
Microsoft Considers Adding Python as an Official Scripting Language to Excel - setra
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-considers-adding-python-as-an-official-scripting-language-to-excel/
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ChrisSD
Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15996753](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15996753)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15938873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15938873)

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campuscodi
This proves how much people like the idea.

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bsilvereagle
In case people aren't aware - you can use any language with COM bindings to
script Excel/Word/PowerPoint/Adobe/etc from outside the application.

Python has pywin32. Usually I have a python prompt and Excel open side by side
and highlight cells I'd like to modify in Excel and then switch to Python to
run the appropriate functions.

The COM API can be used interactively (attach to an existing instance or
launch the GUI) or automatically (launch an Excel instance but turn off
visibility).

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vanderZwan
> from outside the application.

And that's the thing holding back adoption, I bet.

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mastry
>> from outside the application. > And that's the thing holding back adoption,
I bet.

That, plus the painfully verbose and unintuitive COM API. If they add a Python
layer to Excel I would really like to see COM replaced with a simpler
(pythonic?) interface.

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snomad
This could be one of those things that definitely grabs developers attention
in a good way. I disagree it needs to be for all Office apps - if it was just
Excel and Access that would be plenty.

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uncle_d
Always been a mystery to me, why they have never added .NET language support.
16 years and counting...

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ToFab123
They have had .net support for many many many years although not as a
scripting language, but you have been able to write your "macros" in .net for
a long time, deploy the assembly to a web server and have excel, word, etc
download the code from there there. Its a little harder to deploy that an
inline macro but gives you a central location to update the code instead of
trying to tracking down and update all the copies of your word/excel
documents.

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mmjaa
I honestly feel that Lua would be a better fit, since the Lua table maps
pretty nicely to Excel cells... but I'm sure there's some reason that it would
unsuitable?

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sharemywin
I live in ohio and it's 6 degrees outside I'm aloud to be mean in the morning:

[https://stackify.com/popular-programming-
languages-2018/](https://stackify.com/popular-programming-languages-2018/)

~~~
mmjaa
Yeah, who cares about some dumb list? The point is why can't we put any - and
all/other - of these languages in the Excel runloop by now? You say Python, I
say Lua, someone else says Go.. seems to me that all of the above oughta have
a go at it. Excel is freakin' everywhere.

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murrayb
On the one hand this would definitely result in learning me some Python... on
the other hand I am somewhat sorry it is not Perl.

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cube2222
Why would you prefer Perl for it?

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murrayb
I find it easy to express myself in the language and I think it is a good fit
for the problem domain at least in terms of what Perl was traditionally good
for, "glue" and data processing.

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kim0
They should consider adding it to azure functions too!!

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rcarmo
It's coming. The 2.0 runtime and the new out-of-process model required some
changes, which are being tracked here:

[https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk-
script/wiki/Azure...](https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk-
script/wiki/Azure-Functions-runtime-2.0-known-issues)

But you _can_ use Python right now in the stable runtime--it's just not as
nice or full-featured, because of the way the 1.x runtime works.

(I work for Microsoft on an unrelated team, and I too am waiting for Python to
be back, hoping for 3.6 and asyncio)

