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My thoughts on Python in Excel

Last updated on June 11, 2024 My thoughts on Python in Excel Posted by Felix Zumstein - Comments On August 22, 2023, Microsoft revealed the preview of “Python in Excel”. As creator of xlwings and author of the O’Reilly book Python for Excel, I was obviously curious to give it a try.

John Lam, a Principal Architect on the project, told the Real Python Podcast that this implementation was just thought to be “a crazy idea”, but eventually it was picked by those people who call the shots at Microsoft. Well, Python in Excel breaks this core spreadsheet truth: despite behaving very similarly to user-defined functions (“UDFs”), PY cells are evaluated from left to right and top to bottom. What you need to keep in mind though is that Python in Excel will cost an extra subscription fee on top of Microsoft 365 (we don’t know how much yet) and there seems to be a quota: while I was recording my LinkedIn Learning course, I was greeted by this message:

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