Hacker News Reader

Comment by vecinu | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or is the recent surge of DataNitro scripts just proof of concepts? I don't really want to do get Facebook Likes in Excel or play Blackjack. They added a Python handler in Excel to do this, it isn't native.

My question is, why is this interesting?

View on HN

My guess is advertising. HN is their exact demographic / target users, and if you check the front page of "classic" HN where only old accounts can vote: http://news.ycombinator.org/classic It's gone. Someone gamed this to the front page

What's the threshold for an "old account"?

Joined in the first year of HN

I can't speak to the wider surge of DataNitro scripts, but this example is certainly useful to a lot of people.

I regularly have to check the social signals for a lot of URLs, and then wrangle the data in Excel. Now I can do it faster and more efficiently. :)

Also I wasn't aware of DataNitro until now, so I actually found this interesting too. I'll be thinking what I can come up with!

For me, it's still "proof of concept" right now. It's interesting because Python is much easier to use than VBA. Where I work, we use a lot of Excel and data from various sources. The ability to leverage Python code can be a big deal for me.

It's been possible to script Excel (and the rest of Office) using Python for probably 15 years now. I'm pretty sure the COM package is included with all the Win32 Python builds, but if not it's just a package install.

It's a bit disappointing that so many people don't learn about the tools they're using.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com