Microsoft is bringing popular programming language Python to Excel. A public preview of the feature is available today, allowing Excel users to manipulate and analyze data from Python.
You won’t need to install any additional software or set up an add-on to access the functionality, as Python integration in Excel will be part of Excel’s built-in connectors and Power Query. Microsoft is also adding a new PY function that allows Python data to be exposed within the grid of an Excel spreadsheet. Through a partnership with Anaconda, an enterprise Python repository, popular Python libraries like pandas, statsmodels, and Matplotlib will be available in Excel.
Fantastic news. This will help me immensely!
Having it run locally would be even more help for my use cases. I often have lists of IP addresses in my sheets, and it would be helpful to ping them directly from Python code. But I can work around that with fping or nmap.
This integration won’t allow you to do that. Python will not run locally, but instead on Microsoft’s platform (likely Azure).
If you’re just reading some simple data from Excel, there are several ways of accomplishing this already. For example, Pandas has
read_excel()and there is also openpyxl. You could even use those tools to write the results back to Excel. Things get more complicated though if the Excel file is something more than just a simple list.And honestly, for data you should be using formats like .csv anyways. i really don’t see who this update is supposed to target. If you’re using Python, the data must be large enough to warrant its use.
Indeed
‘Tis better to .split() in the cloud than never to .split() at all