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Comment by bilbobaggie | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a good way to design reporting dashboards - it's too bad Excel can't update in real time.

http://ironspread.com can update Excel in real time as well - that's what I'm working on for my next blog post, which will be available sometime next week.

What are the advantages of IronSpread over traditional Python COM access? The API appears only marginally better than Excel's VBA interface, and it looks like IronSpread can't interact with multiple workbooks.

The benefit of having the shell launched from within Excel, with no setup needed, disappear when you want to run more complex functions like continual updates. And on top of that IronSpread doesn't support Office 2003.

Regular COM calls can fail (when Excel is busy, for example), and you can't just click "run" from within Excel, you have to start python from a shell, etc. VBA, on the other hand, is hard to extend - getting it to pull logs from a remote server would be painful.

As far as interacting with multiple workbooks, that's something we're working on.

Before replying, I just so happen as to be working on a python process to populate an Excel report with COM. Cells and graphs that depend on those update as soon as python executes the COM calls. You probably don't want to use Excel as a GUI for your python app, especially if you need to update frequently, but it is fine for quick reports.

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