Memes

45192 readers

2005 users here now

Rules:

Be civil and nice.
Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

307

I hate excel so much (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

52 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

And at least at my workplace, a lot of work processes use poorly-designed Excel spreadsheets for critical tasks, because it’s such a simple way to manipulate data.

I also find that when I need to do more complicated data analysis, Excel starts to become limited, and I find Python to be a more powerful and flexible tool.

Capability is a double edged sword. Any tool that is capable of doing something is going to be used by someone to do that thing, regardless of whether it should be. Excel gets abused and used for things that it shouldn't be frequently in corporate environments because of its capabilities. I can understand being frustrated by that.

I use Excel for reporting and analytics because it makes manipulating and visualizing data very easy. Especially if you know what you're doing. No need to write a UI or worry about portability between workstations, etc. At the end of the day it's a tool. A very capable one. Like any tool, it's not the right one for every job.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I use excel because its stupidly easy to output a shitload of objects with properties (computers/hosts in my case) to a CSV via powershell and sort through the data.