News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry by analog31 on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @08:12PM (#25588402)
I work in a small R&D team within a larger engineering organization. I use Python, and it has spread to the rest of my team. However, I've tried to share tools that I've written in Python with the engineers. The problem is that I have to hand-hold them through the process of getting Python working on their computer at the level of detail of: Here is how you find the Python editor. Double click on it. Click on "open." Find the Python file. Click on "run." Click on "Run Module." Or you can press F5. No, you have to be in the editor when you press F5. Now do you see that a window just appeared? Look at the entries and buttons in the window...

It's really quite harrowing. Whereas if I put the same thing in an Excel file, they can bring it up themselves and I can quickly walk them through using it.

And I don't think my UI's are all that bad. But going from throwing together a simple Tkinter GUI, to something that is totally user proof and self installing is actually quite a lot of work.

Re:Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry by hcrad on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @09:01PM (#25588739)
Pyinstaller + Gooey has been my go-to combo for sharing executable python with simple/intuitive UIs.

https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey

Re:Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry by RMPR on Thursday December 31, 2020 @03:02AM (#25590627)
Re:Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry by shmoogy on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @08:15PM (#25588425)
Solution for this is to make flask or django apps. Easier to make user interfaces, and solves packaging / user experience problems.
Re:Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry by analog31 on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @08:59PM (#25588726)
I've had some success with WinPython, where I just install the whole kit and kaboodle on their computer. Before I share anything, I try running my code on a fresh install of WinPython.

Learning to distribute Python code is on my to-do list for next year. We now have a younger programmer on the team who is up to date on this stuff, and has agreed to train me.

Re:Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry by RMPR on Thursday December 31, 2020 @03:06AM (#25590647)
> Learning to distribute Python code

Found pyinstaller very handy, in fact that's what I use to create releases for my side project[0]. And if you're creating CLIs, a sibling comment mentioned Gooey.

0: github.com/rmpr/atbswp

Re:Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry by bluedino on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @08:13PM (#25588415)
Imagine them the first time they used Excel
Re:Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry by Plastikdusche on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @08:28PM (#25588514)
Have you tried pyinstaller? Works pretty well for simple cli tools or tkinter apps. There's already predefined docker images with all of the necessary wine hacks that just consume your code + requirements.txt and spit out a exe.