Agree. This is why there is so much MS Access stuff out there. It came as part of the MS Office suite so office workers had it on their desktop and could use it without having to IT and work their way up the priority queue.

VBA is terrible, but it is the only programming-like option for most office workers outside of IT/Engineering

Quite relatable.

At work, we want to build a simple database and app to interface against it. Asked our boss, asked the IT guys, got the same answer:

A : "Sure, but it has to be MS Access"

Q : "Why though, PostgreSQL / SQLite/ etc. works fine"

A : "Because we already have MS Access"

Q : "OK - could we at least get [programming language + frameworks] for the interface part"

A : "Use Excel and VBA. We already have that"

wait you asked IT to use something other than Access and they turned you down :rolleyes:

I am on a mission to eliminate Access... the day i can distribute office with out Access will be a glorious day indeed

No IT Dept should be telling users to use Access.....

I've had that same conversation, but subsititute FileMaker for Access (no access to Access on a Mac). I can run anything I want on my own Mac, but there's no way to make it shareable with the rest of the office.

you can install python and https://pypi.org/project/pywin32/ as a limited user. pywin32 allows you to automate ms office (among which excel) from within python. if you can't disable the corporate proxy have a look at cntlm.

You're right, it's the biggest challenge. But a ton of companies do now have something like Anaconda in their official software catalogue and sometimes even an internal mirror of PyPI or anaconda.org for the packages.

> Does the book use any commercial software like xlwings PRO? No, the book uses exclusively software that is open source and free (except for Excel, of course).

This is no longer technically true of Anaconda. They’ve adopted a new licensing approach that prevents employees of companies from using the free edition. Please consider adding alternative install instructions, based on PyPI and pipenv or poetry, to future versions of your book. This would help a ton of data scientists out!

I’m looking forward to reading your book via O’Reilly!

References:

Discussion on r/Python with comments from the Anaconda CEO and team, https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/iqsk3y/anaconda_is_...

Anaconda license change press release, https://www.anaconda.com/blog/anaconda-commercial-edition-fa...

Anaconda Terms of Service, https://www.anaconda.com/terms-of-service

Edit: Here’s an interesting comment on the Reddit discussion from the Anaconda CEO suggesting that Miniconda can still be used with conda forge: “You can download Miniconda, and change your conda config to use conda forge, and the Terms of Service do not apply to that. The ToS only applies to commercial usage of the package repository of packages we build, at repo.anaconda.com; it does not apply to community-built and uploaded packages at anaconda.org.”, https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/iqsk3y/anaconda_is_...

Side note…

While Anaconda Inc.’s licensing approach is currently confusing/frustrating, they’re correct that open source sustainability is a challenge. Projects need financial support as well as volunteers.

SciPy.org maintains Pandas, NumPy, Jupyter, iPython, Matplotlib, etc. They’ve buried a donation page on their website at… https://www.scipy.org/scipylib/donations.html

Thanks for pointing this out and I'll update the homepage accordingly. You're right about the sustainability challenge though!

miniconda remains an option though.

Considering the inclusion of Pandas in the book, I doubt manager types and econ guys are the target group. IMO, engineers would be the ones interested in applying Python to Excel work (because they realize how ridiculous VBScript is), and they are pretty likely to have install permissions on their machine.

I wouldn't sell the financial analysts short. Pandas was developed by financial analysts to assist in their routine analytics work.

Yeah, there is a lot of ridiculous usage of Excel in corporate America, but the idea that econ/finance/MBA types are not aware of Python/pandas these days is a farfetched.

There are tons of resources like this. https://quantecon.org/

In non tech companies it's super rare to have install permissions in my experience (Manufacturing/Automotive/Aerospace etc.) most companies are running proprietary software from a few key engineering software players, and very rarely there's some team writing legacy but hyper specialised FORTRAN / C / C++ engineering analysis tools.

It's a big issue to build tools for others to use - an excel file on a shared drive somewhere might be developed by one person with python installed and elevated permissions but used by 50 with no python installation etc.

IT arn't going to adjust their policies for a small group unless they have significant organizational sway.

I’m sure there are corporate users who would like to use this tool but won’t be able to install i. However, I do not think there is any call for posting dismissive comments solely based on that. It does not detract from the value of the tool, for those who can get it.

How is my comment dismissive?

I'm sharing my experience of this exact problem we have right now. Users cannot install python on their machines, in an org of 60k engineers, asking for changes to a small group of users comes with heavy resistance from IT.

On these machines (most computers in most offices in every western organization) no software can be installed from online, and running any form of executable requires IT/Admin elevation.

It's like you guys have never worked in an office in the real world that isn't dev/tech.

I think your vastly overstating how locked down most companies workstations are. Sure if you work for a fortune 500 they might be but there are 10,000 other companies where that probably isn't the case.

Really? I work for a <50 employee manufacturer/distributor, and we're pretty firmly locked down. If people want to _update Java_, they need an admin password.

Installing python does not require admin permissions in Windows, just choose $HOME/... as install path.

It also does not require admin permissions in Linux, although most distros do not offer a happy path for that.

corporate IT in the companies I am talking about is significantly more locked down, python is not install-able by going to https://www.python.org/ and downloading the binary there. Downloading executables is locked down.

Not really sure how this is a rebuttal, maybe what you say is true on a default windows installation, not on an IT-dept managed system.

You can install Anaconda without admin.

I wrote Random Forest in VBA. Programming is what you make of it.

That said, VBA is slow.

Is it slower than Python, though? It seems intuitively like it should be faster for a lot of things, since it has non-boxed numeric types, early binding, etc.

I'm not sure, selecting data from cells was slow. There might be ways to get around it. I did all sorts of optimization, but looking back on it, I probably shouldn't have saved anything in cells.

Somehow the really large MegaCorp I work at has Python, Anaconda3, and Pycharm. I was surprised and have been using it to automate some mundane work I have to do.

Virtualenv has been pretty handy, but you speak truth