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67 points

The idea that any scientist is doing data analysis in Excel is honestly terrifying on every level.

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26 points

You don’t want to know…

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20 points

I remember when a biologist asked us for help - Excel crashed on processing his 700MB tables. Took some time and Chatgpt to convince him to do the analysis in R. It worked out in the end and he is now recommending this solution to his colleagues, which is nice.

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5 points

Flashback to the time the UK government lost 16,000 positive COVID patients because Excel has a 1 million row limit.

If only there were better ways of storing large amounts of records with a fixed structure. Maybe the future will provide such technology…

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5 points

And is so bad at it that they can’t work around this issue.

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4 points

Excel is excellent at data analysis… Python integrations and everything

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9 points

As an alternative, maybe just Python?

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11 points
*

Because every scientist is also a programmer?
Especially if they struggle to use Excel properly, no chance.

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1 point

Excel sucks open ass. At storing data, at displaying data, at analyzing data. Scientists, of all people, should understand how to use an RDBMS and a data processing framework like R.

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1 point

I believe that accessibility is what makes Excel so good. And the world agrees.

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1 point

I’ve seen idiots doing “bioinformatics” with excel & vba. FFS.

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-8 points

What the hell else is there? Good luck getting universities using OpenOffice

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13 points
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Scientists should be using programming languages like R or Python. They are both extremely popular in this field, much more than Excel.

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4 points

Shoulda coulda. Not everyone is a programmer.

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