Excel + Python?

05.09.2023, to see all post click here.

Microsoft announced Excel integration of Python. While I am happy that more people will enjoy programming I am a bit terrified by the prospect that one day I will get approached by some finance bro: "Hey dude, can you put my sheet into like production??"

I am well-used to people giving me shitty Jupyter notebooks that have no listed packages and usually no function and asking me to make them into production. But this is going to be way worse, if people can just write python into any cell it will be quite a mess to figure out how any of it works...

I think what they should have done instead is to only allow using python to define new functions and having separate sheet for that - this could be visual studio in a separate tab allowing to edit only one file. The Excel file should also automatically list python and package versions to increase reproducibility - although that might be resolved by enforcing this to be cloud only. Also they partnered with Anaconda so versioning might not be such a problem.

Jupyter and python versions

The rant above made me think of another rant: why are jupyter notebooks such a mess?

Why isnt this information saved in the metadata of the notebook? This could be either a new cell type or could be automatically listed at the top of the file