This is for the number crunchers out there. Excel already has a pile of built-in functions for manipulating, organizing, and sorting data. We’ve covered some essential functions, date manipulation, substitute function, stock data, Excel Lambda, XLOOKUP and more. You can extend the application even further with VBA to automate some your number crunching.

If you have a bit of programming background, you have likely heard of the Python programming language. It’s a very popular programming language, used by businesses, students, and mathematicians alike to monkey around and analyze all kinds of data. Microsoft is introducing Python in Excel, combining the power of Python with the Flexibility of Excel. This new feature combines Python’s powerful data analysis and visualization libraries with Excel’s features you know and love. You can manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries, and then use Excel’s formulas, charts and PivotTables to further refine your insights. This also gives you access to Python libraries like Matplotlib or seaborn that can create charts, graphs, and visualizations that Excel can’t touch:

You can also check it all in action here in Microsoft’s introduction video:

Read more about it on the tech behind it, some functions that will be available, ball park timelines on when it’s coming, and some example code on Microsoft’s blog post.