6 ms·

》Python calculations run in Microsoft’s Cloud No thanks!

by hathym 3y ago

cardamomo 3y ago
That caught my attention too! I'm curious why they would choose this model.
- brokencode 3y ago
  Probably because Excel runs in a web browser nowadays and they want to avoid creating a separate way of running Python locally for a locally installed copy of Excel. Maybe they will in the future, but it makes sense to start with the approach that will work in both web and local installs.
  - tigeroil 3y ago
    Looking at what they're doing with Outlook I'd bet money that they intend to replace the desktop version of Excel with the web version sooner or later.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      That's got to be the death-knell for Excel. It might be better in every conceivable way but going web-only only makes Sheets look more attractive to the people doing the buying. And you can run JS in your Sheets right now.
    - walthamstow 3y ago
      I agree but expect that Excel will be the very last app of the suite that they make web-only. Excel heads like my wife absolutely hate the web version.
      - kaashif 3y ago
        A lot of people in finance are Excel heads and hate the web version. And they have a lot of money to throw around, surely Microsoft cares about them. I really don't see them killing the desktop version.
        pessimizer 3y ago
        I could see the prices going up to Bloomberg-terminal level, though, and everybody normal having to settle for Excel 365.
        rvba 3y ago
        They are killing the deskrop version with sharepoint. Sharepoint and web-shared files make it very difficult to link spreadsheets between each other, even one way around. In theory it works, in practice it doesnt. (PowerQuery is an inconvenient stopgap to simple links)
      - csdvrx 3y ago
        > Excel heads like my wife absolutely hate the web version. Have her try Excel 2010 or 2007 running on Wine (whether using WSL or natively) For people who want their spreadsheet offline, it's wonderful: fast and stable.
        pessimizer 3y ago
        This is good news. I did not know this.
    - HelloMcFly 3y ago
      I dread this day greatly, but it's definitely coming.
  - v7n 3y ago
    I'm positive they've at least toyed with the idea of running a Python interpreter in a WebAssembly module, which should work in both environments _and_ provide some isolation. The telemetry settings, I guess, wouldn't need to be changed to call home about performance/errors. I can't attest to the performance of such technique for now, though, or guess why they could have deemed it not worth pursuing at the time being.
  - kbelder 3y ago
    In my corporate experience, casual usage of excel is in the cloud. Any large, complicated, or db-connected spreadsheet is done on local installations. The list of what snacks people are bringing to the potluck is in excel online (or google sheets). The excel sheet that is pulling information from a database, mashing it up, displaying it in a dozen different pivots... that is going to be local.
- twen_ty 3y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1987/ https://xkcd.com/1987/
- Our_Benefactors 3y ago
  A lot of people who use excel heavily are not really “programmers” and don’t have strong fundamentals or an appetite to manage their own software stack. This also simplifies development on MS end by only needing to validate a single python version.
  - abenga 3y ago
    Then they should embed the supported version of python in Excel and manage it automatically for them. This can be validated with Excel before release.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
      This seems like the only solution. Do not copy all of Python’s warts, but offer a curated experience. Microsoft Experience (TM) with fixed APIs, no package management or dealing with ecosystem churn.
      - Spivak 3y ago
        It will never work because Python is the ecosystem. Having Python without the ability to tap the huge catalogue of existing software makes the integration worthless. The first thing someone will want to do is use Pandas on a live spreadsheet.
        kortex 3y ago
        If you read TFA, you'd see that the python env comes with a bunch of the favorites (pandas, matplotlib) baked in.
        0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
        The use case is someone in Excel who does not want to write VBA. You do not need to offer the entire ecosystem, just a slightly better language to handle more sophisticated modeling needs.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  Easier to debug a backend than clients code, single implementation, faster updates, and performance not limited by device. At the cost of privacy. Consider msft could sell this to you but they chose to let you borrow it instead.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  The answer is in the question. They chose this model so that Python calculations would run in the Microsoft cloud, operating on data that resides in the Microsoft cloud. When your code runs on the cloud, they get paid. When your data lives in their cloud, they get paid.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  Because Python, with the required numerical analysis libraries is a pain to setup, and there are a ton of ways for it to get messed up. Doing everything in the cloud massively simplifies deployment and support.
  - pid-1 3y ago
    Microsoft could ship its own Python distro within Excel. The biggest problem is that historically Guido / the Steering Council have avoided being involved in how py libs are distribuited, so there are many ways to do everything. But if you do have an opinion and means to enforce it, mantaining a Python environment can be a quite smooth experience.
    - fullstop 3y ago
      Doesn't Guido work for Microsoft now?
      - pid-1 3y ago
        He does
    - WorldMaker 3y ago
      A complication here is how large the Python distro this appears to be using is. I don't know if you've ever set up a container with all of anaconda, scikit, statsmodels, pandas, Matplotlib, seaborn, and more but it gets pretty big. A lot of people would complain about the bloat if Excel installed it by default. Another complication is they claim the container isn't just "a docker container", but for increased security isolation (they don't want a repeat of VBA malware) it's a mini-VM focused to run on top of Hyper-V (the Windows Hypervisor) itself. That's a really complicated install process on the average machine (like installing WSL2) that sometimes involves flipping entire Windows Features on, so also something unlikely to be a smooth experience out of the box for Excel. It might be neat if they made that an optional install and let users have offline support, but it sounded like they wanted to focus on online and collaborative UX first.
- ltdanimal 3y ago
  Looking at all the packages available, I'm sure that's why. You make it a much simpler thing to just develop that runtime for a known environment that you control vs a browser/local that requires a lot more engineering effort to make sure it works correctly for everyone.
  - JBorrow 3y ago
    You could ship that known environment as an optional download.
- inglor 3y ago
  My guess is that it makes it easier to work on large files which is common without downloading the whole file and it makes CoPilot related efforts much easier. I work on Excel but not this feature and am happy to ask around if people are interested.
  - felixgallo 3y ago
    The last thing in the universe I'm interested when editing Excel is making CoPilot related efforts any easier.
- ec109685 3y ago
  Sandboxing python enough that millions of users could safely pass around excel workbooks is a super hard problem, especially when you allow third party libraries. Forcing it to run in an isolated environment they control simplifies the problem greatly.
  - jasonjayr 3y ago
    Windows has it's own implementation of containers, and with a docker-like structure, and xlsx being a zip file, excel could simply have a dockerfile like structure "FROM excel-python:2023" "COPY xlsx:scripts/" etc. new versions of excel could keep the last few 'base' containers, or if they are in love with the cloud, the signed, verified base images could be pulled on request.
    - ec109685 3y ago
      The latest Windows does, but Excel is used across tons and tons of devices, and you'd want compatibility across them all.
- nixass 3y ago
  As soons as nonsense like this comes about you can tell straight away that it's not in user's favor. It's probably to tie you into subscription, data mining, selling mined data to ad companies and squeez every single dollar they can out of you
- r00fus 3y ago
  Who's the CEO of Microsoft again? Satya would love this approach.
lanza 3y ago
Yup, as somebody who desperately wants great python integration in my suite of spreadsheets I'm not even going to consider trying this.
- anaisconce 3y ago
  You can try Grist. Spreadsheet with Python formula support, and open source. https://www.getgrist.com/ https://www.getgrist.com/ https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/ https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/

》Python calculations run in Microsoft’s Cloud No thanks!

by hathym 3y ago

》Python calculations run in Microsoft’s Cloud No thanks!

cardamomo 3y ago

That caught my attention too! I'm curious why they would choose this model.

brokencode 3y ago
Probably because Excel runs in a web browser nowadays and they want to avoid creating a separate way of running Python locally for a locally installed copy of Excel. Maybe they will in the future, but it makes sense to start with the approach that will work in both web and local installs.
- tigeroil 3y ago
  Looking at what they're doing with Outlook I'd bet money that they intend to replace the desktop version of Excel with the web version sooner or later.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    That's got to be the death-knell for Excel. It might be better in every conceivable way but going web-only only makes Sheets look more attractive to the people doing the buying. And you can run JS in your Sheets right now.
  - walthamstow 3y ago
    I agree but expect that Excel will be the very last app of the suite that they make web-only. Excel heads like my wife absolutely hate the web version.
    - kaashif 3y ago
      A lot of people in finance are Excel heads and hate the web version. And they have a lot of money to throw around, surely Microsoft cares about them. I really don't see them killing the desktop version.
      - pessimizer 3y ago
        I could see the prices going up to Bloomberg-terminal level, though, and everybody normal having to settle for Excel 365.
      - rvba 3y ago
        They are killing the deskrop version with sharepoint. Sharepoint and web-shared files make it very difficult to link spreadsheets between each other, even one way around. In theory it works, in practice it doesnt. (PowerQuery is an inconvenient stopgap to simple links)
    - csdvrx 3y ago
      > Excel heads like my wife absolutely hate the web version. Have her try Excel 2010 or 2007 running on Wine (whether using WSL or natively) For people who want their spreadsheet offline, it's wonderful: fast and stable.
      - pessimizer 3y ago
        This is good news. I did not know this.
  - HelloMcFly 3y ago
    I dread this day greatly, but it's definitely coming.
- v7n 3y ago
  I'm positive they've at least toyed with the idea of running a Python interpreter in a WebAssembly module, which should work in both environments _and_ provide some isolation. The telemetry settings, I guess, wouldn't need to be changed to call home about performance/errors. I can't attest to the performance of such technique for now, though, or guess why they could have deemed it not worth pursuing at the time being.
- kbelder 3y ago
  In my corporate experience, casual usage of excel is in the cloud. Any large, complicated, or db-connected spreadsheet is done on local installations. The list of what snacks people are bringing to the potluck is in excel online (or google sheets). The excel sheet that is pulling information from a database, mashing it up, displaying it in a dozen different pivots... that is going to be local.
twen_ty 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/1987/ https://xkcd.com/1987/
Our_Benefactors 3y ago
A lot of people who use excel heavily are not really “programmers” and don’t have strong fundamentals or an appetite to manage their own software stack. This also simplifies development on MS end by only needing to validate a single python version.
- abenga 3y ago
  Then they should embed the supported version of python in Excel and manage it automatically for them. This can be validated with Excel before release.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    This seems like the only solution. Do not copy all of Python’s warts, but offer a curated experience. Microsoft Experience (TM) with fixed APIs, no package management or dealing with ecosystem churn.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      It will never work because Python is the ecosystem. Having Python without the ability to tap the huge catalogue of existing software makes the integration worthless. The first thing someone will want to do is use Pandas on a live spreadsheet.
      - kortex 3y ago
        If you read TFA, you'd see that the python env comes with a bunch of the favorites (pandas, matplotlib) baked in.
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
        The use case is someone in Excel who does not want to write VBA. You do not need to offer the entire ecosystem, just a slightly better language to handle more sophisticated modeling needs.
kuchenbecker 3y ago
Easier to debug a backend than clients code, single implementation, faster updates, and performance not limited by device. At the cost of privacy. Consider msft could sell this to you but they chose to let you borrow it instead.
kspacewalk2 3y ago
The answer is in the question. They chose this model so that Python calculations would run in the Microsoft cloud, operating on data that resides in the Microsoft cloud. When your code runs on the cloud, they get paid. When your data lives in their cloud, they get paid.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
Because Python, with the required numerical analysis libraries is a pain to setup, and there are a ton of ways for it to get messed up. Doing everything in the cloud massively simplifies deployment and support.
- pid-1 3y ago
  Microsoft could ship its own Python distro within Excel. The biggest problem is that historically Guido / the Steering Council have avoided being involved in how py libs are distribuited, so there are many ways to do everything. But if you do have an opinion and means to enforce it, mantaining a Python environment can be a quite smooth experience.
  - fullstop 3y ago
    Doesn't Guido work for Microsoft now?
    - pid-1 3y ago
      He does
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    A complication here is how large the Python distro this appears to be using is. I don't know if you've ever set up a container with all of anaconda, scikit, statsmodels, pandas, Matplotlib, seaborn, and more but it gets pretty big. A lot of people would complain about the bloat if Excel installed it by default. Another complication is they claim the container isn't just "a docker container", but for increased security isolation (they don't want a repeat of VBA malware) it's a mini-VM focused to run on top of Hyper-V (the Windows Hypervisor) itself. That's a really complicated install process on the average machine (like installing WSL2) that sometimes involves flipping entire Windows Features on, so also something unlikely to be a smooth experience out of the box for Excel. It might be neat if they made that an optional install and let users have offline support, but it sounded like they wanted to focus on online and collaborative UX first.
ltdanimal 3y ago
Looking at all the packages available, I'm sure that's why. You make it a much simpler thing to just develop that runtime for a known environment that you control vs a browser/local that requires a lot more engineering effort to make sure it works correctly for everyone.
- JBorrow 3y ago
  You could ship that known environment as an optional download.
inglor 3y ago
My guess is that it makes it easier to work on large files which is common without downloading the whole file and it makes CoPilot related efforts much easier. I work on Excel but not this feature and am happy to ask around if people are interested.
- felixgallo 3y ago
  The last thing in the universe I'm interested when editing Excel is making CoPilot related efforts any easier.
ec109685 3y ago
Sandboxing python enough that millions of users could safely pass around excel workbooks is a super hard problem, especially when you allow third party libraries. Forcing it to run in an isolated environment they control simplifies the problem greatly.
- jasonjayr 3y ago
  Windows has it's own implementation of containers, and with a docker-like structure, and xlsx being a zip file, excel could simply have a dockerfile like structure "FROM excel-python:2023" "COPY xlsx:scripts/" etc. new versions of excel could keep the last few 'base' containers, or if they are in love with the cloud, the signed, verified base images could be pulled on request.
  - ec109685 3y ago
    The latest Windows does, but Excel is used across tons and tons of devices, and you'd want compatibility across them all.
nixass 3y ago
As soons as nonsense like this comes about you can tell straight away that it's not in user's favor. It's probably to tie you into subscription, data mining, selling mined data to ad companies and squeez every single dollar they can out of you
r00fus 3y ago
Who's the CEO of Microsoft again? Satya would love this approach.

lanza 3y ago

Yup, as somebody who desperately wants great python integration in my suite of spreadsheets I'm not even going to consider trying this.

anaisconce 3y ago
You can try Grist. Spreadsheet with Python formula support, and open source. https://www.getgrist.com/ https://www.getgrist.com/ https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/ https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/