A Snake Between the Sheets

Spreadsheets are amazing! They allow non programmers to create complex computations.

You'll find moms creating budget for the next family vacation, as well as fathers tracing their stock investments and many more.

Professionals also use spreadsheets all the time. Every analytics team that I work with uses several spreadsheets. Managers use them for sophisticated "back of the envelope" calculations and even to track team progress.

At times, you'll reach the limitation of spreadsheets. You might need a custom regression, or to fetch data from an external API. The usual solution is to export the spreadsheet to CSV and then continue the computation elsewhere. Elsewhere being Python, with is the language for data analytics and data science.

The Python program can emit CSV at the end of the run, and then you can import it to a spreadsheet and run more calculations or generate some nice charts.

Recently, Microsoft announced that you can run Python directly from Excel. This means you can skip the import/export steps and do everything inside Excel. You'll find it takes less time to complete your tasks, and the quick feedback cycle will make the work more fun.

What's even better, that it's not only Python, but the Anaconda Python distribution. This distribution is full of scientific tools such as the Pandas data analysis and manipulation library and visualization tools such as Matplotlib and seaborn, which will draw charts directly in Excel.

I'm sure more and more people will take their first programming steps inside Excel with Python. The data-driven future looks very promising.

If you want to learn more, check out LinkedIn Learning's Python in Excel course by Scott Simpson.