I first referred to stackoverflow.com/questions/77666734/… to address the Visual Studio related issue below (starts with "WARNING"). After installing Visual Studio, I realized that Python 3.13 is not yet compatible with the installation of spacy. So I installed Python 3.12 and then installed spacy. I used the following commands for this.

winget install python.python.3.12

py -3.12 -m pip install -U spacy

For invoking the Python shell with 3.12 and then importing spacy, I used "py -3.12" followed by "import spacy".

WARNING: Failed to activate VS environment: Could not find C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vswhere.exe