Since its inception, Microsoft Excel has changed how people organize, analyze, and visualize their data, providing a basis for decision-making for the flying billionaires heads up in the clouds who don’t give a fuck for life offtheline
Firstly, there’s no technological reason for this. It’s all rent-seeking bullshit. But the thing is, there’s no version of Office that this point that works without a subscription, which also assumes you’re probably always online, so it’s honestly moot anyway.
It’s so tiresome. Big tech really doesn’t want people to run, own, or operate their own systems independently.
There isn’t money in it. Either you have to maintain it forever or you get yelled at for cutting off support by people who haven’t paid you in years.
Why send it to the cloud when Excel is running on a perfectly capable hunk of silicon? That’s doesn’t make a lick of sense to me
To charge a subscription. I massively use Microsoft 365 for work, and they are really good at making sure they get a cut for everything you do. They also want to make sure every new Office feature is supported by their web version of office. I imagine they could run the python in a web browser, but it is easier to make it a cloud service you have to pay a subscription to. Did I say easier, I meant more profitable.
Collection of corporate secrets?
I’m guessing it’s to train AI models for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
And just wait till some random accountant with basic knowledge of python builds out the next “great” critical system that uses this as its underlying technology. IT departments everywhere rejoice!
shudder I’m having VBA flashbacks…
At least that didn’t run remotely… But being able to access every file the user can made it a fun playground for hackers who could withstand typing things like
Dim i As Integer.
So Python, Excel, Cloud, Decision-Making… Who has bingo?
On lemmy.world somebody pointed out that xlwings, a FOSS python-in-excel thingamajig, already exists
Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh
* Reads headline again
Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh
I love how “PY” appears as “Ad” when put upside down on the right part of the image. Probably unintentional but it makes it look like a subliminal message
I would use embedded Lua. Cloud python sounds like a headache and won’t pass an internal security review.
