this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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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.
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.
You are if company policy dictates that's all you can use.
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.
You heard about conda/containers/pixi/whatever?
PS: Excel will often fail if your system has a different default language. Like in many European countries one and a half is 1,5, not 1.5. Excel can't take it.
Where I worked, many of the contacts specifically said we could not use open source software, so no, it is not always available.
Why did the contracts specify that?
A lot of government stuff requires that they have complete provenance of all code in the system. When you have people contributing to it from different places - potentially different countries - they get nervous about it.
You'd think they'd also be worried about most proprietary software being a black box when it comes to their code. But it could be only a secondary concern
We were restricted even on some proprietary software (especially if it was from a foreign owned company), but you'd be surprised how much scrutiny some of the major packages have had.
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.