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.
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.
This is true to the extent that you won’t be solving Organic Chemistry 1 or Linear Algebra exercises at your workplace, but I think it’s misleading. If anything, from my experience, people focus too much on producing the results and not enough on learning the skills. A lot of people stay on the mindset of “I only need the degree / where am I going to need that / the industry has moved on from this” and don’t build strong foundations
FOSS is always available. R is always available. Your points remain but you’re never in a situation where Excel is the only thing you can use.
Where I worked, many of the contacts specifically said we could not use open source software, so no, it is not always available.
You are if company policy dictates that’s all you can use.
This is more of an argument for LibreOffice (and in line with the post you’re replying to) than it’s an argument for using a programming language, let alone a specific one.
Current version of Excel stripped out a macro I made to make a specific task easier. It didn’t just block it from running. It refused to let me even see it anymore.
LibreOffice allowed me to see it again so I could re-implement it temporarily. I love how often Microsoft’s own tools can’t do what FOSS can with Microsoft files.
R, the language where dependency resolution is built upon thoughts and prayers.
Say what you want about Excel, but compatibility is kinda decent (ignoring locales and DNA sequences). Meanwhile, good luck replicating your R installation on another machine.
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.
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
Should we also allow them to let AI write their essays?
If the math underneath is valid then I don’t really care what calculator I use.
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.
Have you got recommendations for learning how to use tex, R, or Python for those that haven’t learnt how to programme?
Unironically – use markdown. It’s far more intuitive for most people, comes with similar git tracking benefits, and has simpler compilation / tooling steps.
For tex, i would suggest taking a basic template, and writing what you need, looking up how to do things as you need them. Theres a bunch of documentation on sites like overleaf, and you can learn a lot by looking at stackexchange threads.
YouTube. Straight up. When I learned to code my yt search history was a million different versions of “how to <do thing> in python” for months. I also really liked the “Computational methods for physics” textbook (you can find the pdf for free on cambridge website), but that book is written for an audience that knows near graduate math but starts praying if their advisor asks them to write a program
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)
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.
That’s not very Libre(office) of you there, partner
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!
CSVs are a common format to share data
Yes, but data only.
What’s the current software for this?
For replacing SPSS? R and JASP
Idk about Excel
