Ask Slashdot: Spreadsheet With Decent Programming Language?

First time accepted submitter slartibartfastatp writes "Spreadsheets are very flexible tools for data analysis and transformations, the obvious options being MS Excel and LibreOffice. However, I found increasingly infuriating to deal with the VBA--dialect functions or (even worse) its translated versions. Is there any spreadsheet that allows usage of a decent programming language in its formulae? I found PySpread intriguing, but still very beta (judging from its latest release version 0.2.3). Perl or even javascript would be better options than =AVERAGE(). Do you know any viable alternatives?"

Comments

SIAG

[lisaparratt]

As old as the hills: http://siag.nu/siag/

MATLAB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a very elegant language, but way better than any spreadsheet that I know of.

Pandas + IPython Notebook

[n1ywb]

It's not exactly a spreadsheet, but Pandas is totally awesome and is useful for many tasks for which you might think of using a spreadsheet.

pandas is a Python package providing fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with “relational” or “labeled” data both easy and intuitive. It aims to be the fundamental high-level building block for doing practical, real world data analysis in Python. Additionally, it has the broader goal of becoming the most powerful and flexible open source data analysis / manipulation tool available in any language. It is already well on its way toward this goal.

http://pandas.pydata.org/index.html

IPython Notebook is sort of like a combination of the normal ipython shell and an IDE. You interact via your browser but it connects to a normal python process on your local (or remote?) system.

http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/htmlnotebook.html

I've used these tools together for many tasks for which I might otherwise have used a spreadsheet, particularly for "pivot tables" and time series analysis. Again, even combined they do not a spreadsheet make, but they are in many ways superior. They can handle very large data sets, and best of all you are doing it all in Python.

python embedded in excel

[Anonymous Coward]

https://datanitro.com/index.html

I've used it a bit and it's pretty fantastic

Python or Javascript in LibreOffice and OOo

[SgtChaireBourne]

Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org support macros in Python or Javascript. Chances are you already know one of those, so you don't even need to learn a new language.