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Comment by brokencode | Hacker News Reader

Probably because Excel runs in a web browser nowadays and they want to avoid creating a separate way of running Python locally for a locally installed copy of Excel.

Maybe they will in the future, but it makes sense to start with the approach that will work in both web and local installs.

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Looking at what they're doing with Outlook I'd bet money that they intend to replace the desktop version of Excel with the web version sooner or later.

I agree but expect that Excel will be the very last app of the suite that they make web-only. Excel heads like my wife absolutely hate the web version.

A lot of people in finance are Excel heads and hate the web version. And they have a lot of money to throw around, surely Microsoft cares about them.

I really don't see them killing the desktop version.

I could see the prices going up to Bloomberg-terminal level, though, and everybody normal having to settle for Excel 365.

They are killing the deskrop version with sharepoint.

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)

> Excel heads like my wife absolutely hate the web version.

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.

This is good news. I did not know this.

That's got to be the death-knell for Excel. It might be better in every conceivable way but going web-only only makes Sheets look more attractive to the people doing the buying. And you can run JS in your Sheets right now.

I dread this day greatly, but it's definitely coming.

In my corporate experience, casual usage of excel is in the cloud. Any large, complicated, or db-connected spreadsheet is done on local installations.

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.

I'm positive they've at least toyed with the idea of running a Python interpreter in a WebAssembly module, which should work in both environments _and_ provide some isolation. The telemetry settings, I guess, wouldn't need to be changed to call home about performance/errors.

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.

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