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Excel is a great tool, but its graphing ability leaves a lot to be desired. I feel that graphing in Excel has gotten worse as they have tried making it easier t

Excel is a great tool, but its graphing ability leaves a lot to be desired. I feel that graphing in Excel has gotten worse as they have tried making it easier to use as well. I'm 99% sure the graphing engine in Office 2007-2016 is the same one as in 2003 and earlier, but all of the damn menus they have added slow down the graph making process so much. If you are trying to use Excel to make a graph for a reasonably technical audience you are going to need to make a lot of tweaks to the graph to make it acceptable, and tweaking each part of the graph takes dozens of clicks where it used to take one or two. I personally think that Excel is one of the best tools I have ever used. I do about 40% of my work in Excel. I graduated from college with a degree in biology, and I spent hundreds or thousands of hours in Excel manipulating data and graphing. Excel can and will graph almost anything you need to graph, but anything more complex than the simplest line graph requires getting creative with the formatting of your data and how you use series and data sets. The maximum complexity of a graph in Excel is technically restricted by the 254 series limit, but creating a graph with 254 series will probably take the better part of a week. So ultimately, Excel isn't a bad tool, but when graphing it's a bit like using a shovel to dig a hole. It has a time and a place, but at a certain point using an excavator will be faster, safer and less expensive than digging the hole by hand.

nonbel 10y ago
>"I graduated from college with a degree in biology, and I spent hundreds or thousands of hours in Excel manipulating data and graphing...creating a graph with 254 series will probably take the better part of a week." I don't see how this is an argument for using excel. You could have spent a small fraction of that time learning the basics of R and gotten everything afterwards done 10-100x faster. I know, because I used to be one of the people who spent insane amount of time on incredibly basic stuff. That said I still do sometimes use excel to inspect data and for some other simple tasks.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  I wasn't arguing that one should use Excel. I wasn't arguing that you shouldn't use Excel either. I was arguing the exact same point you just made - you should use the appropriate tool for the job. Excel is a great tool for manipulating data, especially if you are working with other people. Excel produces serviceable graphs, but if you need to produce a graph of any sort of complexity (and know how to program) R is certainly a better tool. Sometimes you need a quick visualization of some very simple data. I'd prefer to use Excel rather than R or Python at that point.

nonbel 10y ago

>"I graduated from college with a degree in biology, and I spent hundreds or thousands of hours in Excel manipulating data and graphing...creating a graph with 254 series will probably take the better part of a week." I don't see how this is an argument for using excel. You could have spent a small fraction of that time learning the basics of R and gotten everything afterwards done 10-100x faster. I know, because I used to be one of the people who spent insane amount of time on incredibly basic stuff. That said I still do sometimes use excel to inspect data and for some other simple tasks.

Declanomous 10y ago
I wasn't arguing that one should use Excel. I wasn't arguing that you shouldn't use Excel either. I was arguing the exact same point you just made - you should use the appropriate tool for the job. Excel is a great tool for manipulating data, especially if you are working with other people. Excel produces serviceable graphs, but if you need to produce a graph of any sort of complexity (and know how to program) R is certainly a better tool. Sometimes you need a quick visualization of some very simple data. I'd prefer to use Excel rather than R or Python at that point.