Dec-21-2016, 11:09 PM
I am a moderately experienced VBA coder, and have only begun learning Python (second post on this forum) because I would like to take on a new project which takes an Excel program/spreadsheet and duplicates what it does using Python.
As you probably know, Excel is made up of rows and columns, and works/calculates left to right within a row, then moves down a row, and starts over, etc.. In addition, a value that is calculated in cell A1, for example, is typically used in cell A2, and so on down the row.
In my spreadsheet, assume I have 80 rows and 200 columns. Formulas (nothing fancy, just normal math) are copied downward in each column to all 80 rows. In other words, every formula in a particular column is the same thing (of course, the values used in those formulas are different).
My general questions:
1. Does Python even lend itself to calculating/behaving like Excel? If not, is there a better language?
2. If so, how should I think of duplicating a spreadsheet-like program in Python? Should I think of a row as a list? dictionary? etc? Is that hard to do with a big list? Maybe a make a bunch of smaller lists to duplicate a section of the spreadsheet? etc, etc.
I just need some general thoughts on whether to try, and if so, maybe how to approach it from a big picture standpoint?
thanks for looking
As you probably know, Excel is made up of rows and columns, and works/calculates left to right within a row, then moves down a row, and starts over, etc.. In addition, a value that is calculated in cell A1, for example, is typically used in cell A2, and so on down the row.
In my spreadsheet, assume I have 80 rows and 200 columns. Formulas (nothing fancy, just normal math) are copied downward in each column to all 80 rows. In other words, every formula in a particular column is the same thing (of course, the values used in those formulas are different).
My general questions:
1. Does Python even lend itself to calculating/behaving like Excel? If not, is there a better language?
2. If so, how should I think of duplicating a spreadsheet-like program in Python? Should I think of a row as a list? dictionary? etc? Is that hard to do with a big list? Maybe a make a bunch of smaller lists to duplicate a section of the spreadsheet? etc, etc.
I just need some general thoughts on whether to try, and if so, maybe how to approach it from a big picture standpoint?
thanks for looking