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Comment by itishappy | Hacker News Reader

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In general I'm very optimistic about the usefulness of AI to programmers but I can't think of much worse than an Excel sheet that's bundles a bunch of AI generated Python code from a quality assurance/correctness point of view!

I worked for a place a few years back that had stuff that was in C++/DCOM and written by someone snooting cocaine all day (both performance boosters) that the front end was an Excel spreadsheet. Now that was fragile.

I just can’t imagine what I can do here that I can’t do with a Python script using Pandas. Maybe visualization of data using Excel, in a way that makes it easier for boomers/accountants to understand?

basic interop like fetching data from s3 bucket, formatting it and showing as a table in excel would be a good use case, but not sure serverside python is needed for that.

more interesting idea could be using Excel as a jupyter-like front-end for the Python kernel. Imagine excel as a jupyter

Yeah, I think it's the compatibility with 'business language' for collaboration.

Most white-collar workers know how to use Excel to a really basic level of proficiency. Not many people know how to parse Python code.

It's also just a lot easier to work quickly in Excel. I dual boot Linux and Windows on my laptop so that I can have Windows keyboard shortcuts in Excel. If I need to do some lightweight financial modeling or analysis, it's dramatically faster (10x or more) for me to build a spreadsheet than write some Python/R code from scratch.

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