It's been 15 years since Steve Ballmer, then one of Microsoft's top executives, called software cancer-free. Curiously, it was Ballmer himself who started the path that had a new milestone when Python finally reached Excel.
Microsoft's integration with open source technologies began when, faced with the failure of Silverlight, an aspiring competitor to Adobe Flash, the company publicly supported the HTML5 standard.
From hate to love
Of course, Microsoft did not develop its "love" for free software tools spontaneously. If a grandmother were writing this article she would say "Necessity has the face of a heretic."
Satya Nadella, the current president of Microsoft, was the leader of one of the few divisions in which Microsoft had not become a quasi-monopoly. Linux was much better than WindowsNT on servers and companies such as IBM, Novell and Red Hat developed corporate services based on it at more competitive costs.
Another market in which Microsoft products have been losing ground is that of developers, lThe proprietary languages developed by the firm were no match for C++, Java, or Python. Integrated development environments like Eclipse or Netbeans were gaining users at the expense of Visual Studio.
With the characteristic pragmatism of capitalism, Microsoft launched its first product for Linux, a version of Visual Studio. It also made Office compatible with the ODF format, supported various distributions on its Azure cloud platform, and surprised us all with Windows Subsystem for Linux, the ability to run distributions on your own operating system.
But, there was still a surprise.
Python came to Excel
For decades, spreadsheets were the preferred tool for combining and analyzing complex data. However, as the amount of data increases and more complex manipulations are required, data scientists are turning more and more to the use of programming languages such as R, Julia or Python itself
Excel, like all applications in the Office suite, has an associated programming language known as Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). VBA can automate repetitive tasks, but it falls short of the power of a full programming language.
Trying to prolong the useful life of its application (And in the process get customers from Google Docs) Microsoft is testing a new feature that allows you to write Python code in a cell. The particularity is that the Python interpreter does not need to be installed on Windows, it runs in the Microsoft cloud and the result is displayed in the cell.
For now, it can only be used by those enrolled in the Insider program.
Its libraries can also be used with Python such as Matplotlib and seaborn for creating data representations such as bar charts, conventional line plots, heat maps, violin plots, and swarm plots. scikit-learn and statsmodels give Excel capabilities for machine learning, predictive analytics and forecasting, regression analysis, and time series modeling.
From Microsoft they assure that
The Python code used by Excel runs in the Microsoft Cloud with enterprise-grade security as a connected experience compatible with Microsoft 365. The Python code runs in its own isolated hypervisor container using Azure Container Instances and secure packages built on Anaconda source code. through a secure software supply chain. Python in Excel keeps your data private by preventing Python code from knowing who you are and by opening Internet workbooks more isolated within their own separate containers. Your workbook data can only be sent through the built-in Python function xl(), and the output of Python code can only be returned as a result of Excel's =PY() function.
To be able to use Python in Excel you have to join the Insider program. The feature will be available starting with beta channel build 16.0.16818.20000