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From the tone of your post I'm thinking that you've made up your mind on this point, but there really is a lot of richness and extensibility in R which isn't av

From the tone of your post I'm thinking that you've made up your mind on this point, but there really is a lot of richness and extensibility in R which isn't available in Excel. For instance my blog is written in an R library called Blogdown, you can process 5 GB datasets on your laptop, send a reproducible analysis to a colleague, stuff like that. I guess the thing I would ask you to consider when thinking about this stuff is the amount of time you've spent learning Excel. At the time I was learning R I probably had several thousand hours of focused Excel practice under my belt, and I could do a lot with the tool. So Excel was a way better tool for me than R because I was an Excel expert and an R novice. After now putting in about that same amount of time working with R I can say it's a much more powerful and extensible tool. But if you mostly work in areas where Excel...uh...excels, then there's no real reason to make the switch.

CJefferson 10y ago
You don't seem to have really answered any of the points, like good in R to interactively edit and view data, and update the graphs automatically. Also, in R I would love an excel style graph wizard -- it could even output the R required. I need to use R about once a year -- each time I've forgotten everything from last time, and use a combination of stackoverflow and swearing to do whatever I need to do.
- gordon_shotwell 10y ago
  Hmmm, I'm not sure there is an Excel style graph wizard, although there's this package which is close https://www.r-statistics.com/2016/11/ggedit-interactive-ggplot-aesthetic-and-theme-editor/ https://www.r-statistics.com/2016/11/ggedit-interactive-ggpl... For PML() kinds of functions, I often just google something like "Excel PML() function in R" and something usually turns up: - https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/optiRum/optiRum.pdf https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/optiRum/optiRum.pdf - https://gist.github.com/econ-r/dcd503815bbb271484ff https://gist.github.com/econ-r/dcd503815bbb271484ff Another good tactic is to follow some of the R quants on twitter. A really popular package for this is http://www.quantmod.com/ http://www.quantmod.com/
byronwall 10y ago
The things you've listed as R being better at are things that no typical Excel user contemplates doing (i.e. blogging, processing 5GB data sets). You're also ignoring that out of the box Excel comes with a wide range of features that just don't exist in R. Most important for the typical user is being able to format and edit their "data" and calculations as they go with immediate updates on dependent cells. Take your typical Excel user and explain to them that R is significantly more powerful, and they will stop listening the first time they get the arrow wrong on a variable assignment. You probably won't even get that far because the idea of a typing a variable name is foreign even though they've been using "variables" hidden behind cell references. "Why am I assigning a variable... in Excel I just type my data where I want it and click when I want to use it".
roel_v 10y ago
I've made up my mind about the things that I listed yes - and a bunch of other use cases where Excel is better; but I'm not saying 'Excel is better' or 'R is better'. What I'm saying is that proper applications of Excel and R are (almost) orthogonal; the number of Excel users who should 'upgrade' to R is very small, compared to the total population. R is a statistics tool, it competes with SPSS and maybe some uses of SAS. For those uses, sure use R; use R when teaching statistics. But saying R is some natural, 'better' progression of Excel is myopic and not understanding the use case of Excel. Not a month goes by that I don't try to switch some Excel sheet I have into R; I run into the problems with Excel every day. It's not like I don't know Excel isn't great. My point is that the solution to those problems isn't R. I don't know what is, but I know it's not R. Like, the other day I tried to do a real estate investment analysis in R. I always do that in Excel; I build the model step by step, starting with some basics, then filling in the details of the case at hand as I go. All the time, I can focus on the numbers; adding an indicator or refinement is part of the natural workflow. In R, you always have to switch between 'code mode' and 'data mode'. In Excel, you don't have this difference. Which is at the same time also its weakness, of course. Sharing R models is a pain in the ass. Others have to get the exact packages, you have to tell them what to look at out of all the variables, ... Shiny sucks for that, it's read-only. In Excel someone makes some changes and sends you back the sheet, boom done. In R you would set up a versioning repo, data is split over multiple files, packages need to be installed, scripts for reporting, ... Fine for big projects, not for the small analysis exercises that make up the bulk of the uses of Excel. Sure you 'can' blog in R. Last week I didn't want to walk to the shed to get my hammer, so I used a brick to pound in a nail. Doesn't make it right. String manipulation in R is a joke. A function to concatenate strings? Please. Again, R is fine for statistics, but it's not a general purpose replacement of Excel.

CJefferson 10y ago

You don't seem to have really answered any of the points, like good in R to interactively edit and view data, and update the graphs automatically. Also, in R I would love an excel style graph wizard -- it could even output the R required. I need to use R about once a year -- each time I've forgotten everything from last time, and use a combination of stackoverflow and swearing to do whatever I need to do.

gordon_shotwell 10y ago
Hmmm, I'm not sure there is an Excel style graph wizard, although there's this package which is close https://www.r-statistics.com/2016/11/ggedit-interactive-ggplot-aesthetic-and-theme-editor/ https://www.r-statistics.com/2016/11/ggedit-interactive-ggpl... For PML() kinds of functions, I often just google something like "Excel PML() function in R" and something usually turns up: - https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/optiRum/optiRum.pdf https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/optiRum/optiRum.pdf - https://gist.github.com/econ-r/dcd503815bbb271484ff https://gist.github.com/econ-r/dcd503815bbb271484ff Another good tactic is to follow some of the R quants on twitter. A really popular package for this is http://www.quantmod.com/ http://www.quantmod.com/

byronwall 10y ago

The things you've listed as R being better at are things that no typical Excel user contemplates doing (i.e. blogging, processing 5GB data sets). You're also ignoring that out of the box Excel comes with a wide range of features that just don't exist in R. Most important for the typical user is being able to format and edit their "data" and calculations as they go with immediate updates on dependent cells. Take your typical Excel user and explain to them that R is significantly more powerful, and they will stop listening the first time they get the arrow wrong on a variable assignment. You probably won't even get that far because the idea of a typing a variable name is foreign even though they've been using "variables" hidden behind cell references. "Why am I assigning a variable... in Excel I just type my data where I want it and click when I want to use it".

roel_v 10y ago

I've made up my mind about the things that I listed yes - and a bunch of other use cases where Excel is better; but I'm not saying 'Excel is better' or 'R is better'. What I'm saying is that proper applications of Excel and R are (almost) orthogonal; the number of Excel users who should 'upgrade' to R is very small, compared to the total population. R is a statistics tool, it competes with SPSS and maybe some uses of SAS. For those uses, sure use R; use R when teaching statistics. But saying R is some natural, 'better' progression of Excel is myopic and not understanding the use case of Excel. Not a month goes by that I don't try to switch some Excel sheet I have into R; I run into the problems with Excel every day. It's not like I don't know Excel isn't great. My point is that the solution to those problems isn't R. I don't know what is, but I know it's not R. Like, the other day I tried to do a real estate investment analysis in R. I always do that in Excel; I build the model step by step, starting with some basics, then filling in the details of the case at hand as I go. All the time, I can focus on the numbers; adding an indicator or refinement is part of the natural workflow. In R, you always have to switch between 'code mode' and 'data mode'. In Excel, you don't have this difference. Which is at the same time also its weakness, of course. Sharing R models is a pain in the ass. Others have to get the exact packages, you have to tell them what to look at out of all the variables, ... Shiny sucks for that, it's read-only. In Excel someone makes some changes and sends you back the sheet, boom done. In R you would set up a versioning repo, data is split over multiple files, packages need to be installed, scripts for reporting, ... Fine for big projects, not for the small analysis exercises that make up the bulk of the uses of Excel. Sure you 'can' blog in R. Last week I didn't want to walk to the shed to get my hammer, so I used a brick to pound in a nail. Doesn't make it right. String manipulation in R is a joke. A function to concatenate strings? Please. Again, R is fine for statistics, but it's not a general purpose replacement of Excel.