Nov-09-2020, 01:31 AM
As a business analyst, I've been using VBA with Excel and Access for a while now and can usually accomplish my goals with these tools alone. I recently started playing with Python and I can see it has some great features. Like VBA, the syntax is pretty simple to pick up. I'm watching as many videos and reading as many articles as I can on Python but all of them seem to fail to tell me WHY I should use this. It's outside of Excel, which seems inconvenient and I can't figure out where the end user comes in.
As an example: In my job I create a lot of interactive dashboards, fed by data from Excel sheets and Access databases. The end users enter a range of dates, for example, and VBA macros manipulate the data, run pivots, charts, etc. I understand this can be done in python as well, but where would an end user come in? Is python better suited for analyst who are running a lot of ad hoc reports to be completed and delivered without the requester running anything themselves?
I know there's a GUI for python, but then I assume I'd have to do python installations on client PCs and at this point excel and VBA seems easier. I want to like this, can someone help me see what I'm missing?
As an example: In my job I create a lot of interactive dashboards, fed by data from Excel sheets and Access databases. The end users enter a range of dates, for example, and VBA macros manipulate the data, run pivots, charts, etc. I understand this can be done in python as well, but where would an end user come in? Is python better suited for analyst who are running a lot of ad hoc reports to be completed and delivered without the requester running anything themselves?
I know there's a GUI for python, but then I assume I'd have to do python installations on client PCs and at this point excel and VBA seems easier. I want to like this, can someone help me see what I'm missing?