PyXLL Notebook

This project bridges PyXLL and remote Jupyter Notebooks.

NOTE: Not to be confused with pyxll-jupyter which embeds a local Jupyter notebook inside Excel.

It enables Excel add-ins to be written in Python using PyXLL, but for the Python code to be executed in an IPython kernel running on a remote Jupyter Notebook server.

For details about PyXLL, see https://www.pyxll.com.

Status

This project is currently a proof of concept, and so lots of things are missing.

What's working

• Excel functions (UDFs): Excel functions in a remote Jupyter notebook decorated with @xl_func can be used from Excel in the same way as if they were being run locally.

• RTD functions (RTD): Functions in remote Jupyter notebooks decorated with @xl_func can return RTD instances, and setting the RTD value in the Jupyter notebook updates the value in Excel.

What's not working yet

• Cached objects
• XLCell arguments
• Macros
• Menus
• Ribbon functions
• Excel C wrapper functions
• Custom types
• ...probably much more

Usage

At the moment there is no easy way to login to a secured remote notebook server without making some code changes.

For testing, use a local notebook server by running jupyter as follows:

jupyter notebook

You may need to update your PYTHONPATH before running the notebook server so that the pyxll_notebook package can be found.

Update pyxll-notebook.cfg with the configuration of your local notebook server, including the auth token that will have been printed out when you ran the above command.

Add pyxll-notebook.cfg as an extenal config to your main pyxll.cfg, and when you start Excel it will load the notebook specified in the config.

[PYXLL]
external_config =
    <<path to pyxll-notebook.cfg>>

See examples/test.ipynb for example usage.

Requirements

Client Side (Excel)

• Python, minimum version is 3.6
• PyXLL (www.pyxll.com)
• Microsoft Excel

Server Side (Jupyter notebook server)

• Python, minimum version is 2.7