When you are learning the basics, you are doing very basic tasks. R can do very basic tasks. MS Excel can do very basic tasks. If you never go beyond the basics

When you are learning the basics, you are doing very basic tasks. R can do very basic tasks. MS Excel can do very basic tasks. If you never go beyond the basics, there is no compelling reason to use R (or any other programming language) over MS Excel. Programming languages come into their own when the tasks stop being basic, but the learning process usually goes through "Hello, World" first. I mean, if you're just going to print a line of text to the screen, why use Python? Just open an MS Word document. MS Word can even include variables and insert them dynamically!