xlpro - Self Hosted Python in Excel

xlpro is a one-click installable extension for Excel on Windows which allows you to call arbitrary Python code from the formula bar, intended as a FOSS alternative to Microsoft’s own version of the extension.

The shift from pure Excel to Python has several key benefits:

• Access to a modern development workflow (version control, debuggers, LSPs, IDEs, etc.).
• Faster iteration cycles.
• Access to Python’s extensive module ecosystem for data science.

Given the flexibility of Python to be able to do almost anything, I set the requirement for xlpro to offer unrestricted access to Python. Any version, any module, and any code which you can run on your machine can be used within xlpro as a formula or macro which can be used inside Excel.

xlpro’s Features:

• Call Python functions from the formula bar.
• Generate Python charts directly from Excel formulas.
• Replace VBA macros with Python scripts
• VSCode integrations for ease of development.

The project can be downloaded here xlpro.pages.dev.

Why?

For years the worldwide user-base of Excel has been begging Microsoft for a better interface for data analysis and automation. In the past couple of years, Microsoft answered, with a ‘Python in Excel’ upgrade, which brought Python scripts into Excel’s formula bar.

Python is a hugely dominant language in the data science and analysis space due to its simplicity to develop, and extensive module ecosystem, through the likes of matplotlib, pandas, numpy for data processing and visualisation, to PyTorch for AI and ML applications.

While this was exciting for some, to many Microsoft’s release was D.O.A. thanks to its dependence on cloud servers ingesting your data and running your code - unacceptable for those concerned with data governance and sovreignty.

I generally agreed with this sentiment, and in theory at least, it felt completely unnecessary to send your data to the cloud just for it to run it through open-source tooling and send back an image or array. Last time I checked, I can run self-host all the code Microsoft would run on my own machine?

Anyway, this sentiment boiled into a 6-month long slow-burn project to see if I could replicate and improve upon Microsoft’s implementation of Python in Excel, while maintaining the FOSS philosphy.

xlpro grew into a one-click installable extension for Excel, allowing you to run arbitrary Python functionality out of Excel’s formula bar - to create arrays, tables and charts, robust, dynamic, and self-hosted.