398
Microsoft fixes the Excel feature that was wrecking scientific data
(www.theverge.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
398 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
58150 readers
7742 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Scientists should be using programming languages like R or Python. They are both extremely popular in this field, much more than Excel.
Shoulda coulda. Not everyone is a programmer.
Except every scientist and analyst. Stats, data sci and ML is done in R and Python, be it astro, health data or genomics.
If someone has been taught stats in spreadsheet software, they have have been taught wrong, period.
Also, programming is a very strong term. we're talking about stats in a scripting language, not software development in CPP.
They should be if they're doing data analysis like this.
If it works, it works. Programming is a tough thing to learn.
Programming in R or Python isn't a lot harder than learning how to get Excel to do what you want. I'd wager it's easier since you don't have to fight your tools.
Excel has its place for simple quick calculations. But at some point it's simply the wrong tool.
Research projects almost exclusively have more than one person working on them.