Since its inception, Microsoft Excel has changed how people organize, analyze, and visualize their data, providing a basis for decision-making for the flying billionaires heads up in the clouds who don’t give a fuck for life offtheline

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      The difference is Microsoft will feed your scripts into training its AI.

      • nottheengineer@feddit.de
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        2 years ago

        Microsoft is stupid, but not too stupid to realize that Excel users are generally tech-illiterate and most of them will produce garbage code.

  • umami_wasabi@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    I don’t get it. Why I need cloud to run Python scripts which can be done locally? Installing Python isn’t hard and MS can bundle it as a library with Office either.

    • Master@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      This sounds like a security check. Our liability and ransomware insurance both require scripts to be turned off for excel and word.

      • umami_wasabi@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        I believe security threats can be mitigated locally without resorts to cloud.

        Actually, one can argue using cloud is less secure because there is a risk of sensitive data leaked out of cooperate network.

        • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de
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          2 years ago

          But Micro$oft never implement any permission system or checks for Visual Basic in Office so any macro can use anything the user has access to. If the scripting language could only access its document’s content in an undoable way without explicit permissions such as to use the filesystem and Internet or modify the Normal template (as opposed to the current system, which does not differentiate between useful scripts and malware and can easily be bypassed by social engineering), the risk would largely be mitigated but Micro$oft does not care.

    • mrsgreenpotato@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 years ago

      Not everyone has an opportunity to work with Python in their work environment. I’m on the “business” side of the company, capable of doing most of programming stuff myself (Python, C#, SQL, etc.), whereas only “IT” people can work with the proper compileable code. And I’m left out working with VBA macros, or ask IT to write a script for me, which will take 1 year to develop. This change now will improve my local productivity for sure.

      • umami_wasabi@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        This issue isn’t about authoring the script, is about why it needs to execute on the cloud rather locally.

        • mrsgreenpotato@discuss.tchncs.de
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          2 years ago

          Fair point, maybe I replied to a wrong comment. Nonetheless, I’ve seen comments saying “just use native Python”. Not everyone can do that.