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Microsoft announces Python formulas in Excel... which have to get sent to the cloud
(techcommunity.microsoft.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Firstly, there's no technological reason for this. It's all rent-seeking bullshit. But the thing is, there's no version of Office that this point that works without a subscription, which also assumes you're probably always online, so it's honestly moot anyway.
It's so tiresome. Big tech really doesn't want people to run, own, or operate their own systems independently.
Full disclosure, I work for MSFT, but I do not speak for them. I fucking hate python and am forced to write it a lot while working here, but I want to suggest there's a complementary technological reason for wanting to run it in the cloud. This isn't to say that MSFT will stand to make more money if you are using their cloud services, and I don't have any insight at all into the "gib us money plz" side of this business.
The reason: One of the biggest headaches for IT depts has been attack vectors through office productivity suites. Download a sketchy excel spreadsheet from someone, and suddenly custom macros are purposefully creating avenues for attack, or are attacks themselves. Ken and Debra in accounting aren't security people. They got a spreadsheet from an email that seems superficially plausible, so they pop it open. Suddenly, your entire org is ransomwared just because two people who are just doing their normal duties get tricked.
That's why the ol' VBA shit and all those fancy macro systems from the past got neutered. Sandboxed and isolated, removed entirely, whatever. But a good feature gets lost.
Enter The Cloud, or in other terms, "Someone Else's Computer". As in, someone else's computer out there, far from your corporate network, that has no ability to reach back through your security perimeter and have a rummage around your business guts. The worst thing that will happen is the attack-vector-spreadsheet, itself, might be compromised. Or Microsoft's cloud computers, which are, again, not your computers.
Anyway, that's honestly a great reason for it. And there's also the business cat reasons, which I don't like in principle; I always begrudge businesses their attempts at squeezing us for more and more every single fucking day. So anyway, it probably isn't worth it to the average home user, but IT departments are going to be thrilled, even if the tech budget is going to get even fatter paying for all these users using someone else's computer.
I have strong opinions about home users who can write Python already but choose to use excel, but I'll keep them to myself. They're elitist and basically just me being a little shit, so... you do you, boo.
As someone has noted above the API doesn't have disk access.
I wonder if the model is "all data you want to process on has to already be in the sheets" or something?