Why do we use R rather than Excel? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#11

Post by inthewoods » Sun, Jul 11, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

Some compelling reasons - I think most of them can be addressed in Excel, but the reality is most people don't know how Excel really works or how to do anything complex in it. Having said that, as your need to batch process numbers goes up, R and other solutions have more value in my opinion.

I'm particularly interested in "half-way" solutions - something between R and Excel. I've been looking at https://www.causal.app/ - no affiliation but I find their approach similar to a Mac app I like called Numi.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#12

Post by supahfly_remix » Sun, Jul 11, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

supahfly_remix wrote: post #8

Saw CSV mentioned in the article but didn't see it mention that R can read Excel files directly. So, you can use the spreadsheet to capture data and process it in R.

Oops. meant this for my comment below.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#13

Post by enriquto » Sun, Jul 11, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

npilk wrote: post #5

For small datasets and simple charts, I'm not sure there are any compelling reasons to use R instead of Excel (unless you're already more comfortable with it). Plus, Excel is great for beginners - most people wouldn't need a class to draw a basic chart. The more complex the analysis, the more reasons there are to get out of Excel.

The "spreadsheet" interface is now universal and not limited to excel. You have a completely equivalent thing with gnumeric, or libereoffice's calc, for example. This interface is really great for kids, for example to compute averages and simple formulas, before they learn "serious" programming. I was taught how to use spreadsheets in school and it is easily one of the most useful things that I learned there.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#14

Post by dav43 » Sun, Jul 11, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

Currently watching a health care department in a c.8m person city implement powerBI.

To me, similar reasons surface to why it's a disaster waiting to happen.

Formulae hidden away in non document DAX columns. Its horrendous. Its the worst thing to happen to "BI", "Data analysis" that I've seen.

Given me a clearly defined single R markdown document that's easy to follow. If you can't follow the Markdown document, you shouldn't be running analysis in the first place.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#15

Post by cmsonger » Sun, Jul 11, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

IMO this really asks the question: Why is there not a code view for an excel spreadsheet?

I get that some of the basic operations probably create expressions that are too wordy / very "specific data" intensive. That is, if you took the first step and just did your best to create that code view it would have a lot of stuff conditional on specific things.

But it's the next step that gets interesting. Now that you've got it, in what ways can the visual UI change to have the code view create tighter expressions. Now that you've got this view, how can it become super handy for doing things that today are clunky?

IMO there's an interesting "no-code" path in there somewhere and there's also an interesting "make spreadsheet re-use more powerful." Or maybe not, what do I look like, an Excel engineer? Ha!

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#16

Post by bonoboTP » Sun, Jul 11, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

verelo wrote: post #6

foreigner wrote: post #2

Wow those reasons don't sound very compelling to me! (I'm a programmer but don't know R.)

Honestly i struggle with it. My partner recently wrote an R package (phd biology) and I’m a developer. I had done a bit of R but nothing substantial. By the end of the project i couldn’t think of a compelling reason not to use any other language. The R tooling is clumsy, the language isn’t great…the built in graphs are ok? It feels like the reason it’s popular is mostly just people not wanting to update skills becaus…

There are also a lot of niche libraries for various statistical tests and analyses that are used for scientific studies. Especially applied scientists who wouldn't necessarily be able to reimplement the math and are not very familiar with programming rely on it as a workhorse. Things like variants of anova, regressions etc. are often just a single line in R, specify the data, the interaction terms etc and you get a nicely formatted output with everything calculated for you, like goodness of fit, p-values etc. There's a long tail of functionality in there that's hard to match even with the scipy stack or other statistical packages in python. Plotting is also much less of a hassle than with matplotlib.

R is more of a free and de-bloated SPSS than an alternative to scipy or excel.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#17

Post by ConfusedDog » Sun, Jul 11, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

These reasons are valid of course. But Excel is installed on most of machines, R or Python isn’t. We all know how people like a “binary” that just runs everywhere…

Overall, for serious data analysis work, I’d use R or Python, but Excel is popular enough to have its place, just need to know the risks.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#18

Post by JimBlackwood » Sun, Jul 11, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

verelo wrote: post #6

foreigner wrote: post #2

Wow those reasons don't sound very compelling to me! (I'm a programmer but don't know R.)

Honestly i struggle with it. My partner recently wrote an R package (phd biology) and I’m a developer. I had done a bit of R but nothing substantial. By the end of the project i couldn’t think of a compelling reason not to use any other language. The R tooling is clumsy, the language isn’t great…the built in graphs are ok? It feels like the reason it’s popular is mostly just people not wanting to update skills becaus…

I use R for work a lot, maybe to give some reasons to use R:

1. The language itself isn’t great, but the tidyverse packages are amazing. There’s really not a reason to use R if you’re not going to use tidyverse.

2. It’s integration to make quick webapps, books, Markdown reports, blogs. Is amazing. In a team where we process a lot in Excel, it’s so convenient I can just make a quick webapp that does that task a lot quicker for everyone to use.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#19

Post by edumucelli » Sun, Jul 11, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

One important aspect is the numerical precision. For those in need of correctness, avoid Excel and other spreadsheets. There are several papers discussing the lack of precision of excel and the likes in the literature [1].

[1] https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v034i04

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#20

Post by mkl95 » Sun, Jul 11, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

A while ago, there was a job offer in my area to automate Excel tasks using Python. The thing was posted time after time by several recruitment agencies, for almost a year. Just thinking how expensive that process must have been answers the question.