I learned how to do a fucking LOT of statistical shit in my degree. I also learned to get REALLY good at all kinds of shit in Excel.
Guess which helped my career on an actual practical way the most? Guess which made people seek me out at work for help with things?
Sometimes Excel is what’s available. Sometimes it’s just faster to do it that way rather than code up some ridiculously overdone solution in some programming language. Having both skills is best, but don’t shit on opening an excel and just fucking getting it done, whatever it is.
If used right, it can also be a great equalizer with those less technically skilled in your workplace. You can quickly format and tune things and even layer a little bit of vba to make their lives easier without having to get into the complexity of an entire bespoke coded solution.
Also, a reminder for those in the back. For most of us, we aren’t in college to learn a specific skill so much as we are there to learn how to be taught. To prove we are capable of taking instructions and producing results as requested.
If you never understand this, then you’ll never understand later why you fail to land a high quality job.
Blows Excel out of the water, and it’s not even close. And it’s free, open source, and completely extensible (with Python, not some godforsaken excuse for a programming language).
I’m no academic, but it seems wrong to me that any field would require the use of a particular proprietary software in order to do one’s homework assignments.
May Excel or SPSS be the best tool for the job? In many cases, sure! But students should be allowed to use whatever other software can also get the job done, as long as the software exports the assignment in a data format that the professor can reasonably ingest (e.g.: turning in a CSV file, which can be understood by many different kinds of software, not just Excel).
I understand professors have limited time to check homework and thus don’t want to spend time learning how to do anything but open a single, specific filetype, but that’s besides the point.
I can never say this enough: the best tool is the tool that gets the job done
Found the guy who would use a flathead screwdriver to regulate a demon core.
Not only did it get the job done, it got the spectators well done.
Hmm. What about CAD? The professor going to teach FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, F360, OnShape, etc?
I think requiring one tool is OK. You’re there to learn the process in a way that you can migrate to what you want later. Teachers aren’t paid enough as it is, so it should be made as easy as possible for them to manage the flow of work.
I understand professors have limited time to check homework and thus don’t want to spend time learning how to do anything but open a single, specific filetype, but that’s besides the point.
If professor is too “old” to learn new shit, like how their students work, they have fallen off and have no business teaching anymore
That reminds me of a story my bachelor’s supervisor in astrophysics told me: One of his best PhDs applied at an insurance company. They got an Excel sheet with data that they had 1 week to analyze. All the other applicants took the whole week. He just put it in Python, solved it in a few hours, and got the job.
This is only tangentially related to your story, but you reminded me of an old maths teacher who had a PhD in maths and once upon a time, had applied to work at an accounting firm. As part of the interview, he was told that he would have to sit a numeracy assessment. He responded “you do know I have a PhD in maths, right?”. They sympathised with his point but told him that everyone had to sit the test, as a matter of course.
So my maths teacher goes and sits their silly test, and he scores so well that they accuse him of cheating! I can only assume that this debacle broke him in some way, because it wasn’t long after this that he started teaching. It’s a particular kind of weirdo who has a PhD in a subject and decides to teach teenagers. He was probably one of the best teachers I ever had (I wonder if I can find contact information for him to tell him that)
Also related, I had a psychology teacher with a PhD in psychology. But because in German schools, you need to teach two subjects (with the exception of the arts), he also taught physics. He was a terrible physics teacher, but a pretty good psychology one.
LinkedIn ass title
Old people and technology man. My advisor during my masters was an absolutely brilliant woman; she’s one of the people who has been basically defining the field of data science since the early 90s. The first time I ever published with her, I sent my first draft and her response was “can you convert this to docx? I don’t know how to work with tex.” I still think she’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known but damn did it hurt to work on Microsoft word documents with her
It’s the tool that she’s learned to get the job done, the virtue of the tool does not matter to a master crafts
manperson, only their proficiency.That might be the stupidest thought terminating cliché ive ever heard. The virtue of the tool absolutely does matter. I’m not out here trying to metaphorically mine iron with a pickaxe when we have metaphorical excavators available, and no amount of expertise will allow somebody to be more efficient with the pickaxe than any random novice with an excavator.
Absolutely true - and that’s when ‘masters’ become obsolete.
R is best
Came here to say this :)
Excel dominates the world of number crunching. Want to change that? You can’t.
Imagine proposing an alternative for your organization that has been using Excel for two decades. Will every single sheet and workbook translate perfectly? If not, not good enough for dealing with numbers. This is why MS never fucks around with Excel. The risk/reward calculation (heh) is not a fit for open source spreadsheets.
Haha, Microsoft absolutely changes shit all the time. Millions of organisations around the world have an octogenarian computer standing somewhere in a corner because they need it running the old software.
Not Excel they don’t, not ever. Been working in the office for almost 30 years. Excel does not change except to add tidbits and it’s fully backwards compatible. You don’t have any experience in this, do you?
the world of number crunching
Weird, I’ve never heard of excel being used on HPC systems
Not just within your organisation, but imagine trying to share something other than Excel outside of it!
That’s not very Libre(office) of you there, partner
He said 2010, I was teached how to use the Microsoft Office suite in 1999. This goes way back.
(As a matter of fact one of my first website I made in FrontPage back then. I actually discovered Word on Windows 3.1 when I was around 5, hence my father’s friend calling me mehdi.doc lol)
Should we also allow them to let AI write their essays?
