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I think Microsoft should improve Excel in several ways. Especially, there should be version control and a possibility to review code. Sometimes I see super comp

by mo_42 3y ago

I think Microsoft should improve Excel in several ways. Especially, there should be version control and a possibility to review code. Sometimes I see super complex Excel calculations. The code is barely readable because it’s in this tiny text area. These people are real programmers. But they are constrained by a tool. That would also be the alternative if Microsoft doesn’t improve this. Switch over to version controlled and reviewed code in R, Python, …

elmolino89 3y ago
In any Excel sheet everything is mixed up: you got raw data, calculated values, formulas, formatting, plots etc. With a Jupyter notebook you have these well separated, and there is a little chance that someone somehow changed the font in one of the 20k cells with values. Scaling up plots or changing the color scheme are explicit: you must have a cell changing the defaults. Yu can not just muse over some cell, press Del and plonk it. If you verified say md5 checksum for the raw data file it contains what you expect it to contain. If you follow up actions of an average Excel user, then it is a long chain of mostly purely manual manipulations, like selecting the cells, copy and paste, add color here and there etc. A lot of steps to check and verify. Compared to SQL or data frame manipulations it is too complicated to be really useful IMHO