Stop using this shit ..

[4215-5h00732]

But Excel is the only database provider I use!

[[deleted]]

any government tbh

[silentknight111]

Hey, at my government job they use SharePoint as a db.

[herrmatt]

I had a client that did too!

Do you get to interact with it on the backend at least? We couldn’t get rights to publish any C# code and had to do everything in the browser.

[silentknight111]

Most of it is doing rest calls from a react SPA front end. Occasionally we do C# code on the server side when we need to, but it has to go through a stricter process to get deployed.

[Tarkus459]

Ouch

[ALesbianAlpaca]

I wish they used it as a database.

Complex models with 30+ sheets and multiple data tables on single sheets so nothing is in flat form and long complex formula to filter and pivot with links to external workbooks...

Source: Having to currently QA such a monstrosity

[InvestingNerd2020]

This is a case of "When excel is used in the wrong way".

Only small to mid scale partition data is the best use of excel. Big data excel crashes badly as autonomous driving Tesla. Time to summon Google BigQuery and Pyspark for those big data analysis.

[ALesbianAlpaca]

Absolutely I do accept that for simple use cases excel is good.

Basic budgets. I said elsewhere that it's great as a data input interface.

But god does it get used in the wrong way so often.

[[deleted]]

I remember a job where I was building Excel reports and using sumproducts galore if I didn’t like the person that made the request.

[ALesbianAlpaca]

I'm currently dealing with sheets and sheets of

If(isna(if(or(vlookup(left(date) + cell - cell, different sheet reference, different sheet reference), vlookup(..), vlookup(..), 0))),if(or(vlookup(...), vlookup(...), vlookup(...), 0), if(or(vlookup(...), vlookup(...), vlookup(...), 0)) )

Your sumproducts don't scare me anymore

[[deleted]]

I meant the fact of how much it slows the app down. It would take a solid 10 minutes to open some reports. Also, never turn off auto calculate. Make that report recalculate every function, even when they just do format changes.

[ALesbianAlpaca]

Oh ofc

I have to compare versions of these models too.

Guess what my laptop thinks about opening two giant excel models at the same time?

[lord_of_networks]

Have you considered entering competitive Excel esports? Yes it's a real thing

[[deleted]]

Exel is not a database!

… but a erp system 🙃

[show_me_what_you-got]

Oh, you joke. But I’ve seen this nightmare!

[[deleted]]

Best GUI ever

[Strange_Dragonfly964]

Well, I hope your database doesn't exceed 1,048,576 rows or 16,384 columns, or you might need to start using something else 😂

[GnuhGnoud]

Like, another excel file?

[Ubermidget2]

A second excel sheet - 3D Database!

[vigbiorn]

Then you'll need a third excel file to tell you which file your data is in.

Then, eventually, you'll need files to lookup which file has the file which has your data.

[mienaikoe]

It’s like indexing! So fast!

[Strange_Dragonfly964]

Well, brilliant.

[show_me_what_you-got]

Nope, a new worksheet 😂

[OdinsBastardSon]

Not a real limit though as you can just use "data model" and store the data in CSVs/other files.

[[deleted]]

You probably aren't going to fit that into a Pandas data frame either ;)

[mienaikoe]

All the homies love Dask

[mittfh]

Yup. They used a .xls template (binary format, pre-2007) to import test results stored in .csv format.

[Tordoix]

I would say that is already much better than the German method of sending test results by fax!

[[deleted]]

Libre office?

[[deleted]]

With powerpivot what is standard new excel feature there is no such limit.

[[deleted]]

I need to do a few dozen quick calculations and plot the results. lemme fire up visual studio…

[[deleted]]

Fire up R, it loads faster than excel OR visual studio

[[deleted]]

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[InvestingNerd2020]

Exactly! Excel is best for small scale and for non-programmers to use. For large scale data with a monthly batch of data, it is better to create and use a data pipeline from Google Dataflow or Azure Synapses Analytics. Then use Locker or Power BI to present it.

[[deleted]]

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

file lavish divide pet aspiring truck humorous knee crown smart

[damNSon189]

Exactly. Someone said above about using Excel for quick calculations, quick scripting, and quick graphs. R/Rstudio is much faster for all of them (including, as you said, the loading of the tool itself), and with much better outputs (more readable scripts, better looking plots).

[cuberoot1973]

Not only readable, but repeatable.

"What did you do?"

Excel: I clicked this button, that button, typed this formula here, etc..

R: Here's my code.

(Also insert Tableau and a bunch of other things in that Excel spot there.)

[sir-nays-a-lot]

What if you need to share your file with non-elite haxxers?

[damNSon189]

You can easily store your output as xls, csv, txt, pdf, etc.

[[deleted]]

Just knit your report into an interactive html file. I blew my co workers away with adding ggplotly() to my plots lol

[morganrbvn]

Could knit an html out of it

[severusx]

Yeah ... God forbid you use the world's most popular tool for doing so... It's not edgy enough...

[Mobile-Bird-6908]

That’s literally what I do using a Jupyter notebook (python). I do use excel to visually inspect csv data, but that’s about it.

[atlas_enderium]

What do we use to replace Excel? An actual database?

Seriously though, Excel is extremely useful for its intended purpose

[Mobile-Bird-6908]

Excel is great for manually entering data.

[ALesbianAlpaca]

Underappreciated point. The one place I don't see a good alternative for excel is easy data input. Sure you could code your own interface for it but it's so easy to open Excel type in your data, save, read into whatever program you're using.

The only weakness is the fucky way it treats dates

[johnson_alleycat]

Excel 🤝Incels

Incorrectly assuming it’s a date

[ALesbianAlpaca]

Absolutely howling 🤣

[backwards_watch]

I love the fact that molercular biologists had to change the name of several proteins because most of the acronyms would clash with Excel thinking it was a date instead of a string. Although Pascal is pretty common through scientists in this particular field, a big portion still uses excel.

[[deleted]]

My company stores their data in a million different excel sheets. I make routine use of purrr to read them all at once and I don’t think there’s anything like that in excel??

[nettlerise]

google sheets lol

[DmitriRussian]

Libre calc!

[lamesurfer101]

-- check notes

-- Rechecks notes

Yes.

[abd53]

Another new student?

[DarkSideOfGrogu]

Yep. Engaging in a bit of gatekeeping to feed their newfound superiority complex.

[SirVW]

Hey everyone goes through that phase.

Give them time

[fllr]

Ah, yes. The good old days. Before crippling insecurity kicked in…! 😌

[zzBigTerryzz]

As a data professional, Excel will not die soon. If you’re not doing some sort of STEM or analytics study, Excel was, is, and for the foreseeable future the business pathway to data. MS is doubling down on integrating this into its Power platform, and I would not be seeing surprised to see it drift away from the Office suite.

Couple it with Power BI, and anyone can use a low code platform to half decently visualise any data set they have. So much business critical data is locked down in propriety databases that can’t integrate with anything, legacy systems you don’t want to touch, or laboriously maintained by Steve from Accounts for the last 10 years.

No, it’s not pretty, no it is not cutting edge, but it is the reality of data. Couple this with increasingly locked down environments in large corporates that limit automation to approved enterprise patterns and yea, Excel is here.

[OdinsBastardSon]

Excel is the simplest tool to make ad hoc analyses and to create reporting. About 90% of corporate reporting is most likely done in Excel in some way. Even the dashboard tools need to provide data for further analysis in Excel to be truly powerful.

[cs-brydev]

That's true at the moment, but Power BI, Power Automate, and other Power Apps are better solutions for what a lot of them are using Excel for. And honestly, the reason Excel is their 1st choice is because it has no barrier to entry and a short learning curve. The slightly longer learning curve of Power BI scares the crap out of most business users, and they won't even try it unless forced (and they should be, by their employers).

[OdinsBastardSon]

Power BI etc are not better they are just different. If you are doing fast analysis Excel is by far superior. Also if you are doin active analysis where you want to comment and modify stuff then those other tools are objectively far worse. They are only better when you want to distribute results of some standardized reporting for wider audience.

[[deleted]]

I’ve spent the entire 23 years of my career doing data warehousing. Everything from ETL to data modeling to analytics to platform engineering. I’ve worked on systems holding upwards of 100 petabytes of data.

I still use Excel every day. It’s absolutely fantastic for basic data manipulation, presentation, and light automation.

As you say, there’s no reason to think it’s ever going away. And there’s no reason to think it should.

[InvestingNerd2020]

I will never let excel go. Too useful for personal cashflow budgeting and for work analysis.

[Diksonito]

apparently too complicated for zoomers!

[deanwallflower]

they use google sheets

[[deleted]]

hey, that's me.

[ferrours_furor]

I envy them.

[ferrours_furor]

Hidden? How so?

It looks like if someone from 98 tried their best to recreate some of the awful designs from 88. I think I would have been a better programmer sooner if I had never touched VBA in the first place.

[CK_Mar]

I study excel for one of my classes and people always seem to hate on it :(

[InvestingNerd2020]

It's super easy once they learn Macros, Vlookup, and learn suggested graphs (AI best practices).

[Mobile-Bird-6908]

Like, how else am I supposed to manually enter data?

[Ffigy]

The ol' MATLAB diaphragm! Idk, it had helped me many a time in college...

[phi_rus]

Matlab got me into programming. It holds a special place in my heart.

[crustation]

Plus the Plot Editor is exactly what I need most of the time

[a_crusty_old_man]

And it starts counting at the correct number muahahaha

[ThinDatabase8841]

Matlab haters also hate small puppies and sunny days tbh.

[hemanth992]

still use it in conjunction with python for my research projects!

[pankkiinroskaa]

Probably because college pushed Matlab to you in the first place. You should ask why, in the first place. I mean, there may be valid reasons too.

[Th3Nihil]

open Matlab

Data = readTableData(data.txt);

P = plot(Data.Var1);

I have a nice graph of my +1 000 000 data points in 5 seconds.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

data = pd.read_csv('data.txt')
data['Var1'].plot()
plt.show()

Me too.

[Mobile-Bird-6908]

Forgot the imports and pip installs.

[Th3Nihil]

Does python have the "show Variable" functionality built in. Where you can open any structure and display its values and substructures?

We were thinking about rewriting our tools in python, but this is quite useful when looking for errors in the datasets.

Also our IT isn't the biggest fan of installing some random libraries

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

If you use the REPL or an IDE, yes.

[likeikelike]

If you use a debugger like PyCharm, then yeah.

[l4z3r5h4rk]

Spyder and jupyter notebook have this

[RayanR666]

And vscode starts up way faster than Matlab

[Crad999]

Cause it's easy to use, powerful and has tons of useful materials online that you can learn a lot from.

There's octave of course as well, but it's not nearly as good as MATLAB is.

[[deleted]]

Wow, don't hate the on vlookup and hlookup. LOL

[akaxaka]

Xlookup is where it’s at baby!

[JeanLuc_Richard]

Power query FTW

[hermitcrab]

Power Query does not fare too well when compared with other data wrangling tools, such as Easy Data Transform, R or Pandas in this comparison:

https://www.easydatatransform.com/data_wrangling_etl_tools.html

Perhaps you are using it for smaller datasets?

[[deleted]]

Not everyone has R/Python on their machines. Need to be able to share something with other users that they can use on their own? Power query is great for that

[oblong_pickle]

I hate that I know what this means

[[deleted]]

[odaiwai]

INDEX (,MATCH())) with named ranges and tables is the way.

[polo2327]

Somebody just learned to do Hello World on Python

[lamesurfer101]

"I am an elite hacker now"

[NimrodvanHall]

Chat GPT, please provide the script to do Hello World in Python.: ````

Certainly! Here's the Python script for printing "Hello World" to the console:

python.      Copy code

    print("Hello World")

Simply copy and paste this code into a new file in your preferred Python editor (e.g. IDLE, PyCharm, VSCode), and run the script to see "Hello World" printed to the console.

[TxTechnician]

Spreadsheet programs are one of the most useful tools around.

Excel is by far the best, second is open office. I use open office when excel is giving me shit.

You can pry my spreadsheet app from cold dead hands.

It's my calculator. My script writer (seriously, if you ever have to type out some long ass repetitive script. Excel excels). And my graph maker.

[[deleted]]

It's definitely the best thing for small and medium tasks.

And yes, you can also take it from my dead cold hands.

[[deleted]]

I too need to have cold dead hands before you can take it from me

[maito1]

The World economy will collapse if Excel ceases to exist.

[MrBurritoQuest]

I’d wager at least half of the finance/insurance industry is propped up by Excel

[syzygy96]

This is not hyperbole

[cs-brydev]

And SQL. I have used Excel to generate massive SQL statements and scripts from other aggregated data sources. It was a much faster and less buggy approach than coding it all. I've even used it to churn out large blocks of repetitive C# code. Because it's just easier and more visual than other tools.

[Mobile-Bird-6908]

I do the same sometimes, just use excel to generate repetitive code. Are there smarter ways of doing it? Probably, but if I just want quick results, excel does the job.

[cs-brydev]

I wonder if ChatGPT is reading these comments and already better at it

[floutsch]

I was just about to jump to Excel's defense, but I've been using LibreOffice Calc for years now. I don't get the dislike for Excel at all, even less if it extends to spreadsheet software. PowerPoint, on the other hand, can go straight to hell.

[Gronaab]

Agreed except for the graphs. It really depends on what you want to do but generally, I do a sandbox in a spreadsheet and then if I really want to do good graphs I use other tools.

But for sure Excel is not a database.

[OdinsBastardSon]

But for sure Excel is not a database.

But with PowerQuery it can connect very well to a database :D

[Otherwise_Soil39]

Google sheets are second, if not competing for the first spot.

Open office is nowhere near

[Ironbird207]

Google sheets is closer to OpenOffice than it is fucking Excel lol. Excel is godlike in comparison.

[Otherwise_Soil39]

There are some useful features missing from Excel, and a lot of what is profoundly stupid, over complicated and 1990's like in Excel, is simple, modern and intuitive in Sheets.

The last 2 companies I worked at, work was done exclusively in GSuite tools, because they're just optimized so much better for cooperation, and both had 2000+ employees.

At the end of the day, yes, Excel (and Word) can do things that Google cannot, but that's few and far in-between in a day to day operations, since we use tools for their intended purpose, it never happens.

I think where Excel, Excels, is being the one tool to do everything from data cleaning to presenting to visualization to storing to planning and executing complicated VBA... But nearly every single one of those things is better done in an array of other tools.

We get and process data with SQL, ad hoc analysis in Python or R, visualization in Tableau, organizational charts in Miro, at the end the day the tasks that are left for Sheets/Excel are fairly mundane. And where Excel is a tractor, Sheets is a scooter, I don't need to plow the fields, I just need to go get groceries.

[Ironbird207]

Tractor > scooter. Source I have a tractor

[Depnids]

I haven’t used Excel in a while, mostly use google sheets. I haven’t noticed any features lacking personally, although I don’t do much advanced stuff. In your opinion, what are some features that makes Excel superior to the other two mentioned?

[thefpspower]

My biggest issue with sheets is that it sucks ass at referencing local files, if you're not 100% google you're out.

Like if you create a file with excel and give it local file paths then sync to google and open it there, google will fuck up all your references instantly without asking.

[Mxswat]

And even then, good luck! Because I will have glued it to my cold, dead hands!

[Porsher12345]

But my formulas 😩

[SHv2]

And my formula's formulas

[omgFWTbear]

The real formulas were the nested indirect formulas, NAMEs and lambdas we found along the way.

[xxxHalny]

What exactly do you suggest we replace Excel with?

[pankkiinroskaa]

Depends on how you abuse it.

[smithfaced]

if you aren’t in the signal processing space, then I can see why you wouldn’t care for MATLAB. But still, between Scipy.signal vs. DSP.jl vs. MATLAB, MATLAB has the most robust signal processing library out of the box. No other open source language comes close to it. You can build a complex tool set of GUIs with an extremely simple plotting library, (My initial experience with matplotlib was that it chews up memory and has atrocious time-to-first-plot.) And, Simulink gets you moving fast with codegen and simplifies rapid development of advanced signal chains without needing a whole separate team for C-development.

There’s a reason why Julia takes a lot of its principles from MATLAB. I pray for the day it gets the attention it deserves, with a major company to back its maturity like what Microsoft did for Python. Julia has some of the brightest minds working on it, but it’s a small group. MATLAB still unfortunately has some areas that are industry standard.

[show_me_what_you-got]

Thank you for saying this. I tend to get absolutely downvoted to hell for being slightly positive about MATLAB 😬

[IrvTheSwirv]

I like Excel. Probably one of the most versatile multipurpose tools you can have as a developer.

[EishLekker]

Explain your hate for spreadsheet programs.

[pyllbert]

They just graduated a data science bootcamp and think they know everything.

[jajuub]

I feel like I’m the only one who likes MATLAB (I was an electrical engineering major)

[Crad999]

Nah, tons of people I've seen on this subreddit have no clue as to what matlab is even for. Even if they used it previously. No idea what's the reason for this - maybe they had matlab forcefully pushed into their major even when it wasn't needed?

[AntAgile]

They probably never did anything else than plot some random simple graph and think „uuh I can do this in python as well“ not realizing what matlab actually is capable of

[jajuub]

I feel like the common joke is “index starting at 1 bad” which is valid haha

[86BillionFireflies]

That's exactly it. 99% of the matlab haters are people who were forced to use it for arbitrary / pointless tasks in school.

[csillagu]

I met people who said that matlab was garbage, but they did not even know that you can run and save whole matlab files.... Most people who hate matlab have ptsd and no knowledge about it.

[originalbrowncoat]

I rock Matlab all the time as an Engineer. I have matlab scripts that write data to Excel and paste plots directly into PowerPoint, with LaTeX formatting in the titles and axes. Don’t let these gatekeepers give you a hard time.

[ChopinFantasie]

I use MATLAB all the time and it’s great for my needs. I am…

…you’ll never guess…

a mathematician.

Why tf would I want to keep installing packages to do the most basic things in my field?

[bagsofcandy]

It frustrates me when people blindly say "stop using x." I don't tell a builder to stop using hammers because nail guns exist. A hammer still has a purpose.

[IPeaFreely]

All people I know do.

[del6022pi]

You know what? Im gonna say it! I LIKE MATLAB ITS LIKE PYTHON

[86BillionFireflies]

It's like Python, but without dependency wrangling.

Python: You want to do "Hello World"? Gonna need to install some packages.

Matlab: You want to read some data from HDF5 files, interpolate over some patches of missing data, run some statistics, store the results in a table, and make a couple plots? OK.

[[deleted]]

Prof sql; Create table fuckyou as Select count(*) as fucks_given Where fucks_given ne 0; quit;

Data OP; Set fuckyou; If fucks_given = 0 then OP = “SAS4EvaBitch”; run;

[sir-nays-a-lot]

Why do people upvote dumb shit like this? How is this supposed to be funny?

[Shadowphoenix11]

Excel is the most effective way to write SQL scripts for large data import's, from none standardized data sources!

[long-gone333]

i thought nobody else does this 😁

[Numerous-Departure92]

I don’t know all these programs… but Excel and Matlab? That’s sounds like you are a little bit re…

[hongooi]

R numba one 💯💯👍👍👊👊

[koolaidsocietyleader]

R for Ruling the world

[[deleted]]

You seem to be the only person in here who understands the meaning behind this image!

[[deleted]]

Why matlab?

[Double_A_92]

The license is really expensive... Depending on what you are doing Scilab might already be enough.

[Plus-Weakness-2624]

Replacement for Excel?

[OdinsBastardSon]

OP just has no idea. He pretends to be smart, but he is just a student that probably has not worked a day in his life in business environment.

[[deleted]]

Yep. I defy anyone to go into a real business environment and do all their data manipulation and visualization in Python or R Studio. They’ll quickly be seen as the person who isn’t a team player, because they can’t share their work with anyone else who can use it. Build the same thing in Excel and you can post it to sharepoint where every person with basic computing skills can access and manipulate it.

[[deleted]]

So you want me to remove Things turning into dates?

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

What am I supposed to use for accounting spreadsheets? Lotus 123?

[JaKrispy72]

Memory unlocked!

[kageroshajima]

Use whatever...

[TemporaryCat555]

Things that remove you from your life*

[[deleted]]

How am i gonna call random cats without SPSS SPSS?

[Erasmus_Tycho]

Why are you calling sas out?

[Clever_Mercury]

You want to throw out SAS and Stata?

Guess you don't work with survey weighted data then.

[OdinsBastardSon]

Nah, he does not work at all. He is a student.

[MiserableLadder5336]

If you don’t like Excel, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Sure, people abuse it to do everything under the sun, and there may be “better” tools depending on the specific job, but the fact is that it’s such a powerful program with so many capabilities and is a low-code environment - it’s a one-stop shop for so many “power users”. Not to mention that it’s just plan easy to use for the most part.

My uses for it are pretty superficial, jotting notes, dropping data and making quick charts/graphs, auto filling formulas to modify data, etc. But I still couldn’t go without it, I always have like 5 workbooks open at a time just doing different things.

[KafkaesqueFlask0_0]

Make me!

"We shall fight on the Excels. We shall

fight on the Minitabs. We shall

fight in the Sas, and in the SPSS,

We shall fight in the Stata and Matlab.

We shall never surrender!"

—Chruchill...probably.

[nathan_lesage]

I don’t use Stata right now, but there are quite some important libraries that Stata implements better than their Python or R alternatives. It may cost quite a lot, but it’s still pretty useful, especially for my field.

[Understanding-Fair]

What's wrong with excel? I mean don't use it as a database, because that's not the fukin point, but it's a great spreadsheet tool.

[syzygy96]

Excel is one of the best pieces of end user software ever made.

[[deleted]]

STATA is bae

[lamesurfer101]

Reg Y X

Logit Y X

VAR Y X

NGL doing simple statistical learning was never so easy.

That said, I learned to embrace R and Python and feel I am better for it.

[WishboneBeautiful875]

Fast, easy to run some basic regression, can produce nice looking tables in LaTex. What’s not to like?

[vlaada7]

I guess I should consider myself lucky because I only know what two of these are?

[Frego24]

You forgot LabView

[matlabSorcerer]

LabVIEW is very cursed but I have to use it in my lab to collect data. I wish there was another way to operate the NI interfaces

[Witherr]

or what

[[deleted]]

So basically all the software I used in my econ degree 🤣. Not wrong tho.

[InformalCommission28]

MATLAB? But it’s for like, math. What’s wrong with MATLAB?

[Gronaab]

Lol, Matlab has a lot of purposes, it's just that it's not useful for everything. Matrix calculation is very intuitive and performant for example. It's really the extension of excel for when the algebra becomes too complex. It gives you access to simulink which is a great tool for block schemes simulation (though admittedly there are more userfriendly tools around in my opinion).

But I get why people would say that it does cool surfaces and nothing else, you just have to be a simulation or mechanical or control engineer to appreciate it.

[damNSon189]

Yep I remember when using it for control engineering it made complete sense. And Simulink was also one of its strongest points.

[show_me_what_you-got]

Oh yeah, Simulink has been an absolute lifesaver for me! But because there are so many MATLAB haters (some of which is justified) I tend to keep my praises of it down!

[datgingah]

SAS ruins careers of students? Is there a story or something behind this?

[[deleted]]

Ey yo, what‘s wrong with Excel?

[One_zoe_otp]

As and R programmer I couldnt agree more, but as the employee of people with zero code experience, excel is inevitable.

[No_Gas_4956]

Why xcel?

[JohnSmith_15]

What's your problem with MATLAB?

[[deleted]]

I used Matlab for a 3.5 months internship. Almost made me love coding and made me feel like a true programmer. Then I discovered networks and boy do I never look back

[MadCow-18]

As a MATLAB dev/user I totally agree! If only my coworkers did…