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Microsoft announces Python formulas in Excel... which have to get sent to the cloud (techcommunity.microsoft.com)
submitted 1 year ago by Aatube@kbin.social to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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 off~~the~~line

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[–] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 67 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] dax@beehaw.org 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

Actually, I believe you just need to root out the networking and disk access then 90% of the attack surface vanished. At least it will not be persistant.

[–] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can see the case of just not wanting to build or bundle a python interpreter into Excel (since they're not going make having python installed on a local machine a dependency). But the security issue can make sense I suppose from a certain point of view. Don't agree with it, but I can understand it.

Also as a python dev, I fucking love python 😂

[–] dax@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They could easily vendor python in the excel distribution if they wanted to, though. In fact, it would be the smart thing to do from their perspective; expecting people to keep up to date python versions (and what counts as up to date and what counts as a needless forced upgrade just from typing import List for your typehints turns into : list is super plausibly arguable.)

I can't love python after all the pain and suffering I've had to go through packaging things from extension modules. I've never had a worse experience with computers, and I used to write coldfusion and java swing for money, so that's fucking saying something. The entire distutils ->setuptools->build/PEP517 + bdist vs. sdist is the least gratifying work in my entire career, by far. It's not even interesting, it's just shockingly poorly documented and your only plausible solution is "try literally everything and see which things work". I shouldn't have to fucking emulate a quantum computer just to ship a fucking bdist.

[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Just the other day, we had to create a requirements.txt with a single character . to get a tool to correctly install dependencies from our pyproject.toml. The tool only supports reading from requirements.txt and setup.py, but we had a pyproject.toml with configurations for many of the other tools we use.

I keep wanting to think it's improving over time, but the reality seems to be simpler than that. It's just changing over time. That being said, type hints were a welcome addition, and occasionally they add new features that make sense. They also add features like the walrus operator, but we don't talk about those.

[–] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

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.

[–] dax@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] upstream@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Works for Microsoft and hates Python. Checks out at least.

IMHO opinions (read: “hard takes”) on popular and useful programming languages doesn’t have to be part of any disclosure, it just creates unnecessary drama.

At the end of the day programming languages are tools, and Python is a good tool. Part hammer, part Swiss Army knife.

Sure, you can grab your compressor, a hose and a nail gun, but the fact is that with Python I can process CSV documents that excel struggle to open in less time than it will take most people to setup a new project in Visual Studio.

I fully agree that running stuff in the cloud may be good for security, but it will probably also open the door for a number of security holes that may or may not be exploited before being patched.

Giving full access to random scripts on random people’s computers is begging for problems.

Sandboxing only works until there’s an escape. But IMO that should have been the target. Proper ground up sandboxing.

On the other hand - how on earth do you make sure that it’s escape proof? I certainly wouldn’t carry that responsibility.

If it’s Python or something else doesn’t matter, but Python certainly carries a lot of the “accessibility” that VB did way back when they made VBA.

Will be interesting to see what people make of it. And if they’ve managed to make the programming interfaces better than during the VBA era.

[–] dax@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I feel like you think you're talking to a different person than I am. My work computer is a linux box, my work IDE is either Jetbrains CLion or Pycharm, and my 40-hour-a-week-job is writing open source software that I release on behalf of Microsoft. So, yanno, if you want python libraries for graph spectral embeddings or approximate nearest neighbor algorithms, that's me.

The only thing I know about Visual Studio is it is distinctly not built for me, and I don't use it. I wouldn't know the first thing about creating a project in Visual Studio, because in the last 7 years I haven't created a single one in it. Gradle and Kotlin or SBT and Scala, sure. Python and pip, sure.

My problem with Python has nothing to do with the language itself. It has to do with the packaging. Remember that bit about me releasing open source software for Microsoft? Yeah. I'm stuck doing a lot of the packaging.

Friends don't let friends use Python, because then they're complicit in the frankly inhumane conditions in the pypa pit of eternal despair. Hug your numpy packager today!

[–] upstream@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

If I misunderstood it’s probably because of the way you represented yourself.

Python packaging sucks, definitely, but saying you hate Python because packaging sucks (and you do it a lot) is bit like saying you hate the US because US immigration sucks (and you travel through immigration a lot).

Sure, you could hold the opinion, but I think most people would differentiate between the two positions.

However, kudos for working on OS! I’d give you a hug if I could!

[–] Aatube@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I've tried the EAP CLion before for a while. Are the suggestions as good as IDEA's? Last time I tried it was average and just on par with clangd.

[–] Aatube@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As someone has noted above the API doesn't have disk access.

[–] dax@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I wonder if the model is "all data you want to process on has to already be in the sheets" or something?

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

See, I kind of see all this, but they control the OS, all the enterprise policy tools, and the software. They could very easily facilitate IT locking execution to the cloud (or custom environments) for their domains without ridiculously limiting people who know what they're doing and want tools that aren't dogshit.

[–] dax@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I sometimes question whether it's as easy as we think; surely they'd be able to have done the same for vba scripts, but instead they just yanked the whole dang thing. I don't know enough of Windows to have any idea tbh.

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just don't see it. They control the whole stack and permissions structure from top to bottom. If they wanted IT to authorize every module you import (to limit low level access), they could do it. If they wanted to allow IT to host their own cloud with whatever constraints they want, they could do it.

This is to increase reliance on their cloud. I don't see any other explanation.

[–] dax@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it's easier and less risky to bank on a whole-ass isolated OS than it is to bank on making sure you have perfect coverage and mitigations in place for every possible module that ships with conda (not miniconda). But honestly, they could just require that Hyper-V is allowed if you want Python in Excel and offload it into a tiny little excel-hypervisor-daemon, same as they're doing in the cloud.

Ultimately, it's all just us reading tea leaves tho. I don't feel super strongly about any of the hypothetical motives talked about in this thread - not even my own. They're all possible, and reasonable people would make different decisions based on their priorities, and we don't even know what the priorities were of the team that decided to ship this. I mean, obviously they want to make money; but making money can be done by asking your customers to pony up more, or it can be done by having a strong degree of confidence that you won't get your ass handed to you when an xslx doesn't tap into cortana tts and try to extend your car's warranty or whatever. Maybe it's both. Maybe they want to start shipping Python with Windows but it isn't ready yet, so they're doing this Up There for a bit first. Or none of these. My goal in my initial response was just to say "it could be this too", in reference to the "there is no possible other explanation". There is a possible explanation. Heck, I gave you two new ones in this response alone! I only submit it as an entrant, not necessarily as the frontrunner.

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Giving organizational policy administrators control over execution doesn't preclude using the cloud as your primary or strongest security model.

It's sincerely not difficult to allow the organization to literally sign the executable of the interpreter they want to use, to explicitly enable or disable specific modules from base Python, to enable specific external libraries by ID through Conda or by signing them with their own keys, or to pass the scripts to their own signed server for execution with any mitigations they want. They wouldn't be assuming any liability or even bad will if a company's IT fucked it up and left an attack vector exposed.

There is not a good faith explanation for forcing execution to the cloud. It only protects against bad configuration, at the cost of a hell of a lot of capability to a competent organization. Defaults are way more than enough to mitigate any exposure for Microsoft. Not providing the right way to do it as an option is all about control.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Why would they want that? They want to maximize profits for the software they make. That's almost all tech companies today.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] ramble81@lemm.ee 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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!

[–] 0110010001100010@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

shudder I'm having VBA flashbacks...

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] drwho@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Or using the SQL Server API to access the screen reader and manipulate the server's DVD-ROM drive.

[–] nottheengineer@feddit.de 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At this point microsoft is actively hurting technological progress all around the world by doing stupid shit like this. I don't see how anyone could actually support stuff like this.

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If it fails, they can just say "nObOdY wAnTs tHiS oPeN sOuRcE sTuFf AnYwAy". It is also way more limited than VBA (at least it cannot change your boot sector) as it seems to be confined to spreadsheet cells. A full console with the ability to load .py files would probably be friendlier to power users. Excel formulas get convoluted in that tiny space they show up in, and Python code will need its own separate window for a usable editor.

[–] nottheengineer@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago

Excel already makes it easy to create shit that's absolutely unmaintaimable, this will just make that much worse.

[–] algorithmae@lemmy.one 38 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

[–] greybeard@lemmy.one 39 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Aatube@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago

Collection of corporate secrets?

[–] nottheengineer@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago

Because python wasn't slow enough already.

[–] NXTR@artemis.camp 3 points 1 year ago

I’m guessing it’s to train AI models for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

[–] khalic@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago

So Python, Excel, Cloud, Decision-Making... Who has bingo?

[–] Aatube@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

On lemmy.world somebody pointed out that xlwings, a FOSS python-in-excel thingamajig, already exists

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh

* Reads headline again

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh

[–] nitneroc@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Luci@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

I would use embedded Lua. Cloud python sounds like a headache and won't pass an internal security review.