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Why do we use R rather than Excel?

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Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#61

Post by roenxi »

corty wrote: post #4

Big big reason: R doesn't alter data without being asked to, Excel does so, silently, sneakily. Anything important should not be done in Excel. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/165042/stop-excel-from-a...

While that is a very real problem, it isn't totally persuasive. It is just as easy to create traps in R (I lost days of my youth to R's challenging-to-defend jungle of an almost-type-system). It is even harder to debug than in Excel too - I would expect less bugs are found in R scripts because less people are up to the challenge of trying.

People shouldn't do important work in Excel. If it is important, people should be involved who have invested the time in learning something more powerful. Indeed, we could ask they aspire all the way to good practice and store their data in a database and their code in git. But there needs to be a process to verify model correctness no matter what tool is being used and bugs will exist in R as well as in Excel.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#62

Post by [deleted] »

cmsonger wrote: post #30
jmkni wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is there not a code view for an excel spreadsheet? Isn't that VBA?

Well, I'm not a VBA / excel expert -- but my neophyte view is that VBA is used to add code to excel, which is great -- but it's not the same as every single spread sheet is automatically creating a "this VBA is the equivalent of your spread sheet." Again, not an expert. I'd expect I've never written one line of VBA. (Yay for me!)

[deleted]

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#64

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

eatonphil wrote: post #33

This week I got a bit more familiar with R while adding it as a scripting language for a data IDE I'm working on (it already supported other languages). It is a very hard language and community to get into! The documentation is very sparse. Library documentation is published as PDF (I guess?) and also very sparse. The default `print` behavior is pretty hard to understand. It's 1-indexed and it took me a while to real…

Everything you're complaining about is just petty bikeshedding issues.

Just learn it, it's more powerful than the alternatives.

P.S. I'm a Python person and not at all an R fanboy, but it's undeniably more powerful and versatile for data science tasks than Python or Julia.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#65

Post by jasode »

user3939382 wrote: post #54
corty wrote: post #4

Big big reason: R doesn't alter data without being asked to, Excel does so, silently, sneakily. Anything important should not be done in Excel. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/165042/stop-excel-from-a...

So if I have Zip codes with leading 0’s, use R?

>So if I have Zip codes with leading 0’s, use R?

Several other software tools also mess up leading 0s including R if used in a naive way without specifying extra options. My previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017116

Like R, MS Excel can also preserve leading 0s -- if you specify the option on import. (Click on Excel 2019 Data tab and import via "From Text/CSV" button on the ribbon menu and a dialog pops up that provides option "Do not detect data types" (Earlier version of Excel has different verbiage to interpret numbers as text))

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#66

Post by jstx1 »

akg_67 wrote: post #26

There is no reason to use R when Excel can do the jobs. It is when Excel can’t handle the task at hand, R shines. I am well familiar with R, but for simple data manipulation, quick chart, pivot table, usually resort to a spreadsheet program. I maintain my Options Trading Journal in spreadsheet where I record all the Options trade I made, positions I hold, P&L, etc. I just can’t imagine doing that in R. R starts with…

> There is no reason to use R when Excel can do the jobs. It is when Excel can’t handle the task at hand, R shines.

I think the problem is more nuanced because Excel can do a lot. There is a large set of use cases and tasks that are possible in Excel but your team would be a lot more efficient and productive using a programming language instead. The trick is to recognise those tradeoffs and it it's not as simple as sticking to Excel as long as things are still possible there.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#67

Post by undreren »

tssva wrote: post #53
corty wrote: post #4

Big big reason: R doesn't alter data without being asked to, Excel does so, silently, sneakily. Anything important should not be done in Excel. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/165042/stop-excel-from-a...

Excel doesn't alter data without being asked either. What it does do by default is try to change how the data is displayed. If the column is properly set to the correct data type the data will be shown correctly because Excel doesn't change the actual data. Column types can be set when csv files are imported. The problem described in the article isn't an Excel issue. It is an issue of the geneticist failure to learn…

It also interprets and coerces values in formulas.

Empty cells are interpreted as zero, which can be downright catastrophic, if the data is just missing.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#68

Post by iagovar »

underdeserver wrote: post #24

For non-programmers who do any kind of data processing, spreadsheet applications (Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets) are the closest thing to programming they have, and have a lot less overhead - just throw in the data, write a formula, you get results, no compilation or fidgeting with input and output and so on. The steps of an algorithm are reflected by cells that reference cells that reference cells. I've always thoug…

Knime is way more powerful, but it requires more learning too. It has nodes for programming (R & Python, and I'm pretty sure it has something with JAVA) your own transformation if you want to integrate complex stuff, but it's very capable out of the box.

Excel has PowerQuery too, which is very nice but you hit the ceiling pretty easy. Knime eats a lot of data down the throat with modest PC, Excel really struggles with large datasets, not matter how you use or tune PowerQuery.

I know here in HN people talk down visual programming, but I've done pretty heavy and complicated stuff with it. It would be way more complicated with pandas.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#69

Post by temp8964 »

corty wrote: post #4

Big big reason: R doesn't alter data without being asked to, Excel does so, silently, sneakily. Anything important should not be done in Excel. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/165042/stop-excel-from-a...

Actually when you use R functions to import CSV files, they also guess data types and make some conversions by default. The difference is that in R you can turn them off if you want to. But in Excel there are automatic changes you can't turn off.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#70

Post by tapia »

underdeserver wrote: post #24

For non-programmers who do any kind of data processing, spreadsheet applications (Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets) are the closest thing to programming they have, and have a lot less overhead - just throw in the data, write a formula, you get results, no compilation or fidgeting with input and output and so on. The steps of an algorithm are reflected by cells that reference cells that reference cells. I've always thoug…

I've always thought that every highschooler should be taught the basics of programming with an easy language like Python instead. That really is a superpower in a lot more contexts.
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