Excel is fantastic for exploring small sets of data... "quick and dirty" stuff. When you want rigorous statistics or a more formal analysis of data, R and friends are far superior. And anything even remotely repetitive should be done in something with a better scripting language. But I'd hate to lose Excel just as much as I'd hate to be forced to use MATLAB or Python to plot results from some small screening experiment.
And of course, we are completely deviating from Excel's forte as a financial tool, where it is much stronger.
Sometimes I'll even use it to clean up data for insertion into a database or some other such task. It has some nice built-in "Filter" functions.
Yes, good suggestion, especially if you already know MATLAB... they syntax and overall workflow is similar for plotting. I personally like the "Pyzo" distribution for Python.
I still find Excel plots to be faster, easier to modify, and easier to share for trivial data sets.
I would vote Excel in that contest. To me, comparing Excel to Python/matplotlib harkens a lot of the comparison of something like Python to a compiled language. The former gives you a REPL that lets you interact with your language easily, you can make changes and see them reflected without recompiling, etc. Well, Excel takes that one step further: with it, you don't have to do anything: as you change the input data, the calculated data changes immediately. With Python and matplotlib (at least as much as I'v
it's easier to type "17 25 4 12" than "17 25 4 12" even ignoring row vs column-ness.
Let's try that again not making up new HTML tags:...it's easier to type "17 [enter] 25 [enter] 4 [enter] 12" than "17 [comma] 25 [comma] 4 [comma] 12" even ignoring row vs column-ness.
Yeah, Excel is obtuse compared to it's former competitors. My favorite was Quattro Pro. It took years for Excel to catch up on some features. Sadly, the macro language was primitive even by VBA standards. Later on it adopted VBA, but it was too late - I had long abandoned it.
Because, unfortunately in some regards, (almost) everyone uses Excel for EVERYTHING. Most people outside of Slashdot could probably name one Database program (Microsoft Access) that they've heard of, and I'm willing to bet most of them don't know how to use it.
Because, unfortunately in some regards, (almost) everyone uses Excel for EVERYTHING. Most people outside of Slashdot could probably name one Database program (Microsoft Access) that they've heard of, and I'm willing to bet most of them don't know how to use it.
I don't see a smiley so I guess this is meant to be serious. You must be stuck in one shit hole corporate job somewhere if you think that about Excel. You are wrong on databases too. I'd say most people couldn't name any, and why should they? 2 of 2, nice.
If you don't think Excel is widely used for all sorts of meaningless crap across a wide array of corporate and non-corporate jobs you're being willfully ignorant.
If you don't think Excel is widely used for all sorts of meaningless crap across a wide array of corporate and non-corporate jobs you're being willfully ignorant.
Corporate world sure, everywhere else is a maybe sometimes, which is a long way from "almost everyone", which is just ridiculous. That comes from people who live in a corporate world and thinks everyone else does too. Not. There are tons of people in the non-corporate world who don't even need a spreadsheet for anything. And some who do, that don't use Excel.
The sad part is, MS Access barely qualifies as a database, but most of the "techies" I spoke to at a ghost-hunting conference last weekend** heaped praise on building a "database" with MS Access - they intended to put it on their website for collaboration between ghost-hunting groups, much to the cheers of those various groups who were present.
I stood up and quietly began asking questions of the guy who announced it. 30 minutes later, after realizing to his horror just how insecure and craptastic Access is
Access has a user friendly GUI for non-programmers or light programmers to do work in. It is the GUI not the engine that makes Access worthwhile. Which is why Base for OO/LO was important. The backend can easily be SQLServer.
And MS Access will upsize decently enough to SQL Server when you Access database outgrows the limits of Access (and I don't really mean the file size limits).
Excel is actually pretty nice for quick, one-off, interactive data browsing and visualization. I see that pivot tables are present in OpenOffice and LibreOffice now, so I don't see any reason to use Excel over one of the free options, because they're all absolutely terrible at anything beyond the aforementioned use case. Anything more involved and anything you'll have to repeat on further data sets should absolutely not be done in a spreadsheet (I personally prefer Python with the MATLAB-like libraries).
Pivot tables have been present in the product since at least StarOffice version 5. They were called Data Pilots until recently, when the developers realized that nobody knew a Data Pilot was the same as a Pivot Table.
OpenOffice Calc has perhaps 98% of the features of Excel. Most of the confusion results from slightly different function names and other inconsistencies found with Excel (at which point I should mention that no version of Excel is 100% feature-equivalent to another, and every Excel upgrade re
Because it's quick and easy for basic stuff, and useful for making graphs from simple data. That's why I use LibreOffice Calc, anyway. Using a spreadsheet for real data is like using Word / Writer for desktop publishing - it's quick and easy but totally bodgy.
I am a scientist. At some point, I decided to move over to linux completely. Real number crunching can be done in R or Matlab, but for some things, excel is quite useful. In the end, I found gnumeric quite nice to work with, and I have not found anything that I missed compared to excel. (actually, it has some extra functionality that I find quite convenient).
I'd be very happy with an open source equivalent to Publisher 98 to be honest. I know there are alternatives but they don't have the useability and functionality of good old Publisher.
I never liked Publisher much, and back in the 90s I used to use a pirate copy of PageMaker - which I liked a lot. In later years I used Scribus a bit, which was ok, but not as good as PageMaker. If Scribus has continued on the course of development it was on a few years back, it should be pretty good by now.
Honestly, you don't keep up with current events. I don't care for Excel but it has supported a million rows since at least 2007 but hey, let's pretend make statements from outdated data. 40 Mb of hard drive space is huge!
Not just Excel, PowerPoint as well. Get the LO and CalligraSuite spreadsheets and presentation packages on par w/ Excel & PowerPoint, and you'll see a lot more adapters of those. Office doesn't consist of just Word.
OpenOffice/LibreOffice may have only 80 percent of the features of MS office, but since neither I nor anyone that I have worked with over the last decade use more than perhaps 15 percent of those features that's not really much of an issue to me. To be truthful, MS Office 4.3 was overkill for probably 90 percent of end users. I can't foresee ever creating a spreadsheet doing anything more complex than pull numbers out of a SQL database and make a pivot table with them, and the free versions do that just f
While I don't condone it, people in the Finance/Accounting departments have made complete applications in Excel. Then, they throw it over the wall to I/T and say "turn this into a web app for us -- it should take, what, two or three days?"
But again, I've seen plenty of complex spreadsheets that use way more functionality than I as a developer would ever use.
While I don't condone it, people in the Finance/Accounting departments have made complete applications in Excel. Then, they throw it over the wall to I/T and say "turn this into a web app for us -- it should take, what, two or three days?"
But again, I've seen plenty of complex spreadsheets that use way more functionality than I as a developer would ever use.
I'd say that you worked for the same company I did.
But at my company they waited until they'd exceeded Excel's row capacity and THEN they threw it over the wall. At which point they were having to break it up into multiple workbooks just to run the business while we scrambled to bail them out. Plus - yay! - critical corporate data existed on a laptop that they'd keep passing around (and occasionally taking out of town) and our IT department didn't backup files on desktops or laptops.
What now? 1 billion! (Score:-1)
MS and its Office needs to die.
Re:What now? 1 billion! (Score:5, Insightful)
Find me a replacement for Excel then. A real replacement, not some crappy OpenOffice thing that has 80% of the features.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, you serious?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What now? 1 billion! (Score:4, Insightful)
Excel is fantastic for exploring small sets of data... "quick and dirty" stuff. When you want rigorous statistics or a more formal analysis of data, R and friends are far superior. And anything even remotely repetitive should be done in something with a better scripting language. But I'd hate to lose Excel just as much as I'd hate to be forced to use MATLAB or Python to plot results from some small screening experiment.
And of course, we are completely deviating from Excel's forte as a financial tool, where it is much stronger.
Sometimes I'll even use it to clean up data for insertion into a database or some other such task. It has some nice built-in "Filter" functions.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, good suggestion, especially if you already know MATLAB... they syntax and overall workflow is similar for plotting. I personally like the "Pyzo" distribution for Python.
I still find Excel plots to be faster, easier to modify, and easier to share for trivial data sets.
Re: (Score:1)
I would vote Excel in that contest. To me, comparing Excel to Python/matplotlib harkens a lot of the comparison of something like Python to a compiled language. The former gives you a REPL that lets you interact with your language easily, you can make changes and see them reflected without recompiling, etc. Well, Excel takes that one step further: with it, you don't have to do anything: as you change the input data, the calculated data changes immediately. With Python and matplotlib (at least as much as I'v
Re: (Score:1)
Let's try that again not making up new HTML tags: ...it's easier to type "17 [enter] 25 [enter] 4 [enter] 12" than "17 [comma] 25 [comma] 4 [comma] 12" even ignoring row vs column-ness.
Re: (Score:2)
I never figured out Excel. Lotus 123 was easy to use and learn, but Excel is obtuse.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, Excel is obtuse compared to it's former competitors. My favorite was Quattro Pro. It took years for Excel to catch up on some features. Sadly, the macro language was primitive even by VBA standards. Later on it adopted VBA, but it was too late - I had long abandoned it.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Because, unfortunately in some regards, (almost) everyone uses Excel for EVERYTHING. Most people outside of Slashdot could probably name one Database program (Microsoft Access) that they've heard of, and I'm willing to bet most of them don't know how to use it.
I don't see a smiley so I guess this is meant to be serious. You must be stuck in one shit hole corporate job somewhere if you think that about Excel. You are wrong on databases too. I'd say most people couldn't name any, and why should they? 2 of 2, nice.
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't think Excel is widely used for all sorts of meaningless crap across a wide array of corporate and non-corporate jobs you're being willfully ignorant.
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't think Excel is widely used for all sorts of meaningless crap across a wide array of corporate and non-corporate jobs you're being willfully ignorant.
Corporate world sure, everywhere else is a maybe sometimes, which is a long way from "almost everyone", which is just ridiculous. That comes from people who live in a corporate world and thinks everyone else does too. Not. There are tons of people in the non-corporate world who don't even need a spreadsheet for anything. And some who do, that don't use Excel.
Re: (Score:3)
The sad part is, MS Access barely qualifies as a database, but most of the "techies" I spoke to at a ghost-hunting conference last weekend** heaped praise on building a "database" with MS Access - they intended to put it on their website for collaboration between ghost-hunting groups, much to the cheers of those various groups who were present.
I stood up and quietly began asking questions of the guy who announced it. 30 minutes later, after realizing to his horror just how insecure and craptastic Access is
Re: (Score:2)
Access has a user friendly GUI for non-programmers or light programmers to do work in. It is the GUI not the engine that makes Access worthwhile. Which is why Base for OO/LO was important. The backend can easily be SQLServer.
Re: (Score:2)
And MS Access will upsize decently enough to SQL Server when you Access database outgrows the limits of Access (and I don't really mean the file size limits).
Re: (Score:2)
Very true.
Re: (Score:2)
** Why was I there? My wife is really big into this sort of thing, and as any married man knows, you either go along with her or you're a dead man.
And apparently at that point, she'd still be coming after you.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Heck, I've done a bit of ghost-hunting. Still have no ectoplasmic trophies over the fireplace, but I had fun.
Re: (Score:2)
I once heard that the most used database in the world is Microsoft Excel.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would anyone use Excel for anything?
Because it's quick and easy for basic stuff, and useful for making graphs from simple data. That's why I use LibreOffice Calc, anyway. Using a spreadsheet for real data is like using Word / Writer for desktop publishing - it's quick and easy but totally bodgy.
Re: (Score:2)
Somewhat valid point.
I am a scientist. At some point, I decided to move over to linux completely. Real number crunching can be done in R or Matlab, but for some things, excel is quite useful. In the end, I found gnumeric quite nice to work with, and I have not found anything that I missed compared to excel. (actually, it has some extra functionality that I find quite convenient).
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
One of the extras I find useful in gnumeric is the ability to do boxplots.
Re: (Score:2)
Newsflash! Anonymous Cowards have crappy imaginations!
Excel replacement (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd be very happy with an open source equivalent to Publisher 98 to be honest. I know there are alternatives but they don't have the useability and functionality of good old Publisher.
Re: (Score:2)
I never liked Publisher much, and back in the 90s I used to use a pirate copy of PageMaker - which I liked a lot. In later years I used Scribus a bit, which was ok, but not as good as PageMaker. If Scribus has continued on the course of development it was on a few years back, it should be pretty good by now.
Re: (Score:2)
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifications-and-limits-HP010073849.aspx [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:2)
yep
"In Excel 2007, the maximum worksheet size is 1048576 rows by 16384 columns."
http://office.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
OpenOffice/LibreOffice may have only 80 percent of the features of MS office, but since neither I nor anyone that I have worked with over the last decade use more than perhaps 15 percent of those features that's not really much of an issue to me. To be truthful, MS Office 4.3 was overkill for probably 90 percent of end users. I can't foresee ever creating a spreadsheet doing anything more complex than pull numbers out of a SQL database and make a pivot table with them, and the free versions do that just f
Re: (Score:2)
While I don't condone it, people in the Finance/Accounting departments have made complete applications in Excel. Then, they throw it over the wall to I/T and say "turn this into a web app for us -- it should take, what, two or three days?"
But again, I've seen plenty of complex spreadsheets that use way more functionality than I as a developer would ever use.
Re: (Score:2)
While I don't condone it, people in the Finance/Accounting departments have made complete applications in Excel. Then, they throw it over the wall to I/T and say "turn this into a web app for us -- it should take, what, two or three days?"
But again, I've seen plenty of complex spreadsheets that use way more functionality than I as a developer would ever use.
I'd say that you worked for the same company I did.
But at my company they waited until they'd exceeded Excel's row capacity and THEN they threw it over the wall. At which point they were having to break it up into multiple workbooks just to run the business while we scrambled to bail them out. Plus - yay! - critical corporate data existed on a laptop that they'd keep passing around (and occasionally taking out of town) and our IT department didn't backup files on desktops or laptops.
On the whole, I'm inclin