<story><title>R for Excel Users</title><url>http://blog.yhat.com/posts/R-for-excel-users.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>roel_v</author><text>The thing is though - R is just not Excel. For many tasks (blasphemy!), Excel is simply better.&lt;p&gt;Take quick scenario evaluation. In Excel, I change one or two cells and see everything update immediately; in R, you need to re-run your analysis and find the outputs you&amp;#x27;re after again. There is built-in support for scenarios in Excel. In R you have to code your analysis around it, and do the formatting for comparing, too.&lt;p&gt;Or take the libraries. Anything that is not statistics is just a pain in R. Everything is possible, sure - but high friction. PMT()&amp;#x2F;IPMT() functions in R? Good luck. Sure it&amp;#x27;s easy to code yourself (which is the advice you get when asking R users %| ) but I&amp;#x27;m using something high level to not have to bother with that sort of thing!&lt;p&gt;Graphs? Yeah, there&amp;#x27;s plot() which is straight out of 1960, or ggplot - which is easy for the simple things and then devolves into afternoons chasing obscure manual pages for this or that setting. Here&amp;#x27;s one: plot 360 degrees of a sine wave, and it&amp;#x27;s first and second derivatives. Then explain an Excel user how that works. (this is both because anything non-stats is bolted onto R, and because ggplot is designed around stats graphing.)&lt;p&gt;Keeping a matrix of data, like a simple database? Sure R can read dozens of file formats from CSV to HDF, but actually editing&amp;#x2F;maintaining that data is a pain in the ass. Excel, just add a sheet and use vlookup - it will let you sort and filter and copy and validate, all without leaving one software package.&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are many things wrong with Excel. FFS, there is a conference on how to not screw things up in real life with Excel. But saying &amp;#x27;just use R&amp;#x27; is silly. For most applications where starry-eyed grad students advocate R over Excel (because hey, nail&amp;#x2F;hammer, right?), Excel is just the better choice, even if that means workflows that make programming-literate folk die a little inside every time we have to work with them.</text></comment>
<story><title>R for Excel Users</title><url>http://blog.yhat.com/posts/R-for-excel-users.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ktamura</author><text>So glad to see this. As someone who learned both Excel and SQL on the first job (it&amp;#x27;s called being an analyst at a trading firm), I always felt that SQL was a &amp;quot;more powerful but clunkier cousin&amp;quot; of Excel and wished there was a tutorial for SQL aimed at Excel ninjas.&lt;p&gt;Well, fast forward half a decade and nobody wrote it, so I did so awhile back. Of all the things I wrote for work, it continues to be the most popular:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.treasuredata.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;learn-sql-by-calculating-customer-lifetime-value-part-1&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.treasuredata.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;learn-sql-by-c...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>