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Comment by ggrrhh_ta | Hacker News Reader

This is the talk that I first saw that builds on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw

I found it interesting, fun and great. Still, I would stick to using Excel for the personal analysis of data and not as the language/tool on which software is developed: data & programming logic intermixed, the default way to index cells, the difference between normal cells and array cells, and tables, etc., the fact that some things are just not possible to do fully programmatically without creating your own VB functions and therefore asking recipients of what looks like data to accept running arbitrary code in their machines, etc.

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I use Excel in my data processing workflow. I'll grab a small subset of the data to play around with in excel to see what it is I actually need out of it. Then, I'll do all of the real processing in python along with matplotlib for any charts I need to produce. Excel could almost entirely handle my use cases but there is usually some bit manipulation I need to do because my data is usually telemetry encoded as ASCII. Also making if-else statement in Excel is exhausting.

I could also just use MATLAB but I'm more used to using python.

Excel is exceptionally good at telling you what the shape of your data is. I love being able to just turn something into a table and then see the distinct values as a filter.

Sure, SQL and most environments can tell you distinct values of a column and their counts, but they are much slower and more cumbersome to explore with. I often start out with broad filters then go through many more specific ones depending on what I see from the first filter.

Another great tool for data exploration is visidata! This is a good example of what it can do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU

Visidata is great. My main problem is that I use it so infrequently so it's hard to build up the muscle memory to use it really effectively.

Isn't all excel data tabular in shape?

>Also making if-else statement in Excel is exhausting.

About a year ago Excel added =SWITCH, which is effectively {Logic Test | Output} pairings executed until one is true. Many if/then/else nestings could be eliminated with it.

It looks to me datasette (https://datasette.io/) could fill the same need: load the data into SQLite and explore it with a host of tools and visualisations, all profiting from the power of SQL

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