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
Damn they found a way to make python slower
That made a python interface wrapper arround VB Script.
Wow, Microsoft is now copying LibreOffice. Who could have guesses?
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The Python bit. The cloud was copied from Google’s suite.
I was just going to ask how long before Libreoffice has local python scripting. Of course it already has it and MS is copying them in a shittier way, silly me.
GSheets lets you run python code? I thought they were all js-based
edit: I misread, you’re saying LibreOffice has Python support, nvm
They don’t let you write custom JS scripts, at least not without hacks AFAIK. We are talking about scripting languages for macros like Office’s infamous VBA.
So who is hosting libteoffice’s python cloud?
The difference is Microsoft will feed your scripts into training its AI.
Microsoft is stupid, but not too stupid to realize that Excel users are generally tech-illiterate and most of them will produce garbage code.
Gpt/Bing attempts at python code for excel lmao, full circle, ai training on itself
Does anyone not think Microsoft is going to use all their cloud data for training language models?
“We promise not to” doesn’t seem realistic to me. Proving they used it is impossible.
“We promise not to”
Where did you quote this from? I think they won’t care, just like GitHub Copilot, or it will be an opt-out feature.
Surprising no one. You can’t even autosave files in Office software anymore unless you use OneDrive.
Yeh that pisses me off. When I looked that up, I saw that on the Microsoft help forums their response was ‘well, you never really had that feature locally anyway’.
I don’t get it. Why I need cloud to run Python scripts which can be done locally? Installing Python isn’t hard and MS can bundle it as a library with Office either.
This sounds like a security check. Our liability and ransomware insurance both require scripts to be turned off for excel and word.
I believe security threats can be mitigated locally without resorts to cloud.
Actually, one can argue using cloud is less secure because there is a risk of sensitive data leaked out of cooperate network.
You could argue that, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Microsoft has a massive amount of resources to throw at securing their environment, whereas most businesses simply don’t have the ability to field a dedicated security team. The solution many reach is to offload risk to your software vendor, in this case Microsoft. Then, if there is data lost, it’s Microsoft’s fault, and it’s their problem to fix, too. It’s not ideal, but it’s the world we’re living in.
Cloud doesn’t have access to local drives…but in this day and age, python could be containerized or sandboxed. Sounds messy though.
But Micro$oft never implement any permission system or checks for Visual Basic in Office so any macro can use anything the user has access to. If the scripting language could only access its document’s content in an undoable way without explicit permissions such as to use the filesystem and Internet or modify the Normal template (as opposed to the current system, which does not differentiate between useful scripts and malware and can easily be bypassed by social engineering), the risk would largely be mitigated but Micro$oft does not care.
I’ve been asking this for every other cloud service - either companies are jumping on the 10-year-old bandwagon or want to collect data for AI training purposes in a way you cannot just disable in the settings. And of course you cannot self-host your own server.
Richard Stallman on Service as a Software Substitute:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.htmlNot everyone has an opportunity to work with Python in their work environment. I’m on the “business” side of the company, capable of doing most of programming stuff myself (Python, C#, SQL, etc.), whereas only “IT” people can work with the proper compileable code. And I’m left out working with VBA macros, or ask IT to write a script for me, which will take 1 year to develop. This change now will improve my local productivity for sure.
This issue isn’t about authoring the script, is about why it needs to execute on the cloud rather locally.
This happened in my old place - also on the business side. Asked for python, got it, then had it immediately removed because of security risks.
I told the head that I could still access tables and shit via excel if I wanted so what does it matter? He didn’t realise this, and asked that I told no-one else it could be done. FFS.
Holy shit Excel is still like it was 20 years ago. And now, when they want to add such a useful feature, it comes with that bag of crap with it? Fucking hell. I know why I switched all non-trivial stuff to python.
Defining reusable functions? Diagrams with parametric ranges? (Only the title can be a cell reference, nothing else) Zooming in diagrams? More than 1 x axis? More than 2 y axis? …
Even a basic thing like XY scatter plots is absolutely terrible. I had made dozens of them before but in 365, when I selected the data and clicked “Scatter Plot”, it refused to assign the left column to X and the right to Y. I fought for 10 minutes with “Chart Series” and then gave up to look up the solution. Also very few trendline functions are available, the default axes look like crap and min/max is broken for logarithmic charts.
Not to mention that one third of all options is in a keyboard-unfriendly, laggy “responsive” UI while the rest is in windows that barely changed since 1995, and are completely missing in the web version. Localization has only become sloppier and you want centimeters rather than inches in Office Online? Fuck you.
I agree with the rest but I think the ribbon concept itself is nice and they actually updated the UI for Windows 11
I like Ribbon too but the Home tab keeps getting used to give spotlight to rather unimportant new features. Also, the Windows 11 redesign is horrible, the buttons are spaced out too far. At home, I use my old legal copy of Office 2007 via Wine of I need to correctly open Office files while getting used to the messy icons and dropdowns of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice also has a ribbon. Just go to View → User Interface and select “Tabbed Bar” or something like that. I like contextual groups (which needs experimental features enabled, unfortunately) better since it’s like the MS office “group descriptions” but it isn’t fully suited for Impress yet so groupedbar (non-compact version also experimental) is a nice middle ground.
Thanks!
time to mine monero on their servers
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So this is basically a native version of xlwings that requires exposing your excel data?
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microsoft ad please remove
Ads generally don’t criticize what they’re selling.
welcome in 2023
lazy social obviously didn’t read the article
Checks out
