Are you interested in using your Python skills within Excel? Would you like to share a data science project or visualization as a single Office file? This week on the show, we speak with Principal Architect John Lam and Sr. Cloud Developer Advocate Sarah Kaiser from Microsoft about Python in Excel.

John shares the multi-year journey of adding Python to Excel. He describes how the project moved beyond writing user functions in Python to something much more elaborate. He details assembling a team with diverse skills in interface design, languages, and security.

Sarah discusses the instant convenience of having familiar Python and pandas techniques at your fingertips inside Excel. We cover typical data science workflows and the potential of interactive visualizations within a spreadsheet. We also share multiple resources for you to learn more.

Note: Python in Excel is currently a preview accessible by joining the Microsoft 365 Insider Program and selecting the Beta Channel.

Course Spotlight: Data Cleaning With pandas and NumPy

In this video course, you’ll learn how to clean up messy data using pandas and NumPy. You’ll become equipped to deal with a range of problems, such as missing values, inconsistent formatting, malformed records, and nonsensical outliers.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:53 – Sr. Cloud Developer Advocate Sarah Kaiser
00:02:46 – Principal Architect John Lam
00:04:08 – What is Dev Div?
00:04:33 – Python data science inside Excel
00:09:05 – Designing features with a focus on sharing
00:14:28 – Moving between Excel and Python objects
00:18:20 – What libraries are imported by default?
00:23:11 – Sharing a workbook with others
00:26:12 – Recalculating data workflow
00:30:07 – Working in Jupyter Notebook vs Excel
00:33:03 – Creating a Python object
00:33:38 – Video Course Spotlight
00:35:02 – More history and project team
00:40:19 – Immediate wins of having Python in Excel
00:42:28 – Interactive visualizations
00:44:34 – Answering security concerns
00:49:17 – Limitations and potential
00:54:34 – Creating demo projects
01:00:25 – Resources to learn more
01:02:59 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
01:10:41 – What do you want to learn next?
01:12:09 – How can people follow your work online?
01:13:26 – Thanks and goodbye

Show Links:

Python in Excel – Python to Excel - Microsoft 365
Get started with Python in Excel - Microsoft Support
Python in Excel DataFrames - Microsoft Support
Open-source libraries and Python in Excel - Microsoft Support
User guide and tutorial - seaborn 0.13.1 documentation
Assessing and Restoring Reproducibility of Jupyter Notebooks - IEEE Conference Publication - IEEE Xplore
Book of Python in Excel - John Lam’s Website
GitHub - microsoft/python-in-excel - Python in Microsoft Excel
Use Python in Excel to enhance your data science - Python Day - YouTube
Introducing Python in Excel: The Best of Both Worlds for Data Analysis and Visualization - Microsoft Community Hub
PEP 703 – Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython - peps.python.org
Dr. Sarah Kaiser (@crazy4pi314@mathstodon.xyz) - Fosstodon
John Lam (@john_lam) - X

Level up your Python skills with our expert-led courses:

Support the podcast & join our community of Pythonistas

Preaching and Preachers Episode 171: The Preaching of George Whitefield