Excel Now Has Python - And It's Awesome

Wasn't expecting it, but I'm still excited.

▼ Time Stamps: ▼
0:00 - Intro
0:41 - The Tour
2:44 - The Built-In Examples
4:04 - More Basic & Practical Examples
4:52 - Actual Demonstration of the Feature
6:48 - Finally! Regex in Excel
8:10 - Looking Under the Hood
11:04 - Data Types Demo
14:23 - If-Statements
16:50 - Python Eval Function
17:50 - Comparing Python vs Excel Example

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[KwadSkwad]

I was pulled in to the professional developer review team to get updates and give feedback on this product as they were developing it (I've been seeing previews and giving feedback for just under a year before the announcement).

The remote only aspect of this was my biggest concern, every time. I pushed to ask why, if I have python installed locally, I cant execute code locally or even on my own servers. Depending on the sensitivity of your data, it's the difference in a viable product and a no-use-case product.

That said, I'm SUPER stoked about the union here for use cases where it's allowed... and finally glad they announced it to the public and released it to the wild :P

[BradsHacks]

3:31 Matplotlib is not Matlab. It's a Python library designed to resemble and be an alternative to Matlab.

[RockstarRomania]

For some time I prefered plotting graphs in MATLAB since Excel's graphs were not my cup of tea, so I'm excited to see that Matplotlib is directly supported!

[zarinloosli]

I could see this being big for teachers. Even compared to Jupyter notebooks, The way this allows you to see your entire program state at once and mix and match more familiar Excel functionality with less familiar code could be huge for someone trying to teach computer science in a middle school or high school setting

[natalieeuley]

This is super amazing. It's in a not super useful state right now, but the potential with this is so huge. VBA is completely impractical these days, so being able to use Python for stuff instead is so wonderful

[splitscim]

Although its use case could be limited, I think this could find some really good use in computer science classes. The way this helps to visualize arrays is awesome, and I'm sure classes can find ways to use this which are different and easier to understand than normal textbook examples of Python. I do really hope some code can be run locally without a subscription!

[RobBulmahn]

6:53 You can *kinda* do regex in Excel, but only by creating a User-Defined Function in VBA and utilizing the Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions library. It's not the prettiest implementation, nor the most performant, but it'll work using Excel's own built-in features.

[charliesumorok]

14:45 yes, it does interpret strings as strings by default. str is the class for strings in python.

[_SJ]

I'll give you a giant thumbs up, Professor Joe

[chicagotimesskateboarding_]

GOnna start watching you again. Your pretty much my second Computer Science professor 😂

[roywilson]

I just got the python ability in Excel, what I am most excited about is the ability to produce better charts and store/manipulate the data in a more organised way than Excel generally allows on the grid.

[Lampe]

17:40 Correction: Pyhton only evaluates variables, formulas or function calls with `eval()`, if you want to execute code that contains multiple lines or assigns variables you need `exec()`. Unfortunately that always returns `None`, so you'll have to pass in a dict as the second argument (as in `namespace = {}; exec('x = 5 # or other stuff', namespace)`) which then contains all variables set/imported/defined inside the evaluated code.

[cdvries]

Remember the PC? The Personal computer? For the first time one could do his/her own computing at home instead having to rent time to use the big mainframe computer at campus or university. The first pc pioneers were excited that they could finally do all the computing at home without having to pay per hour. And what are we doing now? Right, going back to the 60s where the computing is done on someone else his computer. What the bleep, micro transactions in excel functions, get out of here. Bring the P(personal) back in computing

[MagicBoterham]

I wonder how good the Python in the cloud in Excel on Wine on Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux integration is.

[Its-Just-Zip]

So on the topic of them running it remotely. I'm not super happy with that but I understand the reasoning. But since windows has hyper-V included, at least the pro version, I would have liked to see an option to have Excel spin up a hyper-V container and run the code there instead of remotely

[fluentmoheshwar]

I wish it will allow using local python instead of cloud. Also allow using Visual Studio Code instead of that integrated code editor without any syntax highlighting

[harryhack]

One thing I've learnt during my programming career is that "eval is evil". I wouldn't use it, even if the code is running on a separate VM, there might still be vulnerabilities that could allow malicious code to "escape" it and do nefarious things into your host system.

[funnydj]

Thanks, Joe, your making my day better.

[RexfordHaugen]

19:05 An alternative to nested IF statements natively in Excel is using a combination of an IFNA and IFS. For example:

=IFNA(IFS(C7="A", C10, C7="B", C11, C7="C", C12), "Invalid Choice!")

[Blackilykat]

what a big scam. Surely a big ass company like Microsoft could figure out how to run it safely in your own computer, but yhe good ol' "safety concerns we could avoid force us to only offer this as a service instad of a product". Customers are paying regularly to not have the latest features. And they will be happy to throw more money at should come with what they already pay!

Imagine if your web browser forced you to pay a subscription to run every website's code in the browser's owner's server instead of your computer, for "safety concerns". While it's possible that exploits coild lead to the code being unsafe to run, it has never been a big enough concern to not let users run the code in their own machine.
This feature is bullshit and it hurts to know that people won't see the scam and will happily pay for it.