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This accords with my experience.

When I worked in clinical trial design/analysis, no one did their analyses in excel, but for initial data formatting and clean-up? /everything/ went through excel, even if the final cleanup was a python script.

You’re not going to have the same ease of eyeballing your data in SPSS or SAS or R.

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I'd wage for formatting and clean-up, it's a lot faster to proceed via R or Python (notebooks), and it can be reproduced a lot more easily.

I understand that Excel allows for a quick glance, but I'm not sure how R does not offer the same visual cues? Assuming that the data originates from some csv/table structure, Excel requires some GUI clicking and R needs a read.csv() call.

I would say R is a lot more useful for a quick check on whether all columns have one data structure, contain NaN/NA's, are of equal length, etc.

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