Since its inception, Microsoft Excel has changed how people organize, analyze, and visualize their data, providing a basis for decision-making for the flying billionaires heads up in the clouds who don’t give a fuck for life offtheline
Are they not gonna give a bullshit reason for this? Just straight up give us your data and it’s secure on our Azure instances?
Seems a bit odd to not have the option to run python locally on my own machine
I would agree with you, if I’d never met a corporate executive. Anecdotal, but all the CEO’s I’ve ever met have got to grasp at any power that anyone will give them and then exploit it for profit as much as possible. If it ran locally, then they couldn’t charge a subscription fee. They even do the drug dealer trick of letting you have the first one free (there’s a preview period) and then taking it away unless you pay (the sub fee).
It would be very strange if you couldn’t just export your data to csv and then run a python script in a shell on it.
Python is slow enough as is, who the fuck thought adding a web request to that was a good idea‽
Python is fast enough, and generally quite a bit faster than complex spreadsheet formulas. I’ve seen formulas that can take minutes that Python could do in seconds. A web request isn’t going to matter that much.
Web requests are \very\ slow compared to CPU computations, not to mention that time has to be doubled since it’s a two-way route.
Sure, but it happens once. So as long as Python saves you more than the half second or so round trip, it’ll be preferable.
I’d prefer it to be embedded, but I can absolutely see it being useful even if it’s cloud-only.
Wouldn’t it need to send to the cloud and back every time you change one of the cells the script is depending on?
Yup, most likely. I’m saying the total calculation w/ Excel formulas is often greater than that round trip + computation time w/ Python. Excel formulas are pretty slow.
I haven’t seen how they were slower than just python.
Think huge formulas. I’ve seen formulas take minutes in Excel, but seconds when implemented better in a script. If you haven’t worked with massive formulas, you’re not the target market here.
Another application is accessing external APIs that don’t have internal support. If you’re accessing an external API, you’re already paying a network overhead cost, so adding another isn’t going to matter much.
Because it was so much easier to send data to the cloud than embed a Python interpreter. 🤦
I wouldn’t be surprised if there already is one in the monstrosity that is Excel
My guess is that they are seeing this as less likely to become a security hole.
Yep. Everyone in the thread asking this question seems clueless to me. Macros are already a threat. I can’t imagine what a shitshow full on python would be.
The Python API they gave doesn’t have disk access. Maybe somebody’ll discover an exploit but that’s for everything.
I can understand the cloud part. they wanted it work on the web and phones. They do know many businesses don’t want cloud, so I see a good chance they’ll ship it with embedded Python eventually.
Phones can also run Python and web is already a pretty separate version, I don’t see why they can’t only make the web version cloud.
Money, what else? Office 365 is a priority and this is an attempt to hasten adoption.
At least iPhone apps usually redirect Python tasks to their servers. That’s one reason there are projects like Tensorflow Light.
For instance? All the python apps I’ve downloaded so far seem to function offline.
You can look up Tensorflow Light.
That’s just machine learning which is very resource consuming. It has no relation to your purported case of phones redirecting all python tasks to servers.
Okay, I dug more to find out I’m wrong.
But isn’t ML technology a thing Excel offers with its new Python interface?
Not really. I don’t expect them to have a cloud instance running that long.
You can even get third party libraries, though it’s limited compared to less restrictive environments.
Someone on lemmy.world pointed out the FOSS xlwings also exists.
