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This! I happen to use and advocate for R/RStudio for ad-hoc work (I spin it as "excel on steroids" when I am trying to convince someone). But it is hard to pul
by crispyambulance 9y ago
This!
I happen to use and advocate for R/RStudio for ad-hoc work (I spin it as "excel on steroids" when I am trying to convince someone). But it is hard to pull people away from something that has worked for them.
The alternatives to excel in the past have been really, really unpleasant to use. A now EOL product from Oracle comes to mind. It is called "Discoverer"-- that's right, "Discover" + "er". It is a turgid POS requiring extreme suffering and handholding/permission granting from your local friendly DBA-- all this to produce 90's era bar charts that are all but impossible to tweak.
- iagovar 9y agoIMO if you really want non-tech users to become more technical and use DBs as single source of truth, use KNIME. It still needs proper reporting addons though, but you can export data, even to tableau.
- tenkabuto 9y agoI saw a presentation about KNIME but was unfamiliar with many of the processes that it allows one to string together to build a workflow, so the notion of building a workflow myself seemed very daunting. Do you think it would allow one to build workflows for basic stuff and gradually grow in their confidence with it? The presentation mentioned that the company is/was working on reporting add-ons, I think.
- iagovar 9y agoOh yeah, I'm pretty dumb and I managed to do very complicated stuff. It seems a bit tricky to "get" at the beginning, but it's pretty easy. The trick is to learn what node does what, because there are lots of them. You can also download community nodes for additional behaviors. Once you learn the basics, it's pretty straightforward. I learnt by trial and error, looking for examples and info about nodes, and now I have some workflows with data from DBs, files, APIs and all at once.