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7 posts tagged with "Python"

Python features and tips

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Excel's New Regex Functions Versus Python's re Module Capabilities

· 39 min read

This comprehensive post compares Excel's newly introduced native regex functions (REGEXTEST, REGEXEXTRACT, and REGEXREPLACE) with Python's long-established re module. We explore their respective capabilities, syntax variations, supported regex constructs, and advanced features to help you understand which tool is best suited for different text manipulation scenarios. Whether you're working within a spreadsheet for interactive data exploration or building automated text processing pipelines in Python, this detailed analysis will highlight the strengths and limitations of each approach.

Python Statistical Functions for Excel

· 9 min read

We are thrilled to announce the availability of Python-powered statistical functions for Excel users. This release brings the full power of Python's scipy.stats library directly into your spreadsheets with comprehensive distribution support, advanced statistical methods, and capabilities that go far beyond what native Excel functions provide. Our Python functions enable you to access full distribution support (PDF, CDF, quantiles, and more) for distributions not available in Excel, perform advanced analytics, and leverage the complete toolkit of scipy.stats directly from your spreadsheets.

Python for Excel Code Editor

· 3 min read

We're excited to announce a major update to our Python for Excel add-in that makes it easier than ever to create Excel LAMBDA functions from Python code. The new code editor provides a familiar VS Code-like experience right inside Excel, with features like syntax highlighting, function management, and integrated testing.

Fuzzy Matching with Python in Excel

· 6 min read

Fuzzy matching is a technique used to find strings that are approximately equal, e.g. "Microsoft" and "Microsoft Inc". This is particularly useful in scenarios where exact matches are not possible due to typographical errors, variations in spelling, or other inconsistencies. In this post, we will explore how to perform fuzzy matching with Python in Excel using the NLTK library.

Our text_distance function for fuzzy matching is similar to that used in our Fuzzy Match app, but supports many more algorithms and can be readily modified to your specific needs. Actually, we've recently updated our Fuzzy Match tutorial with more details.

Python in Excel Functions

· 4 min read

Since we launched Boardflare's Python for Excel add-in over a month ago, we've heard from users that they would like to see more pre-made Python functions that they can use as-is or modify to suit their needs. As we've started buiding out a collection of Python functions, we realized that we could align our API with Microsoft's Python in Excel so that the same code could be used in both with minimal modification.

Python in Excel Review

· 6 min read

Microsoft's Python in Excel has now reached GA. It enables the user to input Python code and it will return the result as either a Python object or Excel values. You can read in more detail how to use this function in the official documentation.

The Python in Excel feature is only available to Microsoft 365 subscribers, and access to the higher performance runtime requires a separate add-on license.

The purpose of this post is to focus on the strengths and potential weaknesses of this implementation and to explore alternatives.