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As a former ML engineer, Excel is a surprisingly practical tool even for ML folks. It’s a very tactile tool to touch and feel your data and do quick what ifs wi

by wenc 1y ago

As a former ML engineer, Excel is a surprisingly practical tool even for ML folks. It’s a very tactile tool to touch and feel your data and do quick what ifs without doing a lot of coding. Want a graph? Plot it instead of fudging with matplotlib. Forecasting? Yes. Dynamic formulas? Yes — much better than writing code (you’d have to write a reactive widget in Jupyter). Most people don’t need to do ML but they need to do complicated formulas and get immediate feedback. Excel is really good at that. Libre office can do 90% of it but Excel has some advanced features that it doesn’t come close to.

esafak 1y ago
Excel is for playing with data that is already aggregated. You don't see any data scientist in a tech company reaching for spreadsheets. Business analysts use them, maybe, because they work with the raw data rolled up by the engineers. How are you even going to ingest the data you want to visualize from the database it's in otherwise? It won't fit on your computer as is. You need something like Tableau to query and inspect it. edit: Sure, let the finance people have their spreadsheets, but don't let that stuff anywhere near engineering and data science. It's a major anti-pattern.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  Yes, yes, Excel is the Blub tool. Plenty of other options which are better typed, performant, intuitive, whatever. Every F500 company has accountants, FPNA, auditors, likely even the CFO who are doing their analysis in Excel. They live and breathe it. It is their everything app which they run 40 hours a week. They know Excel, they are the 10x rockstars of their field. It is a common refrain here that you should absolutely invest in SAAS tools at $/month if it makes your workers more productive. Even if they are not slinging code, these people already have the best tool for their job. Making them all switch to save a few bucks to a less feature complete option is hamstringing yourself. Could many people switch without issue? Sure, but it is foolhardy to imagine a 100% cut over without enormous pain to the elite staff.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Delphiza 1y ago
    Good points. It is egregious that HN 'technologists' will tell people that the tool that they use for 40+ hours a week to _get stuff done_ is completely wrong and that they must use python and a text editor instead.

by wenc 1y ago

esafak 1y ago

Excel is for playing with data that is already aggregated. You don't see any data scientist in a tech company reaching for spreadsheets. Business analysts use them, maybe, because they work with the raw data rolled up by the engineers. How are you even going to ingest the data you want to visualize from the database it's in otherwise? It won't fit on your computer as is. You need something like Tableau to query and inspect it. edit: Sure, let the finance people have their spreadsheets, but don't let that stuff anywhere near engineering and data science. It's a major anti-pattern.

0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
Yes, yes, Excel is the Blub tool. Plenty of other options which are better typed, performant, intuitive, whatever. Every F500 company has accountants, FPNA, auditors, likely even the CFO who are doing their analysis in Excel. They live and breathe it. It is their everything app which they run 40 hours a week. They know Excel, they are the 10x rockstars of their field. It is a common refrain here that you should absolutely invest in SAAS tools at $/month if it makes your workers more productive. Even if they are not slinging code, these people already have the best tool for their job. Making them all switch to save a few bucks to a less feature complete option is hamstringing yourself. Could many people switch without issue? Sure, but it is foolhardy to imagine a 100% cut over without enormous pain to the elite staff.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Delphiza 1y ago
  Good points. It is egregious that HN 'technologists' will tell people that the tool that they use for 40+ hours a week to _get stuff done_ is completely wrong and that they must use python and a text editor instead.