The mysterious powers of Microsoft Excel

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22213219

by schrofer • 13 years ago

18 4 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

A nice rebuttal to some of the other articles going around. I am reminded that it is a poor workman who blames their tools.

(And that covers choosong the wrong tool for the job.)

peatmoss• 13 years ago

I object to excel for quantitative analysis on the grounds that it is impossible to demonstrate anything that might give one confidence in an analysis. There's no record of the steps taken to transform data. By contrast, in R, you can start all the way at the beginning and trace everything that is done to your data, right up to your final answers. You can explore the data without wondering if you've accidentally performed the Sort of Ulimate Corruption.

It's like algebra class: no credit unless you show your work. And in excel, there really isn't a good way to show your work.

diroussel• 13 years ago

You can trace your work in excel. What ever tool you use, you need to verify your results in another tool.

ffffruit• 13 years ago

There is a similar article published in a notable bioinformatics journal explaining how errors were introduced when Excel was used and altered gene names irreversibly.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80

The mysterious powers of Microsoft Excel

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