I got bad news for this guy, his employer is only going to pay for excel and his coworker only knows how to use excel so he better learn to use excel. Also people do a lot of things in excel that have no business being done in excel.
I heard its good for databases…
I used to maintain an excel database along with an ecosystem of internal engineering tools in excel/vba. I worked in a vault, and one day I asked my isso if I could get python on some of the machines in my lab. A full 1.5 years later they got back to me that some security office was finally ready to consider my request and sent me a bunch of paperwork to fill out to justify why I needed python. And separate copies for each individual library I wanted to come with it. Needless to say I went on continuing to maintain my excel database and toolkit
some businesses just deserve to die, and are actively working towards it
My high school IT teacher said this outright. He was a FOSS guy, but he said employers will expect MS Office, so we’re going to be learning that.
Funnily enough proprietary software is frowned upon in my professional domain. Im not mad though, the excel commands and whatnot still work in libre office spreadsheets.
Unrelatedly, doing statistics in a spreadsheet program sounds like absolute hell.
I have coded VBA-based shadow-IT back in the day, but I seriously think this is something that needs to disappear in most firms that still have it. It is typically unmaintable automation of tasks at the department level that is super dependent on who is around and is still often in use after the programmers are long gone. I have seen a few old VBA tools in use that should be done with standard python/R or god forbid even JS Code in a decent documented repo.
R was around in 2010, lol
R is great. Your boss will give you excel.
Excel dominates the world of number crunching. Want to change that? You can’t.
Imagine proposing an alternative for your organization that has been using Excel for two decades. Will every single sheet and workbook translate perfectly? If not, not good enough for dealing with numbers. This is why MS never fucks around with Excel. The risk/reward calculation (heh) is not a fit for open source spreadsheets.
Not just within your organisation, but imagine trying to share something other than Excel outside of it!
That’s not very Libre(office) of you there, partner
Old people and technology man. My advisor during my masters was an absolutely brilliant woman; she’s one of the people who has been basically defining the field of data science since the early 90s. The first time I ever published with her, I sent my first draft and her response was “can you convert this to docx? I don’t know how to work with tex.” I still think she’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known but damn did it hurt to work on Microsoft word documents with her
Have you got recommendations for learning how to use tex, R, or Python for those that haven’t learnt how to programme?
I think there are free editors for LaTeX that show you the code and the end result next to each other, and let you edit either.
You need to learn the ability to resist the urge to tweak layout. You’re using a professional document preparation tool that well make your document look professional. Playing with trendy fonts and margins and placement is how regular people make documents in a word processor that look less professional than LaTeX.
LaTeX gives you the respectability of the corporate style of the professional science researcher, but if you want free-form do-it-how-you-like, you really really really don’t want LaTeX.
Ah, I use OpenOffice for writing.
Unironically – use markdown. It’s far more intuitive for most people, comes with similar git tracking benefits, and has simpler compilation / tooling steps.
YouTube. Straight up. When I learned to code my yt search history was a million different versions of “how to <do thing> in python” for months. I also really liked the “Computational methods for physics” textbook (you can find the pdf for free on cambridge website), but that book is written for an audience that knows near graduate math but starts praying if their advisor asks them to write a program
Start out with Python. It’s easy to learn and there are tons of courses and tutorials out there. Unless you want to be a professional programmer, it’s all you’ll ever need. Learning tex in this day and age is a waste of time, if you ask me.
It’s the tool that she’s learned to get the job done, the virtue of the tool does not matter to a master crafts
manperson, only their proficiency.That might be the stupidest thought terminating cliché ive ever heard. The virtue of the tool absolutely does matter. I’m not out here trying to metaphorically mine iron with a pickaxe when we have metaphorical excavators available, and no amount of expertise will allow somebody to be more efficient with the pickaxe than any random novice with an excavator.
Absolutely true - and that’s when ‘masters’ become obsolete.
LinkedIn ass title
If the math underneath is valid then I don’t really care what calculator I use.
Should we also allow them to let AI write their essays?
They were living in 2025 when they posted that in 2023. I don’t think the stats software is the biggest story here.
Excel I agree with.
But sometimes there is value in teaching the old tools/frameworks for doing something. For instance, in bioinformatics, I prefer students that can explain what the FASTA format is versus just boinking the pretty GUI button on the proprietary format used by their sequencer.
Not sure if the post is about GUI vs non-GUI. I read it as use R or pandas instead if SPSS.
