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The video is amazing if you're a coder and might need to use excel at some point (access columns by name?! sign me up!). However, what I love about excel is to
by phn 7y ago
The video is amazing if you're a coder and might need to use excel at some point (access columns by name?! sign me up!).
However, what I love about excel is to see what it enables people without formal programming training to do with data, and using functional programming on top of that!
Is there any tool that comes even close in terms of power, accessibility and ubiquity? What would such a tool even look like?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Enginerrrd 7y agoI'd love to see excel running python under the hood with easy integrations to numpy and matplotlib and all that. There actually are a couple such projects I've been meaning to check out. In essence, I've spent a lot of my career modeling things in excel. For quick, easily shareable prototypes(to pseudo-technical people), excel is great. But add any real complexity and I rapidly find myself using some UGLY hacks to get the functionality that would be trivial if I could just iterate over the data more explicitly. If I could just click a cell and set the output equal to a python function return value, man would that be a tool. THE tool even. I don't really want to learn VBA or something clunky and not very useful outside of that niche context. I already keep too many programming languages in my head between python, c++, FORTRAN, and some bash scripts.
- abakker 7y agoCheck out XLwings. It can do some pretty handy stuff.
- Enginerrrd 7y agoThat is one of the projects I've been meaning to check out!
- rch 7y agoFor larger datasets check out IGOR Pro.