Python for Excel

Chapter 3. Getting Started with Python

With Anaconda installed and Jupyter notebooks up and running, you have everything in place to get started with Python. Although this chapter doesn’t go much further than the basics, it still covers a lot of ground. If you are at the beginning of your coding career, there may be a lot to digest. However, most concepts will get clearer once you use them in later chapters as part of a practical example, so there’s no need to worry if you don’t understand something fully the first time around. Whenever Python and VBA differ significantly, I will point this out to make sure you can transition from VBA to Python smoothly and are aware of the obvious traps. If you haven’t done any VBA before, feel free to ignore these parts.

I will start this chapter with Python’s basic data types, such as integers and strings. After that, I will introduce indexing and slicing, a core concept in Python that gives you access to specific elements of a sequence. Up next are data structures like lists and dictionaries that can hold multiple objects. I’ll continue with the if statement and the for and while loops before getting to an introduction of functions and modules that allow you to organize and structure your code. To wrap this chapter up, I will show you how to format your Python code properly. As you have probably guessed by now, this chapter is as technical as it can get. Running the examples for yourself in a Jupyter notebook is therefore a good idea to make ...