My Thoughts on Python in Excel

Hi all,

I've been thinking a lot about Python in Excel lately so I wrote it all up in my first blog post in a long while!

Here’s the TL;DR:

• We wanted an alternative to VBA, but got an alternative to the Excel formula language

• Integrating the Jupyter notebook cells inside the Excel grid was a mistake

• Python in Excel isn’t suitable for Python beginners nor for interactive data analysis

• Right now, there are too many restrictions (can’t use your own packages and can’t connect to web APIs)

Here are the current use cases I see for Python in Excel:

• Computationally intensive things like Monte Carlo simulations

• AI stuff via the included packages (scikit-learn, nltk, statsmodels, imbalanced-learn, gensim)

• Advanced visualizations via Matplotlib/Seaborn

• Time-series analysis (this is one of Excel’s blind spots)

• Not sure about data cleaning/data analysis: since you almost certainly need Power Query, it may actually be simpler and faster to just stick to Power Query (instead of using Power Query and Python in Excel together)

You can read the full post online (and leave a comment there!):

Thanks for reading!
Felix