* A well known tendency to mangle date and gene data under the guide of being 'helpful'. * Easy to making mistakes when cutting and pasting cells. * Difficult to see what is going on in a spreadsheet. * Poor handling of CSV files.
Some of these shortcoming are inherent to spreadsheets. Others are specific to Excel, but hard to overcome due to the weight of backward compatibility.
I have written a product for transforming and analysing tabular data (https://www.easydatatransform.com) that tries to overcome these issues:
* Doesn't change your input data file. * Doesn't re-interpret your data, unless you ask it to. * See changes as a visual data flow. * Operations happen on a whole table or column. * Good handling of CSV files.
Also it doesn't try to do everything Excel does.
It is a fairly new tool. Would appreciate some feedback.