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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?

#101

Post by ekianjo »

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…

The tooling is massively better than Python to say the least. You have a single environment (RStudio) that does most things really well, an excellent package manager, and integrated graphing capabilities and environment variables observation. In comparison Jupyter notebooks feel very limited and clumsy. And Base-R is way more tuned towards data analysis than base Python is, so you end up importing many libraries in Python to do the same thing. Finally, tidyverse has no equivalent in Python as this is a major selling point for R.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#102

Post by ekianjo »

verelo wrote: post #91
papaf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The R tooling is clumsy I really like the R tooling. What do you find clumsy about it? It feels like the reason it’s popular is mostly just people not wanting to update skills I have the opposite view. I find its the people who complain about R because its a bit different are the ones who are inflexible about learning new skills.

Package management is painful, replicating our two environments as i did a peer review always took way more effort than it would have in many other languages. I found my partner, Jess, to be using some fairly niche packages for stats, which admittedly would be harder to replicate in other languages. I personally think it’s fine to use, there’s no harm, but as someone comfortable with many languages, most the people i…

renv is way less clumsy that whatever Python keeps trying to reinvent with pyenv, virtualenv and whatever new solution they come up with every single year.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#103

Post by a5seo »

corty wrote: post #44
Zhyl wrote: post #40

If you need to do something once, use a GUI (Excel). If you need to do something ten times, use hotkeys and shortcuts. If you need to do something a hundred times, write a script (R). I usually use the command line as the example for why writing code and scripts are better than the more intuitive and lower-learning-curve GUIs. If I want to move a file from one folder to another then I just drag it across. Easy. If I…

rstudio is an excellent gui for R. So you can already start with R.

So is https://exploratory.io - I almost always start with it and export the R script once I have some intuitive confidence in my data.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#104

Post by croes »

HPsquared wrote: post #72
temp8964 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can set the data type to "text" when importing CSVs, that turns most things off.

If you try reading an Excel file via SSIS you are out of luck. You can't turn of the auto guessing feature.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#106

Post by indymike »

The reason that we use R or Python or any programming language over applications is integration, capacity, performance or control of process. When I'm asked to replace a spreadsheet it is usually based on the sheet being to large to be performant or it is very buggy, and can't be relied on. I.e. CFO got crushed in a meeting because of a bad excel/googel sheets formula. Lately, I've been thinking about what the "Rust of spreadsheets" would be like... It's really a big problem now.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#108

Post by verelo »

ekianjo wrote: post #101
verelo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The tooling is massively better than Python to say the least. You have a single environment (RStudio) that does most things really well, an excellent package manager, and integrated graphing capabilities and environment variables observation. In comparison Jupyter notebooks feel very limited and clumsy. And Base-R is way more tuned towards data analysis than base Python is, so you end up importing many libraries in P…

The tidyverse packages are pretty great that is true, in particular dplyr was useful. I don't want to sound like I'm just someone against R for the sake of it. There were things I liked, but I just walked away from the project uncertain what the benefit was in using R. There's a solid chance i'm wrong.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#109

Post by glormph »

Zhyl wrote: post #40

If you need to do something once, use a GUI (Excel). If you need to do something ten times, use hotkeys and shortcuts. If you need to do something a hundred times, write a script (R). I usually use the command line as the example for why writing code and scripts are better than the more intuitive and lower-learning-curve GUIs. If I want to move a file from one folder to another then I just drag it across. Easy. If I…

Also, if you need to do something (even once) and have to know how you did it three months later, write a script.

Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?

#110

Post by enumjorge »

protomyth wrote: post #27

R isn't interactive or visual like Excel. Excel's learning curve is a lot less daunting. Also, Excel is ingrained in the accounting culture and well supported by peers. Plus Excel is everyone's default database and form software. None of the article's reasons matter to non-IT people and no IT department has the juice to override the CFO and accountants. Unlike, every other interactive tool that displeases programmers…

Yeah most of the reasons explained in the article are too abstract for a beginner to understand. Visibility for example. If Excel is doing what the user needs, they might naturally question why they need to see under the hood. It might even be a positive that you get less visibility with it. Excel is exposing a smaller surface for the user to understand. Once you have a more complex task those guardrails are going to feel constraining, but until then Excel works well enough.
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