The Last Straw for Excel?

Microsoft Office and I haven't been getting along well lately, which is too bad because I have really liked all the new features of Office 2013. But after upgrading Windows to 8.1 this week, Excel decided to stop working. As in, it completely crashes whenever I try to go beyond the view of cells available when it opens. Not cool.

Normally I'd try to figure something out to get everything working, but this weekend I had to input my students' grades so I could discuss their test scores with them on Monday, so I didn't have time to go on a wild Windoze chase for a solution. Instead, I tried out the import feature of Google Docs, and overall I was pretty impressed. Let me share the details...

Downgraded to Python 2.7.1? How did that happen?

So I was doing some work on my home computer tonight which involved a little bit of Python hacking in Windows.  At one point I wanted to make sure that I had a certain library installed such that it was accessible to the script I was working with, so naturally I opened up an interpreter and tried importing it.  It failed, which surprised me since I had just finished using pip to install it and no errors occurred.

The script I was working with was one I wrote a few years ago, so my first thought was that maybe they released a newer version of the library with different capitalization.  Kind of a strange guess, I know, but not too far-fetched considering PEP 8 is still not completely followed by the community and some maintainers of certain libraries are changing this to conform to the standard, but I digress.  I run the pip install command one more time, just to make sure that there wasn't an issue with naming.  Nope, dependency already resolved.

Finally, I noticed that the interpreter I was running was Python 2.7.1.  Well, I knew that couldn't be the problem, but I like to always have the latest version of Python installed so I thought I'd take a minute to rectify that.  But that was another issue... why wasn't I running 2.7.3?  It was weird that I had such an old version running when I'm usually so on top of updating Python.  Whatever.

So I first tried a repair.  Still showed up as 2.7.1.  Downloaded a fresh copy of the installer and verify the checksum.  Still showed up as 2.7.1.  Removed it completely after making a backup of site-packages, then re-installed it.  Still showed up as 2.7.1.  Uninstalled it again without re-installing it.  The interpreter still ran and showed up as 2.7.1.  What the...?

I was starting to get fed up at this point.  The system path didn't have anything out of the ordinary, like a separate folder for an old installation, nothing.  Finally, I found this StackOverflow article which, oddly enough, had an example of exactly what I needed to figure out what was going on and where this rouge installation of Python was that was driving me crazy. Here's what I got:

C:\Users\Mike>for %i in (python.exe) do @echo %~$PATH:i
C:\Program Files\Box Sync\Python.exe

Box Sync includes its own Python interpreter?  That's what's going on?  And it somehow became the default interpreter instead of my 2.7.3 installation?  Okay... I guess that's great they're using Python, but why force my computer to use an old interpreter?  I'm no Windows expert, but it seems like there should be a better way to do whatever it is they're trying to do.  But I can also have sympathy for them not wanting to use Py2Exe... shudder

Apparently, this is something Box is already aware of, but the whole thing is still just so weird.  I don't use Box that much as it is, so I think I'll just nuke their version of Python for the time being.  And yes, it did fix my problem.