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Comment by mkagenius | Hacker News Reader

> It makes me sad when brilliant software engineers open up Excel to make a line graph!

Why do people get religious about tech.. funny, let him/her use excel for god sake its a great tool :)

Excel is a great tool, but its graphing ability leaves a lot to be desired. I feel that graphing in Excel has gotten worse as they have tried making it easier to use as well. I'm 99% sure the graphing engine in Office 2007-2016 is the same one as in 2003 and earlier, but all of the damn menus they have added slow down the graph making process so much. If you are trying to use Excel to make a graph for a reasonably technical audience you are going to need to make a lot of tweaks to the graph to make it acceptable, and tweaking each part of the graph takes dozens of clicks where it used to take one or two.

I personally think that Excel is one of the best tools I have ever used. I do about 40% of my work in Excel. I graduated from college with a degree in biology, and I spent hundreds or thousands of hours in Excel manipulating data and graphing. Excel can and will graph almost anything you need to graph, but anything more complex than the simplest line graph requires getting creative with the formatting of your data and how you use series and data sets. The maximum complexity of a graph in Excel is technically restricted by the 254 series limit, but creating a graph with 254 series will probably take the better part of a week.

So ultimately, Excel isn't a bad tool, but when graphing it's a bit like using a shovel to dig a hole. It has a time and a place, but at a certain point using an excavator will be faster, safer and less expensive than digging the hole by hand.

>"I graduated from college with a degree in biology, and I spent hundreds or thousands of hours in Excel manipulating data and graphing...creating a graph with 254 series will probably take the better part of a week."

I don't see how this is an argument for using excel. You could have spent a small fraction of that time learning the basics of R and gotten everything afterwards done 10-100x faster. I know, because I used to be one of the people who spent insane amount of time on incredibly basic stuff. That said I still do sometimes use excel to inspect data and for some other simple tasks.

I wasn't arguing that one should use Excel. I wasn't arguing that you shouldn't use Excel either. I was arguing the exact same point you just made - you should use the appropriate tool for the job.

Excel is a great tool for manipulating data, especially if you are working with other people. Excel produces serviceable graphs, but if you need to produce a graph of any sort of complexity (and know how to program) R is certainly a better tool. Sometimes you need a quick visualization of some very simple data. I'd prefer to use Excel rather than R or Python at that point.

Nothing "religious" about that observation; quite the opposite, in fact.

In particular: it's not so much whether the tool "works" or not, but the side effects (how well it plays with other tools; and hence, the extent to which it can be integrated into larger, maintainable projects) that need to taken into consideration, also. Which is why better engineers detect more than a whiff of bad "design smell" when they hear someone say "just use Excel" (most of the time).

I think the concern is less that it's a good tool, and more that it's one invariably receives emails with attached documents that open well only in Excel.

I re-read that part and I think the sentiment was more like "If you are a great computer scientist you have most of the skills you need to be able to use R."

Regardless, even if the recipient has Excel, I think it is poor form to insert an Excel object into your reports and emails. The copy/paste menu allows you to paste charts and graphs as images, and it's a superior option to inserting an actual graph (or table) the majority of the time. Not only does it preserve the formatting, and allow better cross-platform compatibility, but documents with images instead of graphs open faster and are generally smaller.

The same can be said for screen clipping an Excel graph, which can be done at any point, and there's an additional bonus in that the layperson can see and manipulate the data as well. It's a(n admittedly poor) self-contained document that anyone can poke at, versus an image that only the anointed can recreate with different data. For better or for worse.

That point was in favor of Excel actually, sorry I wasn't very clear. I was actually referring to the built-in functionality in Office that allows you to choose to paste Excel graphs as images instead of as full excel objects.

Putting people down for using Excel for simple tasks is snobbery, plain and simple. I'm not a Microsoft apologist in the least (I use Linux as my desktop OS), and I can confidently say Excel is a great program. While there are more powerful tools, Excel is often perfectly suited for smaller tasks. When I need to clean and match a small set of data, I'll reach for Excel. When I need to clean and link a small set of data, I'd rather use filter and VLOOKUP in Excel than dealing with SQL/R/Python.

The faster I can turn data into information the happier my coworkers are, and the happier I am in turn.

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