Microsoft released a new preview version of Microsoft Excel today. Main new feature in this preview is the support for the Python programming language. Many data analysts are used to writing Python for analysis, which will soon be possible in Excel as well. This will give Excel wings.
For the basic Excel user, today’s news is little exciting, but for advanced Excel users, its a giant step forward. Microsoft Excel is getting support for Python, making it finally possible to use the well-known programming language for data analyses in Excel. To take advantage of this, you do have to sign up for the Microsoft 365 Insider program.
For now, Python will only be available in the desktop version of the popular spreadsheet program. Microsoft chose to perform Python calculations in the cloud, and not on the user’s PC. It is unclear why Microsoft chose this route; in principle, Python can run just fine on a PC.
Perhaps Microsoft plans to take Excel to an even higher level by making all calculations in the cloud for more extensive spreadsheets. So that the application can no longer crash or freeze due to a lack of processing power when spreadsheets get too big. It’s also possible research shows that Python will be used mainly on large data sets and not on small data sets.
Microsoft is working with the well-known data platform Anaconda to provide Python support in Excel. Excel uses Anaconda’s Python distribution, which contains 400 selected and verified libraries offering even more features. For example, popular libraries such as Matplotlib and Seaborn are available for data visualization, scikit-learn for machine learning and pandas for working with tables. To write Python code, one starts the formula with =PY.
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