Excel’s popularity stems from its user-friendly data formatting and presentation capabilities. Take, for example, the nuisance of narrow columns. Resolving this issue in Excel is as simple as selecting the affected columns and double-clicking on any one of them: Python does present unique strengths to Excel, but visual formatting ...

In an earlier post I provided an overview of how to use the pandas and openpyxl packages together to automate the production of Excel workbooks. In that post, I likened pandas as the “Power Query of Python,” highlighting its role in cleaning and transforming tabular data. Readers might question the ...

Between Power Query and Power Pivot alone, “modern” Excel boasts so many features that it’s impossible to learn them all. Add to that Office Scripts, Power BI, LAMBDA() and more and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. One “Excel-adjacent” tool that can be particularly intimidating for prospective learners is ...

In January 2023, I traveled to Santa Barbara, sunny Californ-i-a to record two data analytics courses with Madecraft. There will be plenty of opportunity to discuss the contents of these courses, but for now I’d like to reflect on the process of recording them in the studio. Making a video ...

Many packages exist for working with Python and Excel, but xlwings may be the most powerful all-around due to its many reading and writing features. This versatility, however, comes at the cost of being relatively more difficult to set up. For example, one of the most useful features of xlwings ...