6 ms·

Excel is not fundamentally suited, but it's fundamentally used. I wish you luck, but I long ago declared defeat against Excel. I can't prevent everyone from us

Excel is not fundamentally suited, but it's fundamentally used. I wish you luck, but I long ago declared defeat against Excel. I can't prevent everyone from using it. I have come to accept that whatever Excel does is what I have to live with, because someone, somewhere out there hasn't heard the anti-Excel gospel yet.

ppod 6y ago
Quantitative social science (which maybe a lot of comp bio people might regard as a "softer" science) has really made huge strides in moving this kind of analysis to R. Of course one person can't change it, but those with high status in the field can make a difference by leading the way and setting standards.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- take_a_breath 6y ago
  At some point, you generate a dataframe with the data in R, save it as a csv, email it to someone, and they open it in.....Excel.
ianai 6y ago
This is the exact sort of thing that indicates market-power being concentrated to a point requiring severe, acute regulatory action.
- arthurcolle 6y ago
  Not at all There is tremendous competition in the spreadsheet business, and anyone is free to use Julia, R, whatever they like.
  - mcv 6y ago
    But they don't, and that's a problem. It's an education problem: everybody automatically defaults to Excel, even when it's not the proper tool. People need to learn about better tools.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      You can't force people to use a different tool that they don't want to use. They [(computational) biologists] know other tools pretty well, they don't want to use them. If you want to help, work on better tools for them, based on their needs. Regulation is about the worst thing you could've thought of. If you said this to my gf's research group, they would yell at you, Excel is a loved piece of software among them, and other spreadsheet applications are not even close. They don't want to have a dozen different tools that they have to switch between fifty times an hour, converting data in the meantime, they want to know one or two very well and have the data all there. Excel is a data swiss army knife, which is exactly what they need, it has some warts but forcing them off Excel really is not the solution.
      - mcv 6y ago
        Where am I talking about forcing them? You're the only one bringing that up, and I strongly disagree with it. Education is not force, it's empowering. The only reason they want to use a tool that doesn't really fit their use case, is because they're not aware of better tools. I find it very hard to believe that scientists actually want to use a tool that corrupts their data. If that is true, then that is absolutely a problem with their attitude towards science and data. It's not that hard to imagine a tool that can do exactly what Excel can, but without corrupting your data. It might even exist already. LibreOffice got mentioned a lot; it can do almost(?) everything Excel can, but without corrupting your data. If there are problems with it that make it useless to scientists, there's a good chance the LibreOffice community can fix them. I think better tools that preserve the integrity of their data are absolutely the solution here.
        emteycz 6y ago
        You're taking a minor, very unusual issue that happens only to a subset of a subset of a subset of users and resolving it with regulation, while forgeting all the cases where Excel works perfectly for them. Libreoffice is good, but it has much more warts than Excel does and the presentantion capabilities (a key functionality) simply are not as good.
- pmarreck 6y ago
  Ah yes. Without acute regulatory action, Lotus 1-2-3 would have never been defeated, the PalmPilot would have reigned supreme as a smartphone device to this day, and Starbucks would have taken over all coffee production.
dijksterhuis 6y ago
> I wish you luck, but I long ago declared defeat against Excel. Totally relate to this. I studied a degree because I wanted to rid the world of Excel. Just like I wanted to rid the world of pie charts. Turns out the rest of the world is quite happy using both of them, no matter whether I think it's right or not.
oneplane 6y ago
I'm actually having a lot of scenarios where Excel is banned except for some managers, C-level and board type stuff. If you produce, touch or directly act on data, Excel is no longer allowed. On the other levels the people that still use it (because they think they have the skill - which they often don't) can't do meaningful direct-action on those files anyway so that solves part of the problem of acting on bad data or bad data processing. We do allow web-based spreadsheets, that has the benefit of limiting what you can do and drives people to either put a request in with the correct team or take internal courses on how to do it right. Some people hate it, but then again, some people hate Excel. The difference is that the people that don't hate it now have an empowered skillset that they didn't have before. In theory you could do the same with Excel-oriented internal courses, but we didn't want to do Excel because a lot of us think it's stupid (often simply for emotional reasons but the push was based on hard data like process metrics and user input). To add to this: it's probably because I find myself attracted to data-driven organisations where using Excel didn't help the workforce much anyway, and the positions I'm in allow for a certain degree of influence on the tools that we support and how much explicit allow/deny we apply on them.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  The difference is that the people that don't hate it now have an empowered skillset that they didn't have before. Not knowing how to use the primary tool in your field because you only know how to use a web-based spreadsheet with 1/100th the functionality is not an "empowered skillset." It's a cruel trick to play on employees, who will have difficulty finding further jobs in that field because they don't have a basic understanding of the tool everyone else uses.
  - oneplane 6y ago
    I was talking about Apache Spark via Databricks. ~220 of the people that were attached to Excel and PowerBI switched over for their calculations and data processing, 3 remained. One was let go, one didn't actually use Excel to write data, only to see it and search it, and the third wasn't able to learn the replacement so they got to keep Excel. It's not a cruel trick and even if it was: web-based spreadsheets might not have the same functionality, but the people that were using the desktop-based spreadsheets weren't doing much more than basic computation on fields and search/replace. That works fine on the web. It's not like we took away their toys and gave them dirt instead. We just made everyone take the startup course to get them acquainted and if that went well we would decide our next steps. It went well, and the next steps became removing Excel from the standard workflows.

ppod 6y ago

Quantitative social science (which maybe a lot of comp bio people might regard as a "softer" science) has really made huge strides in moving this kind of analysis to R. Of course one person can't change it, but those with high status in the field can make a difference by leading the way and setting standards.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
take_a_breath 6y ago
At some point, you generate a dataframe with the data in R, save it as a csv, email it to someone, and they open it in.....Excel.

ianai 6y ago

This is the exact sort of thing that indicates market-power being concentrated to a point requiring severe, acute regulatory action.

arthurcolle 6y ago
Not at all There is tremendous competition in the spreadsheet business, and anyone is free to use Julia, R, whatever they like.
- mcv 6y ago
  But they don't, and that's a problem. It's an education problem: everybody automatically defaults to Excel, even when it's not the proper tool. People need to learn about better tools.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    You can't force people to use a different tool that they don't want to use. They [(computational) biologists] know other tools pretty well, they don't want to use them. If you want to help, work on better tools for them, based on their needs. Regulation is about the worst thing you could've thought of. If you said this to my gf's research group, they would yell at you, Excel is a loved piece of software among them, and other spreadsheet applications are not even close. They don't want to have a dozen different tools that they have to switch between fifty times an hour, converting data in the meantime, they want to know one or two very well and have the data all there. Excel is a data swiss army knife, which is exactly what they need, it has some warts but forcing them off Excel really is not the solution.
    - mcv 6y ago
      Where am I talking about forcing them? You're the only one bringing that up, and I strongly disagree with it. Education is not force, it's empowering. The only reason they want to use a tool that doesn't really fit their use case, is because they're not aware of better tools. I find it very hard to believe that scientists actually want to use a tool that corrupts their data. If that is true, then that is absolutely a problem with their attitude towards science and data. It's not that hard to imagine a tool that can do exactly what Excel can, but without corrupting your data. It might even exist already. LibreOffice got mentioned a lot; it can do almost(?) everything Excel can, but without corrupting your data. If there are problems with it that make it useless to scientists, there's a good chance the LibreOffice community can fix them. I think better tools that preserve the integrity of their data are absolutely the solution here.
      - emteycz 6y ago
        You're taking a minor, very unusual issue that happens only to a subset of a subset of a subset of users and resolving it with regulation, while forgeting all the cases where Excel works perfectly for them. Libreoffice is good, but it has much more warts than Excel does and the presentantion capabilities (a key functionality) simply are not as good.
pmarreck 6y ago
Ah yes. Without acute regulatory action, Lotus 1-2-3 would have never been defeated, the PalmPilot would have reigned supreme as a smartphone device to this day, and Starbucks would have taken over all coffee production.

dijksterhuis 6y ago

> I wish you luck, but I long ago declared defeat against Excel. Totally relate to this. I studied a degree because I wanted to rid the world of Excel. Just like I wanted to rid the world of pie charts. Turns out the rest of the world is quite happy using both of them, no matter whether I think it's right or not.

oneplane 6y ago

I'm actually having a lot of scenarios where Excel is banned except for some managers, C-level and board type stuff. If you produce, touch or directly act on data, Excel is no longer allowed. On the other levels the people that still use it (because they think they have the skill - which they often don't) can't do meaningful direct-action on those files anyway so that solves part of the problem of acting on bad data or bad data processing. We do allow web-based spreadsheets, that has the benefit of limiting what you can do and drives people to either put a request in with the correct team or take internal courses on how to do it right. Some people hate it, but then again, some people hate Excel. The difference is that the people that don't hate it now have an empowered skillset that they didn't have before. In theory you could do the same with Excel-oriented internal courses, but we didn't want to do Excel because a lot of us think it's stupid (often simply for emotional reasons but the push was based on hard data like process metrics and user input). To add to this: it's probably because I find myself attracted to data-driven organisations where using Excel didn't help the workforce much anyway, and the positions I'm in allow for a certain degree of influence on the tools that we support and how much explicit allow/deny we apply on them.

gamblor956 6y ago
The difference is that the people that don't hate it now have an empowered skillset that they didn't have before. Not knowing how to use the primary tool in your field because you only know how to use a web-based spreadsheet with 1/100th the functionality is not an "empowered skillset." It's a cruel trick to play on employees, who will have difficulty finding further jobs in that field because they don't have a basic understanding of the tool everyone else uses.
- oneplane 6y ago
  I was talking about Apache Spark via Databricks. ~220 of the people that were attached to Excel and PowerBI switched over for their calculations and data processing, 3 remained. One was let go, one didn't actually use Excel to write data, only to see it and search it, and the third wasn't able to learn the replacement so they got to keep Excel. It's not a cruel trick and even if it was: web-based spreadsheets might not have the same functionality, but the people that were using the desktop-based spreadsheets weren't doing much more than basic computation on fields and search/replace. That works fine on the web. It's not like we took away their toys and gave them dirt instead. We just made everyone take the startup course to get them acquainted and if that went well we would decide our next steps. It went well, and the next steps became removing Excel from the standard workflows.