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

  • umami_wasabi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    59·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Master@lemm.eeEnglish
      211·
      2 years ago

      This sounds like a security check. Our liability and ransomware insurance both require scripts to be turned off for excel and word.

      • umami_wasabi@lemmy.mlEnglish
        193·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          7·
          2 years ago

          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.

        • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.deEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          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.

        • heyoni@lemm.eeEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          Cloud doesn’t have access to local drives…but in this day and age, python could be containerized or sandboxed. Sounds messy though.

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.deEnglish
      13·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • mrsgreenpotato@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      72·
      2 years ago

      Not 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.

      • umami_wasabi@lemmy.mlEnglish
        16·
        2 years ago

        This issue isn’t about authoring the script, is about why it needs to execute on the cloud rather locally.

        • mrsgreenpotato@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          Fair point, maybe I replied to a wrong comment. Nonetheless, I’ve seen comments saying “just use native Python”. Not everyone can do that.

      • Urbanfox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • RheingoldRiver@kbin.social
          2·
          2 years ago

          GSheets lets you run python code? I thought they were all js-based

          edit: I misread, you’re saying LibreOffice has Python support, nvm

          • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.deEnglish
            3·
            2 years ago

            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.

            • RheingoldRiver@kbin.social
              2·
              2 years ago

              I think what they let you do is write mini add-ons using the API and support JS in an in-browser editor. Then you have to enable the add-ons. I guess equivalently you can do the same things with an IDE and any language, but it felt like they “officially” supported JS.

    • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
      111·
      2 years ago

      The difference is Microsoft will feed your scripts into training its AI.

      • nottheengineer@feddit.deEnglish
        12·
        2 years ago

        Microsoft is stupid, but not too stupid to realize that Excel users are generally tech-illiterate and most of them will produce garbage code.

  • Kethal@lemmy.worldEnglish
    501·
    2 years ago

    This is inside-out programming. I want my code to read data files, not my data files to contain code.

    The first example is how to take cells in the sheet and make a data frame in an Excel equation. That’s easy, pandas.read_excel(): no clound needed, no need to hunt through cells of a sheet to find your code.

  • just_change_it@lemmy.worldEnglish
    323·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.deEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      “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.

  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    2 years ago

    Surprising no one. You can’t even autosave files in Office software anymore unless you use OneDrive.

    • ZodiacSF1969@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      31·
      2 years ago

      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’.

    • venusenvy47@lemdro.idEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Does xlwings require any specific Python installation? Can I use it with my WinPython 3.10 installation on Windows 10?