While Excel remains ubiquitous in the business world, recent Microsoft feedback forums are full of requests to include Python as an Excel scripting language-in fact, it's the top feature requested. What makes this combination so compelling? In this hands-on guide, Felix Zumstein--creator of xlwings, a popular open source package that allows the automation of Excel with Python--shows experienced Excel users how to integrate these two worlds efficiently.

Excel has added quite a few new capabilities over the past couple of years, but its automation language, VBA, stopped evolving a long time ago. Many Excel power users have already adopted Python for their daily automation tasks. This guide gets you started.

• Use Python without extensive programming knowledge
• Get started with modern tools, including Jupyter notebooks and Visual Studio Code
• Use pandas to acquire, clean, and analyze data and replace typical Excel calculations
• Automate tedious tasks like consolidation of Excel workbooks and production of Excel reports
• Use xlwings to build interactive Excel tools that use Python as a calculation engine
• Connect Excel to databases and CSV files and fetch data from the internet using Python code
• Use Python as a single tool to replace VBA, Power Query and Power Pivot