Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?

practicalstats.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 108 posts

Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?

#31

Post by kprybol »

kprybol wrote: post #2

The other reason to not use Excel for stats? It's virtually impossible to reproduce your work unless you documented every step in some other format. Excel is easily one of the worst tools you can use if you ever need to refer back to/redo your original work at any point in the future or if you need to be able to validate your result with any confidence. Yea I know there are some people who are freaking magicians with…

Oh, almost forgot! (can't edit so I'll reply to myself) - there's no way for you to set a fixed seed using the built in random number generator. REALLY hope you don't need to reproduce your results because it's essentially impossible. Again, it's technically possible to implement your own Lehmer random number generator within Excel and rely on that and again VBA is always and option, but let's be realistic. The people who understand the need for setting fixed seeds, can implement their own random number generator, and/or are comfortable actually programming aren't going to using Excel anyway (willfully at least)

Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?

#32

Post by lordnacho »

twunde wrote: post #10

I disagree. Where I work, we have one person that does all the hedging, price calculations and other financial modeling and he only uses Excel. The only practical downsides to his use of Excel it's that he doesn't have direct database access so we generally need to create the initial reports to give him the data and secondly Excel can only hold a little over 2M rows.

Why does he not simply read a tutorial on how to pull in data from a database?

Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?

#33

Post by Delmania »

nn3 wrote: post #13
gaius wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just as unsuitable. But there are plenty of open source packages that R the right tool for the job...

The article disagrees with you """ Solution #2: Alternatives to Excel Yalta (ref 1) states that p-values [inverse probability distributions] reported by the free OpenOffice’s Calc spreadsheet and the open-source Gnumeric spreadsheet do not have the same numerical problems as does Excel - their programmers used accurate algorithms.""" It is not surprising because with an open source program everyone who can program ca…

> It is not surprising because with an open source program everyone who can program can fix such issues, while with Microsoft you are at the mercy of the likely overworked Excel team.

Yep, that's the theory behind open source applications. The reality is that in a company, people will prefer Excel because Microsoft is a point of contact that can work with, blame, or yell at to fix because you're paying them. With OpenOffice or LibreOffice, sure, you could have your engineering department fix it, or they could work on the software you need for your business.

Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?

#34

Post by lordnacho »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #28
lordnacho wrote: post #26

Never, ever use Excel for anything other than prototyping, spot-checking data, or as a makeshift GUI while you develop a proper one. I've seen several financial shops where people were moving millions of dollars around using Excel. IMHO, it's always an indicator of deficient processes and lack of coding skill. Yes, I do know that some clever people use it. They are productive in spite of excel, not because of it. You…

I could've sworn I've seen people who work in the financial and maybe data science industries who've praised Excel to the heavens on HN. Like on the same level as Python, R, etc. I don't work in finance (or data science really) so I can't comment, but it seems merely a tool to me.

No way, not data science. How are you going to load in millions, possibly billions of individual numbers?

With finance there's a lot of things that seem like good fits, but only if you keep them small. Something like a personal budget is fine, where everything fits on a screen.

Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?

#35

Post by ee8aq3g5c6 »

nolok wrote: post #30
ee8aq3g5c6 wrote: post #21

Let's not forget the time Excel's bad UI contributed to a bombshell paper's faulty evidence in favor of fiscal austerity, probably prolonging the European recession: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinha...

Yeah no, if people who were decided by this paper took it at face value without checking the numbers made sense, it's not an excel ui's fault. As for the others, they would have picked that policy choice with or without that paper.

Sure, we could argue over multiple possible sources of blame and maybe we will conclude that Excel is not the most important. It seems nearly impossible to have that debate in a rigorous way. In any case, "the evidence will be ignored anyway" is not a good argument to use a tool that will produce bad evidence.

Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?

#38

Post by galkk »

"statistics don't lie quote but liars use statistics"

Well, the similar can be said about authors of that article (don't know about newer version of Excel though).

Basically they are saying "Of course, it all appears only to old versions of Excel but there were sooo much problems with them".

So, what?

Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?

#40

Post by blahi »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #18
tangue wrote: post #3

Considering Microsoft recent involvment with R I have the crazy hope that future versions of Excel will be shipped with R as a scripting language.

IMO adding scripting to a spreadsheet is a waste of time when R can simply import a spreadsheet, perform whatever operations needed, then spit out another spreadsheet/database/whatever format you want.

That would depend on what you want to do. If by statistical analysis you mean regression or similar tasks, then sure R is the way to go.

However there are other family of analytics tasks which can be summed up as "decision analysis". Taking regression models (for example, maybe even built in R) and simulating them under different inputs, getting quantiles, sensitivity, etc. This goes much further with multiple sets, multiple outcomes with decision trees (NOT regression trees/CART) and even further with solvers. Excel is the best option in those tasks most of the time because of quick data entry and already built output reports and interfaces.

Post reply on HN