Using Python in R in Excel

Adam Gladstone wraps up a series on an R add-in for Excel:

In the last post in this series I am going to look at calling Python from R. Even though Excel now provides a means of calling Python scripts directly, using the =PY() formula in a worksheet, there are still occasions when it is beneficial to call Python via R. For example, it turns out that importing yfinance produces a ‘module not found’ error using Excel’s function. According to the documentation, yfinance is not one of the open source libraries that the Excel Python secure distribution supports. To get around this issue, we can use the R package Reticulate. This lets us load and run Python scripts from R. As we have seen in the previous parts of this series, the ExcelRAddIn allows us to run R scripts from an Excel worksheet. And putting these two together is quite simple.

I’m glad Adam mentioned this because my first question was going to be, why use this when Excel has Python capabilities built in? And that’s a reasonable answer.