INTRODUCTION
At the time of this writing, I’ve been in the technology field for 28 years and have been doing analytics for the last 14. Over my career, I’ve seen many hype cycles come and go (e.g., “Big Data”). I mention this only to emphasize how profoundly I was impacted by what I saw in May of 2023 – an early version of Python in Excel.
As an analytics consultant and educator, I was blown away by Microsoft’s vision for Excel. There was only one reason why Microsoft would spend so much time and effort into building Python in Excel: Microsoft sees Excel becoming the world’s most used do-it-yourself (DIY) data science platform.
Doing data science with Excel is not new. Using Solver, you can implement advanced analytics like market basket analysis, logistic regression, simulations, and so on.
However, using Excel in this way often requires setting up complex worksheet templates that are error prone. If this wasn’t a big enough hurdle, many of the most powerful analytics techniques (e.g., cluster analysis) cannot be implemented using Solver.
Enter Python in Excel.
As you will learn in this book, Python is not only foundational for Microsoft’s vision of Excel as a data science platform, but knowledge of Python is also required to make the most of Microsoft’s Copilot artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
Microsoft Excel has always been, first and foremost, a tool for analyzing data. For professionals wanting to have more impact at work using data, Python is the jewel in Excel’s ...
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