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I can hardly imagine what is that which is easy in Excel but hard in Python with Pandas and SqliteiteAlchemy/Pytable/whatever and matplotlib. What really annoy
by qwerty456127 7y ago
I can hardly imagine what is that which is easy in Excel but hard in Python with Pandas and SqliteiteAlchemy/Pytable/whatever and matplotlib.
What really annoys me in Excel is they won't replace the fossil VBA with Python, F# or a new language designed from scratch right for this. The VBA environment feels fun to touch to have the feeling of time-travelling back to the years of your childhood but it feels quite clumsy in actual programming.
Excel's plots feature also feels fairly weird. I could never make it to produce exactly the plot I want. Perhaps that's because I haven't mastered it but this means it is harder to master than matplotlib is.
- Sahhaese 7y agoYou lack imagination. I'm a professional software developer and I open excel every day. Let's say someone emails me a list of figures and I want to quickly add them up? Sure, I could write an incantation in awk but I can't then see if it's wrong because maybe on one row they 'accidentally' put an extra blank column in before the number by marking it with a letter, or there being an extra tab or whatever might cause that. It's far quicker and less error prone to pop open excel, paste it in and then sum the column, and most importantly there is clear visual feedback if that doesn't work. In awk or a programming environment you'd just either get an incorrect figure and never know it was incorrect, or you'd get an error (e.g. trying to add a letter and number) and then have to debug what should have been an instant thing. Excel shines for doing one-shot data processing.
- qwerty456127 7y agoSure, but he wrote something was a way to difficult to program while easy in Excel.