First-class integration in Excel would be a game changer. Holy shit. Though adding a multiline editor with indentation in Excel would be really nice as well. We've got to stop pretending Excel functions don't constitute a programming language.
Bring in versioning/snapshotting with some git integration while you're at it...
The finance folks I work with are fucking wizards. I'm convinced many of them would have made great engineers given what they can accomplish building applications in what might be the world's worst IDE.
Well... most quants are recruited straight out of engineering schools so you are probably right. About the IDE, honestly once you think about it, it actually achieve many thing at once. I am not sure what they could change to make it better.
Some of the most impressive, most complex Excel apps I've seen were 1000% not built from quants out of engineering schools. That's the beauty of Excel - but _managing_ these apps is the nightmare of my specific profession :)
I'd say two things would make it better:
- Have a "code" version of the cell editor that has formatting/indentation + basic linting. [Sometimes 75% of the challenge is reading the code in linear fashion and figuring out what it does]
- Integrate git-like versioning and some sharing features with Office365. Basically, make it so that you can roll-forward or roll-back on both the code and the contents, and make it so that you are _not_ emailing files around to share them.
Interestingly enough, Libre Office (and OpenOffice before that) allow you to use Python internally for Macros through PyUNO, which is a pain to use given the lack of documentation, but amazingly powerful.
It was one of my first usages of Python, and used that to create quite complex Spreadsheets
Office suite automation with Python would be great across the board. The external python libraries that do this are pretty clunky and VB scripting is a hot mess.