[theptip]

Excel workflows are terrible though. No version control, hard to test, prone to indexing errors. And doing very sophisticated things with it gets hard; lots of financial analysts/quants are moving over to Python for analysis anyway.

If you’re thinking about this in isolation, I can see why it would seem a bad idea to move power-excel users to Python. But take this in the context of a much wider shift where many shops are already shifting to Python for other reasons, and so we need a way to help transition the Excel power users over too.

Excel has its place for sure, but I think it’s interesting to consider whether another tool paradigm could gradually replace it; we would need to really hone the flexibility and expressivity of the UI for simple tasks. The benefit would be that when your task grows you don’t need to re-implement it in a new Python engine.

[aarondia]

Aaron here, one of the Mito co-founders.

+1, beyond the most obvious reasons that companies are moving away from Excel (too much data to process, not enough robust automation features), there are important workflow management reasons that companies are making the transition.

More and more, we're hearing that companies want to use software engineering practices on their data analytics workflows -- things like version control, easily understanding what edits are applied by looking at the code, and even things like CI to automatically build dashboards from the most up to date data.

While you technically could build tooling around Excel to do a lot of these things, its much easier and already exists in the Python ecosystem.