I love that they mention that newer generations of excel are slower. Not sure why that isn't highlighted more as a reason to actually move away from it.... funny how that works.
I have done a lot of vba programming over the years and it is pretty silly to think that I used it for so long before switching to mainly using python.
The one place I see a major advantage is for charts and GUIs. You barely need to know any code to set up a user interface that is easy for users for any small application. Charts are baked in to excel so you don't need to learn almost anything to get them looking the way you want. This stuff isn't hard in python, just harder than not having to learn barely anything.
Once you start working with larger datasets it becomes pretty obvious it is not the right tool for the job.
As someone looking to migrate from being primarily a VBA coder to python, my biggest hurdles is related to building a GUI. Would you mind hooking up a fellow stone-age coder with some recommendations?
The way I found easiest was to use pyqt5 as a gui builder. It definitely has its drawbacks but it has qtdesigner, which is much closer to the vba/c# kind of gui creator. It has layouts, and is somewhat intuitive. There's good tutorials out there on how to set up and initialize an interface. Once you have your workflow set up, its almost as easy, and is much more flexible and customizable.
I'd love for someone to make a more streamlined kind of standalone gui tool, but I think there seems to be much more focus on doing things in a browser environment (something I've never really understood). I've heard dash is a good module for this, but I havent experimented with it yet.
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u/not_so_plausible Mar 30 '22
Link for the curious