Microsoft is bringing popular programming language Python to Excel. A public preview of the feature is available today, allowing Excel users to manipulate and analyze data from Python.
You won’t need to install any additional software or set up an add-on to access the functionality, as Python integration in Excel will be part of Excel’s built-in connectors and Power Query. Microsoft is also adding a new PY function that allows Python data to be exposed within the grid of an Excel spreadsheet. Through a partnership with Anaconda, an enterprise Python repository, popular Python libraries like pandas, statsmodels, and Matplotlib will be available in Excel.
I’d like to see it. VBA is actually brilliant, you can make very very portable applications with intuitive user input and output interfaces (i.e. a cell range in Excel, and and version of tables and graphs you like as outputs)… But realistically who wants to use BASIC these days?
I usually say it in jest, but I’m not sure there is actually a better RAD (rapid application development) platform out there than Excel (with a bit of VBA as needed).