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I think Microsoft must have a very powerful lobby tackling this potential "end of an era" event. With more companies moving analytics from Excel to Python, oth

I think Microsoft must have a very powerful lobby tackling this potential "end of an era" event. With more companies moving analytics from Excel to Python, other data science tools, cloud or not... And governments adopting ODF as document standards. Not to mention the free beer.

thanatropism 9y ago
That's a drop in the ocean.
- guilhas 9y ago
  It can be a spark and all go downhill from there. You only need the first sucess example. * Governments/Councils start using this as an example. * Companies that work with the council start supporting Linux and LibreOffice. * Council worker might get a Linux as the next personal laptop buy.
freehunter 9y ago
Python works for data scientists, but the people who use Excel are not all data scientists. Python and Excel are as comparable as apples and oranges. They're both fruit, but that's literally all they have in common.
- angry_octet 9y ago
  People are looking for something better than Excel though, particularly for teams. Raw python won't work, it would be a chaos of copy pasted receipes and voodoo... VBA is bad enough. The spreadsheet model could be leveraged, but without free form tables and formula repetition. I'm torn about whether allowing explicit recursion or iteration is a good idea. It would have to include a visionary visual debugger.
- guilhas 9y ago
  Yes. But one of the arguments, in my previous company, for Excel over LO Calc, was speed for lots of data, data sources speed... With more tooling around the end user data will be less and more clean/prepared.
Sylos 9y ago
Microsoft did recently move their German headquarters from slightly outside of Munich's tax area to inside of Munich's tax area...
StreamBright 9y ago
Moving excel to python is entirely irrelevant here because this subject is not about an average human trying to use a text editor for general things (like writing documentation).

thanatropism 9y ago

That's a drop in the ocean.

guilhas 9y ago
It can be a spark and all go downhill from there. You only need the first sucess example. * Governments/Councils start using this as an example. * Companies that work with the council start supporting Linux and LibreOffice. * Council worker might get a Linux as the next personal laptop buy.

freehunter 9y ago

Python works for data scientists, but the people who use Excel are not all data scientists. Python and Excel are as comparable as apples and oranges. They're both fruit, but that's literally all they have in common.

angry_octet 9y ago
People are looking for something better than Excel though, particularly for teams. Raw python won't work, it would be a chaos of copy pasted receipes and voodoo... VBA is bad enough. The spreadsheet model could be leveraged, but without free form tables and formula repetition. I'm torn about whether allowing explicit recursion or iteration is a good idea. It would have to include a visionary visual debugger.
guilhas 9y ago
Yes. But one of the arguments, in my previous company, for Excel over LO Calc, was speed for lots of data, data sources speed... With more tooling around the end user data will be less and more clean/prepared.

Sylos 9y ago

Microsoft did recently move their German headquarters from slightly outside of Munich's tax area to inside of Munich's tax area...

StreamBright 9y ago

Moving excel to python is entirely irrelevant here because this subject is not about an average human trying to use a text editor for general things (like writing documentation).