110
Microsoft announces Python formulas in Excel... which have to get sent to the cloud
(techcommunity.microsoft.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
110 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37622 readers
502 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
Full disclosure, I work for MSFT, but I do not speak for them. I fucking hate python and am forced to write it a lot while working here, but I want to suggest there's a complementary technological reason for wanting to run it in the cloud. This isn't to say that MSFT will stand to make more money if you are using their cloud services, and I don't have any insight at all into the "gib us money plz" side of this business.
The reason: One of the biggest headaches for IT depts has been attack vectors through office productivity suites. Download a sketchy excel spreadsheet from someone, and suddenly custom macros are purposefully creating avenues for attack, or are attacks themselves. Ken and Debra in accounting aren't security people. They got a spreadsheet from an email that seems superficially plausible, so they pop it open. Suddenly, your entire org is ransomwared just because two people who are just doing their normal duties get tricked.
That's why the ol' VBA shit and all those fancy macro systems from the past got neutered. Sandboxed and isolated, removed entirely, whatever. But a good feature gets lost.
Enter The Cloud, or in other terms, "Someone Else's Computer". As in, someone else's computer out there, far from your corporate network, that has no ability to reach back through your security perimeter and have a rummage around your business guts. The worst thing that will happen is the attack-vector-spreadsheet, itself, might be compromised. Or Microsoft's cloud computers, which are, again, not your computers.
Anyway, that's honestly a great reason for it. And there's also the business cat reasons, which I don't like in principle; I always begrudge businesses their attempts at squeezing us for more and more every single fucking day. So anyway, it probably isn't worth it to the average home user, but IT departments are going to be thrilled, even if the tech budget is going to get even fatter paying for all these users using someone else's computer.
I have strong opinions about home users who can write Python already but choose to use excel, but I'll keep them to myself. They're elitist and basically just me being a little shit, so... you do you, boo.
But they house my information, and goodness knows Microsoft will not compensate me when my information gets leaked through no fault of mine.
No cloud, no how. Keep it local.
If you read the release, each spreadsheet gets to run in it's own isolated container in a hypervisor system. You literally have separation of information at the file level, which is good. But I absolutely agree with you that if you store things in the cloud, you don't own those things, you give them away and lease that access back under restrictive terms. I don't find it to be worth it, but countless other people disagree with me.
If I'm to get on my soapbox after all, I'll just say this: Use json or jsonl, use polars, use jupyter and seaborn/matplotlib-pyplot, keep your data lolcat, and never open Excel again.
Edit: unless someone sends you an xslx and you need to convert it to csv before you transform it to jsonl. If someone has a cli that'll turn xslx -> jsonl directly I'd be so happy.