I love spreadsheets. When I'm working out a method for analyzing some dataset, I just hack it out in Calc. Or if it gets too big, Excel. Once I've blocked it ou

I love spreadsheets. When I'm working out a method for analyzing some dataset, I just hack it out in Calc. Or if it gets too big, Excel. Once I've blocked it out, I move to MySQL. But I can do any database operation in Excel, or even Calc. Maybe not efficiently, but well enough. But I've also learned that basic Linux tools (grep, sed, tr, awk, sort, uniq, etc) are far more efficient for cleaning and preparing data for spreadsheets or databases. And then I use spreadsheets for final analytic steps, stuff that SQL doesn't do efficiently, and for charting. I could learn Python and R, I suppose, but SQL and Calc/Excel have always been enough. And Gumeric, sometimes, because it can do some amazing charts that the others don't.