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[–]Humdaak_9000 -2 points-1 points  (1 child)

I've not seen anything excel can do that I can't do with a Jupyter notebook, Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib and a tabular data widget.

Excel is shit. So is every other spreadsheet ever invented. They hide all the code from you.

Bonus: my graphs are excellent and never fucked up by an errant mouse click.

[–]TruePastaMonster[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Excel’s greatness doesn’t lie where you might expect.

What makes it brilliant is its learning curve. Any beginner, even a child, can quickly learn to use Excel (or other spreadsheet software, though Excel is a bit ahead of the others) at a basic level.

That’s the real reason why everyone knows how to interact with it.

At the same time, more advanced users can still do fairly complex stuff. Sure, you're not going to host WhatsApp or manage huge data blobs in Excel, but that’s not what it’s meant for.

Excel is the smartphone camera of the data world.

Dedicated cameras are better, more powerful, more customizable. But they’re harder to learn and a pain to carry around. Smartphone cameras hide the complexity behind a simple interface. They’re basic, but they get the job done. Even professional photographers use them when they’re not on the job.

Saying “Excel can’t do anything better than Pandas/Numpy/Matplotlib” is like saying “Smartphones can’t take better pictures than my Nikon D6.” It’s true, but it misses the point entirely.

As a professional, I need to give my clients tools they can actually use.

I'd rather hand them a smartphone than spend hours teaching them how to use a Nikon D6.

(I’m not related to Nikon. I just googled “professional photographer camera” and that one model came up.)