》Python calculations run in Microsoft’s Cloud
No thanks!
Maybe they will in the future, but it makes sense to start with the approach that will work in both web and local installs.
I really don't see them killing the desktop version.
Sharepoint and web-shared files make it very difficult to link spreadsheets between each other, even one way around.
In theory it works, in practice it doesnt. (PowerQuery is an inconvenient stopgap to simple links)
Have her try Excel 2010 or 2007 running on Wine (whether using WSL or natively)
For people who want their spreadsheet offline, it's wonderful: fast and stable.
I can't attest to the performance of such technique for now, though, or guess why they could have deemed it not worth pursuing at the time being.
The list of what snacks people are bringing to the potluck is in excel online (or google sheets).
The excel sheet that is pulling information from a database, mashing it up, displaying it in a dozen different pivots... that is going to be local.
At the cost of privacy. Consider msft could sell this to you but they chose to let you borrow it instead.
Doing everything in the cloud massively simplifies deployment and support.
Another complication is they claim the container isn't just "a docker container", but for increased security isolation (they don't want a repeat of VBA malware) it's a mini-VM focused to run on top of Hyper-V (the Windows Hypervisor) itself. That's a really complicated install process on the average machine (like installing WSL2) that sometimes involves flipping entire Windows Features on, so also something unlikely to be a smooth experience out of the box for Excel.
It might be neat if they made that an optional install and let users have offline support, but it sounded like they wanted to focus on online and collaborative UX first.
Hyper-V is enabled by default on supported hardware.
Python data science containers are on the order of GBs.
> And who said it must be installed by default?
I did end my comment with thoughts that I think it would be nice to have as an optional install. Mentioning why it isn't likely a default install is relevant because they want this Python feature to be accessible to everyone and they want people to collaborate and the UX for an optional install isn't what they were looking for and would complicate things. (That's not an argument against also supporting the optional install, but a reasoning for why the optional install is a harder feature to support and doesn't make the "version 1" cut.)
Yes. And SSDs are on the order of 100s and 1000s of GBs.
> Mentioning why it isn't likely a default install is relevant because they want this Python feature to be accessible to everyone and they want people to collaborate and the UX for an optional install isn't what they were looking for and would complicate things.
How do you know these things?
It won't be accessible to everyone until it's installable. Collaboration is not cloud exclusive. The UX isn't what they were looking for is circular.
1 - That could be an optional component, behind a "Install Python for Excel " button.
2 - You need to install Python to code in Python anyway, with or without Excel.
3 - Bloat is the norm nowadays and I'm not sure whether users care. A clean Visual Studio install takes 10 GB of disk or something. Office itself takes several GB as well.
4 - Not sure why Docker would be needed. Using Python in Windows is fine nowadays. There are caveats with libs that are very reliant on POSIX (Airflow comes to mind,) but, again, if you control your distro you can limit the libs users can install.
4) I don't think they are using Docker, but they are using containers. (They mention running directly on top of Hyper-V so they might not even be considered by some developers as containers in the Docker sense but closer to "mini" VMs.) The container they are using for security/sandboxing reasons. The Excel team likely still has nightmares from the worst years of VBA macro malware and this Python system seems built specifically to sandbox all the running Python code to an execution environment (container/VM) that is easy to refresh/rebuild/recycle/tear-down. I agree that Python on Windows is usually great and most of the Python ecosystem is great at cross-platform support, but I also understand why Excel would want to sandbox any Python it runs to containers that are isolated from the host machine/user and it can easily reboot.
I work on Excel but not this feature and am happy to ask around if people are interested.
Forcing it to run in an isolated environment they control simplifies the problem greatly.