Cloud computing with Python and Excel : picloud integration

Further to my previous post about making Python GUI interact with Excel, we thought it would be interesting to test how cloud computing could be easily accessible from Excel using Python and the picloud library.

We have just added interfaced some Python code that do compute the put and call price of a stock based on a Black & Scholes Monte-Carlo simulation. We end up with one function call in Excel :

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Interactive Python graphics/visualisation with Excel

Making Excel users benefit of the quick and powerful Python GUI tools was an idea that looked pretty interesting.

The two main arguments for that are :

1. Python code is easily maintainable, tested and integrated compared to what can be inside of an Excel sheet
2. Python has some powerful libraries for numerical computing, 2D/3D visualisation, etc.

For the last London Financial PUG meeting (March 11), Travis and I had the idea of making Chaco playing with Excel thanks to a cool tool named pyxll and the pywin32 extension. The example allows the user to select a range of columns in Excel, send them to a Chaco regression tool where the user can select points. A Chaco tool does lively compute a regression on those points and update the Excel sheets.

The result is pretty interesting as shown on the screenshot here below. (I will most probably post a video showing how interactive it is).

Pyxll is a very interesting library allowing you to very easily make your Python function available within Excel (either as menu or functions). Thanks a lot to Tony Roberts for his excellent pieces of advice on using pyxll for the demo.

Chaco Python plotting application toolkit that facilitates writing plotting applications at all levels of complexity, from simple scripts with hard-coded data to large plotting programs with complex data interrelationships and a multitude of interactive tools. Chaco is part of the Enthought Tool Suite and available under the BDS license

Implementation details