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Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

I was so excited about Python in Excel, until it said "run in the cloud." There just doesn't seem to be any reason for this except to tie you into their cloud service. It feels so much like protecting me from unsafe printer ink.

I'm generally a fan of MS Office products and try to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Please help me think of a plausibly good reason for requiring Python to run in the cloud, that is not just about lock-in.

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These are red flags. M$ is forcing people into their cloud. Their hijacking of your local file system with onedrive is a great example that many people already ran into.

I think we are about 5 years overdue from bailing from M$. They need to be avoided. Every product from Windows to Office already has anti-consumer features.

Not asking customers to manage a local python installation is one thing, although I totally understand how excel + python power users would likely be comfortable bringing and maintaining their own python runtime.

Fun fact: Microsoft shipped Python code in 1996. The could do it again if they really wanted to.

http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/01/microsoft-ships-p...

Does Excel run in a browser today?

There are a lot, I mean a lot apps that support scripting languages and don't need you to manage the language's runtime yourself. Blender's UI is entirely in Python. Civilization games have most game logic in Lua.

Inkscape (vector graphics) also has a built-in Python install, same goes for Cura (3D printing), Fusion 360 (3D CAD), and I'm sure many more

You can just ship a copy of Python with Excel, no need to ask anybody to maintain their own installation.

This. Why you would leverage system python is beyond me.

Anaconda distributions aren't exactly small. I'd also assume there's some sort of environment isolation, so you're getting multiple copies. Maybe one per workbook?

No need to use Anaconda or any general purpose venv solution. Microsoft screwed this up.

The embeddable package from python.org [1] is 20 MB unpacked. To install different sets of packages per workbook, just have Excel automatically set the module path as appropriate.

[1] https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3114/

Agreed. They could have easily shipped it with something like MicroPython.

Probably because most users of excel don't have any experience installing and running Python which is even a pain in the ass for people that know Python lol.

You also have people using Excel on iOS, and Android devices. This allows them to use and read Python in their spreadsheets.

>Probably because most users of excel don't have any experience installing and running Python which is even a pain in the ass for people that know Python lol.

An embedded Python is about 10 MiB. I just checked. Excel could easily have its own separate copy.

But don't you need to install lot of packages for it to be useful?

Based on the announcement it looks like the standard data-science libraries (numpy, pandas, matplotlib, seaborne) will be available. The covers a lot of use cases. However I would really appreciate the ability to set the python interpreter to whatever I want. Then I could access the niche libraries I need (shout-out to JSBSim for open source flight dynamic modelling). Or even better, hooking up my organizations custom libraries we built for our own specific data analysis applications. Huge value add. Shame this likely won't be possible. Unless I've misunderstood some part of this.

there's always Grist. its not a clone of excel but its a spreadsheet/hybrid database so it does some similar things, but most importantly let's you use python for formulas and also has a self hosted option if you want to run it locally

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