Excel is both a blessing and a bane for companies. Because of its capabilities folks have created formulas/macros/scripts/functions etc in Excel that allows them to generate data that is used to take major financial decisions with real world impact. But that capability also makes it an ideal vector for infiltrating an organization using Macros or scripts in Excel files to compromise systems.
Back in Aug 2023, Microsoft first announced that they are going to support running Python inside an Excel file. After that there was no major talk about it so I had hoped this meant that they had abandoned the project, but sadly I was mistaken. Redmond announced the official release of Python in Excel for Windows users of Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise in a blog post. The post has a lot of details on the new capabilities this gives to power users and frankly I can see why folks are excited about it. But from a security and version control point of view this is a disaster waiting to happen.
There is a new learning series available for free for 30 days on LinkedIn that incorporates numerous examples, tutorials, and tips on how to best leverage Python in Excel.
Included in the Excel for Python release is a large language model integration that will allow Excel users to ask the Copilot to build scripts for them with plain language commands.
Microsoft partnered with data science tool maker Anaconda to develop the Python-Excel integration. As we’ve previously reported, data can move effortlessly between the two platforms using a few custom-defined functions.
This two-way function sending is a key part of security – Microsoft states Python processes Excel data without revealing the user’s identity, and all Python code runs in a secure, isolated environment, only accessing libraries approved by Anaconda.
As with all the stuff MS has released recently, this also has LLM Integration but is on a very restricted list. The service is available to all Office 365 users with a valid Enterprise or Business Microsoft 365 subscription on the Current Channel.
Source: The Register: Python in Excel is here, but only for certain Windows users
– Suramya