Best 'ah ha' moment for why R (or python, matlab, or whatever) might be useful is to have someone do tedious work making a bunch of charts and formatting them i

Best 'ah ha' moment for why R (or python, matlab, or whatever) might be useful is to have someone do tedious work making a bunch of charts and formatting them in Excel. Oh, and histograms. Oh, or confidence intervals on your linear regression. Pivotcharts (and tables) help quite a bit for removing some of the tedium, but now suddenly it's interactive. Sometimes you want a format where BAM, everything is there laid out. There's nothing to misclick, all the tables and charts are there, you can just tell whoever, "look at the 3rd figure from the top on the 2nd tab". The other things that people usually laugh at excel about (aside from silently changing values... that's just baaaaad) is the gong-show of naming files and versioning. R and friends + CSVs by themselves don't fix that problem. They just make it somewhat easier to solve (as in they play with git better).