Worse Is Better™
Why do we use R rather than Excel?
141–150 of 266 posts
Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?
#142Big 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...
> Anything important should not be done in Excel. Hold on a second while I go shut down the global economy for two years so we can teach everyone finance person how to program.
This. Most finance people who live by Excel have ninja level skills with Excel. I have had to unpack logic from some excel sheets into webapps and they had so much sophisticated programming embedded into it. And it is so much easier intuitive to use Solver for linear equations in Excel than any web application.
Regarding the graphing ability , R may have more power but plotting the graphs in Excel is so much more WYSIWYG.
Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?
#143Excel files are shareable and everyone's able to inspect them. (drops mike)
Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?
#144Use R when getting paid by the hour. Excel when you have dinner plans.
Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?
#145If 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…
> I want to move a thousand files beginning with 'UTR-77' and ending with '.csv'
1. Use a file manager with stable sorting [1] (I use Thunar which does this, but I suspect lots of file managers keep the sort order stable).
2. Sort by type.
3. Sort by name.
4. Select the first file named UTR-77.
5. Scroll to the last file, and Shift+Click it.
6. Cut then paste to your desired directory.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithm#Stability
Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?
#146Big 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...
> Anything important should not be done in Excel. Hold on a second while I go shut down the global economy for two years so we can teach everyone finance person how to program.
Do not shutdown the global economy. Just maybe move to tools with less issues around process governance:
"The 7 Biggest Excel Mistakes of All Time"
https://www.teampay.co/insights/biggest-excel-mistakes-of-al...
"The financial fails and business risks of spreadsheets"
https://www.webexpenses.com/2020/10/financial-fails-business...
"Nightmare on spreadsheet: take Excel use seriously"
https://www.icaew.com/insights/viewpoints-on-the-news/2020/o...
"Excel – The Dirty Secret"
https://tax.thomsonreuters.co.uk/blog/excel-the-dirty-secret...
"8 Challenges When Using Excel For Accounting"
https://www.senacea.co.uk/post/excel-for-accounting-challeng...
Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?
#147For 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…
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Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?
#148If 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…
> I want to move a thousand files beginning with 'UTR-77' and ending with '.csv' 1. Use a file manager with stable sorting [1] (I use Thunar which does this, but I suspect lots of file managers keep the sort order stable). 2. Sort by type. 3. Sort by name. 4. Select the first file named UTR-77. 5. Scroll to the last file, and Shift+Click it. 6. Cut then paste to your desired directory. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/…
> 5. Scroll to the last file, and Shift+Click it.
With thousands of files, this won't be particularly fast or easy.
Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?
#149Big 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.
As a total R beginner I was hugely put off by the complexities of data cleansing especially columns with ?different data types.
Re: Why do we use R rather than Excel?
#150I think a fairer question today would be "Why do we use R rather than M?" https://www.howtoexcel.org/power-query/m-code/
Absolutely! For power-users of Excel, this article reads as "the reason we don't use Excel is because we don't understand how to use it". For those who aren't as familiar with Excel, all the functionality the author is describing as missing in Excel is actually built into it out of the box - as a feature called Get & Transform (or 'PowerQuery'). You can load in a CSV, manipulate it, do batch processing, and all the s…
Second using Get & Transform (or 'PowerQuery'). Note it is also Power BI's data integration functionality. (Though was recently disappointed to learn it is not available on Mac.)
While I use wide range of data integration and visualization tools, Excel/Power Query with pivot tables & charts is often my go-to for quick data analysis or exploration.
Recently used it to retrieve Our World in Data Github hosted csv file data into an Excel file and then click refresh to get most recent data: https://009co.com/?p=1491