In the last post introducing Python, I demonstrated how to make a simple app using variables and conditional statements. In order to do anything really powerful in a given programming language though, ...

Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions.

One of the most useful new features that Microsoft has incorporated into Excel in recent years is the ability to incorporate Python code directly into a spreadsheet. While it has long been possible to ...