Hacker News Reader

Yes, but often different contexts.

Let's say my volunteer org wants to keep track of events, who volunteered in them, etc. and wants to give an award to the volunteer who gave the most hours. How do you do that in Python? Why would you?

View on HN

For me, Excel is a tool mostly for entering data manually. In the case you described, it would be good for that purpose. I suppose you would have a column for each volunteer and then just enter data. Then you can read the file with python (pandas) and make a sum over the columns and give the one with most hours. Of course this case is also easy to do in Excel, however, the idea is that if you know more powerful tools (programming in general), then you will be able to do other things that otherwise you would regard as more time-consuming. Maybe you want then to give different awards for age ranges. And if you have too many volunteers then it would not be so easy any more in Excel, but in python you would just know how to do it.

It is also a reasonable output format. I have written more than one Python thing that ended up by generating an Excel which I then emailed to people. It was imperfect but saved me a lot of “can you make a graph blah blah blah” type work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com