Overall, there was a lot of good stuff in that discussion at the end, one of the comments suggested that spreadsheets are a bad way to package programming, since they already tend to obscure the mechanisms used to do calculation (in the form of formulas etc hidden in cells). It’s not Python, but presumably if you can hack Scheme (a dialect of the Lisp language) you could probably hack Siag. “Scheme in a Grid” is an open source spreadsheet that’s been around forever. Also from Resolver is a “programmable cloud spreadsheet” called Dirigible, still in beta at the moment. For example, every time you recalc, the entire spreadsheet is turned into a single Python program that you can review and debug. Resolver One is a commercial package that also looks interesting.
Also for Excel, PyXLL “is an Excel addin that enables functions written in Python to be called in Excel.” Not open source, but free for evaluation/noncommercial use.For Microsoft Excel, published under the open source Common Public License. Want something else? How about XLLoop, described as “Excel User-Defined Functions in Java, Javascript, Ruby, Python, Erlang”.PyUNO is ‘s Python scripting mechanism.mpmath, from Google, is a “Python library for arbitrary-precision floating-point arithmetic”, which adds a whole lot of good stuff for doing calculations, very helpful if you’re doing spreadsheeting recommended as a great add-on for pyspread.
Pyspread is described as in “early beta” release it’s open source (GPL) and multi-platform (Linux and Windows for sure, Mac OS X reportedly works as well). Since I rarely use spreadsheets for anything, I don’t even have a way to conceptualize how useful that is, but I’m pretty sure it should be pretty useful. It’s kind of an amazing idea to get your mind around: instead of a number or string or formula in each cell, you can put an array or matrix or whatever.
Businesses (at least those run by people smart enough to keep track of such things) have to plan to revise or upgrade almost all their internally-designed applications almost every time Microsoft rolls out a new version of Windows or Office. But one of the biggest problems with almost anything from Microsoft is that those kind of architectural features of the operating system are so often subject to change. Over the years, I’ve watched as spreadsheets grew in power, with the addition of macro languages the use of Visual Basic as a “universal” scripting language for Microsoft Office was a powerful incentive for learning it. If I’d had the money back then, I would have undoubtedly gone home with a new computer and a copy of Visicalc back then. That especially includes today’s source: Spreadsheets using Python – Have you seen this? ()Ī bit of history: back around 1979, I recall going into a personal computing store and being blown away by a demo of Visicalc on an Apple II. I often find it very useful to summarize the content I find at a place like Reddit, particularly when people are looking for advice about learning something new–particularly about programming or other networking/computing technologies.