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I'm an Ecology student, and the last few days there's been a lot of (justified) criticism of Excel. I use R and Python for data analysis, but a lot of what I do is gathering data, inputting into Excel and then exporting this as a CSV for use in R/Python for statistical analysis - are there any other tools that can replace Excel for this step?

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How do you gather the data? You could learn scraping in python, for example. If you manually input the data, a simple spreadsheet is fine for that.

If you have the data in a non csv format and use excel to transform it into csv, python and R have utilities for that job (python has pandas, I don't use R as much for data cleaning, but I know it can).

Yeah, it's a lot of manual entering of data (eg finding abundance of certain species of lichens, and lat/long, then manually entering all data and exporting this as a csv either for heatmaps with GIS or for more stats analysis and the same with animal species abundance) so it's good to know I'm not missing something fairly obvious!

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