Some of us in academic worlds still stick with Excel when visualizing data. I don’t blame them. In my first year of PhD student, I had used Excel for some of my presentations. Why? Because I use Windows, because it’s quick, and because it’s a good companion with Powerpoint and Word. Even now in my life of a researcher, sometimes explaining something to someone by datamining using Excel is a quick way: the learning curve for excel plotting is simple: click drag, choose and voilà.

Right now most of the time I work with LaTeX and computational analysis using Python and Matlab, Excel is in the past. But there still are some special cases I have to switch to Excel, and I really miss what I have in Python: Panda and Matplotlib.

xlwings comes to rescue.

This package is an updated one, provides Excel the power of Python: you will run a command window being in interaction with Excel. Moreover, it’s opensource, sounds perfect for academic worlds.