eliminate Access... the day i can distribute office with out Access will be a glorious day indeed
No IT Dept should be telling users to use Access.....
This is no longer technically true of Anaconda. They’ve adopted a new licensing approach that prevents employees of companies from using the free edition. Please consider adding alternative install instructions, based on PyPI and pipenv or poetry, to future versions of your book. This would help a ton of data scientists out!
I’m looking forward to reading your book via O’Reilly!
References:
Discussion on r/Python with comments from the Anaconda CEO and team, https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/iqsk3y/anaconda_is_...
Anaconda license change press release, https://www.anaconda.com/blog/anaconda-commercial-edition-fa...
Anaconda Terms of Service, https://www.anaconda.com/terms-of-service
Edit: Here’s an interesting comment on the Reddit discussion from the Anaconda CEO suggesting that Miniconda can still be used with conda forge: “You can download Miniconda, and change your conda config to use conda forge, and the Terms of Service do not apply to that. The ToS only applies to commercial usage of the package repository of packages we build, at repo.anaconda.com; it does not apply to community-built and uploaded packages at anaconda.org.”, https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/iqsk3y/anaconda_is_...
While Anaconda Inc.’s licensing approach is currently confusing/frustrating, they’re correct that open source sustainability is a challenge. Projects need financial support as well as volunteers.
SciPy.org maintains Pandas, NumPy, Jupyter, iPython, Matplotlib, etc. They’ve buried a donation page on their website at… https://www.scipy.org/scipylib/donations.html
It's a big issue to build tools for others to use - an excel file on a shared drive somewhere might be developed by one person with python installed and elevated permissions but used by 50 with no python installation etc.
IT arn't going to adjust their policies for a small group unless they have significant organizational sway.
It also does not require admin permissions in Linux, although most distros do not offer a happy path for that.
Not really sure how this is a rebuttal, maybe what you say is true on a default windows installation, not on an IT-dept managed system.
I'm sharing my experience of this exact problem we have right now. Users cannot install python on their machines, in an org of 60k engineers, asking for changes to a small group of users comes with heavy resistance from IT.
On these machines (most computers in most offices in every western organization) no software can be installed from online, and running any form of executable requires IT/Admin elevation.
It's like you guys have never worked in an office in the real world that isn't dev/tech.
There are tons of resources like this. https://quantecon.org/
That said, VBA is slow.