Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but have nothing to do with Office.

PowerPoint has a feature that suggests design ideas based on the content of your slides. This is to solve the specific problem of non-designers spending too much time trying to make slides look better:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-PowerPoint-De...

Even though you don't work on Office, I wonder if you might have some insight into why Microsoft seems to be largely ignoring two of their biggest strategic advantages: the desktop and Microsoft Office.

I've done years of VBA programming in Excel, struggling to make that horribly weak language do things it was never designed to do. I've just started working with Python, but more specifically pandas. How I got this far in life and never picked it up is beyond me, but now that I finally have, it almost makes me want to cry how powerful and filled with plain old common sense it is. So far, things are pretty much exactly how one would expect them to be in a non-insane world - if you need to do something, it is almost surely there, and likely very close to the form you'd expect it in. Just wonderful software.

With the battle now moving to the cloud, and Amazon being the biggest competitor Microsoft has seen in ages, why is Microsoft mostly just competing in the cloud, rather than competing there and bringing the desktop toolset into the 21st century with seamless integration with the cloud? Why can't I do something equivalent to Jupyter notebooks in Excel, including using Python as the language?

It just seems extremely short sighted to me, but I never hear it discussed anywhere. Does the topic ever come up at Microsoft?

Unfortunately, it's against company policy to speak on behalf of the company in any way without prior approval.

Since I can't comment, I'll suggest this page that outlines Satya Nadella's vision for Microsoft:

https://news.microsoft.com/features/nadella-ignite-collectiv...

It's understandable why Microsoft would be slow-moving to incorporate new languages into Excel; what is popular now could change (eg if you add Python, do you also do R?), and restricting the number of languages available means people in an office can more easily work with each other.

But there has been progress!

- Excel already has a native JavaScript API. [1]

- They are seeking feedback on implementing Python as an Excel scripting language. [2]

- It's a little esoteric / proprietary, but the language backing Excel's "Get & Transform" feature, M, is a noticeable jump in power. [3]

Nevertheless, it's still surprising there hasn't been more innovation in the spreadsheet space given Excel's shortcomings. So I'm working on Mesh, a spreadsheet that feels more like a 'real' programming language (because it's just JavaScript). [4]

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/script-lab/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132

[3] See, eg, https://powerpivotpro.com/2016/02/reviewlist-generate-create...

[4] https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh

I wasn't aware of that much progress on your first link.....I'm curious to know if at the same time they've put any effort into improving the half-assed Excel COM API.

Totally agree on the Power Query thing, if they'd support pandas + power query + embeddable Power BI objects in Excel + seamless integration with cloud functionality (there's still no way to use Power Query in SSIS for goodness sake).

Using pandas in an Azure function and then consuming that from Excel and displaying in Power BI visualizations, all within a nie little wrapper you can email around or whatever would just be a killer app. This is one of the few advantages Microsoft has over the Amazons and Googles, I wish they'd take advantage of it.

The syntax in your example is lovely and this is something I've wanted in Excel for a very long time.

EDIT:

There is some interesting 3rd party innovation happening: https://www.xlwings.org/

Microsoft is considering adding Python support to excel:

https://m.slashdot.org/story/334927

They've been considering many things with Excel for well over a decade now.

That looks pretty interesting. Can you add template suggestions? That could be an interesting extension of using a custom template to standardize an organizations presentations.

The author is writing for a UK audience, where productivity is an issue.

If the UK trend is so wildly different than the US trend, then that alone looks like a pretty big flag that technologies shared by both the US and UK (computers and phones!) aren't to blame, no?

I actually don't see anything wrong with middle managers doing clerical work. Middle management has always been largely an information processing task: Gathering, analyzing, organizing, and communicating information.

It's easy to forget that before PowerPoint: slides were napkin sketched by a manager, passed to a secretary to type up a detailed description, sent to a design bureau to piece together, proofs shipped to be examined/reviewed/quality-checked, then imaged to 35mm slides, and finally shipped back to the manager.

In comparison, ugly manager slides in PowerPoint really are a huge productivity boost.

Robert Gaskins' book Sweating Bullets about the early history of PowerPoint history is a fascinating read: http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bul...