Even as a data scientist working with other data scientists, my most common deliverable is a Google Sheet.
https://twitter.com/pavelasamsonov/status/110653418815977881...
According to the Wall Street Journal, yes.
The Trendy New Way to Organize Your Schedule: A Paper Planner https://apple.news/AMN1W-MtTRCecQ-qIeFUQSQ
It seems to work :p
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/711755-need-to-redire...
It's just there, a refactored version ( yekyll) is already in the works
https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/scientific-expe...
How can we have reproducibility in scientific research if we don't all make the same errors?
Is it too much to ask that people treat a field with a bit of respect? Like, just because NYT reporters can use some of these "data skills", can they hold off a bit until we figure out if they're even any good at statistical analysis after their crash course? We currently have an entire academic field that has to throw away a lot of their findings because tools like sheets and SPSS gave them false confidence. I don't have any higher hopes for the NYT newsroom.
The purpose of this material isn’t to suddenly turn normal reporters into data scientists, it’s to give them a better grasp and understanding how how to evaluate different types of information that become important when reporting.
I don’t know how good or bad this material is — a cursory glance shows that it’s very low-level, the type of stuff I learned in my 100 level accounting and stats classes as an undergrad. But I won’t dismiss this material being made available and potentially augmented for all — tho I wish it was stored in GitHub or GitLab.
If you look through the material, there is nothing that actually says that someone who goes through this training will be a skilled data journalist. But it might just prevent poorly-interpreted articles like this [1] from being written.
And for the record, I’ve worked with data journalists who were more skilled in math and computer science than the engineers I work with at giant tech companies.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-new...
Also anything is better than SPSS.
Tracking major operations in Excel, mostly outside the existing ERP which is happening more often than not in my opinion, is big no-no.
Side note: I know people pasting screenshots from other Excel sheets into Excel sheets....
Whether you are a finance person working on balancing the sheets (or whatever else they do, that's beyond my knowledge) or an operation person building complex macros, it is both versatile, easy to use and yet powerful.
The byproducts of this is that it is also subverted by the genius of human ingenuity and you end up with some pretty interesting, awe-inspiring contraptions.
Such as building a calendar system but using arrow graphs to fill it out. And that's fine, except when you try to scale things up to automate the process and save people money. Now you have to do some pretty wasteful engineering to accommodate this pesky creativity we have.
That is the really interesting and a testament to being a really good software (in features and reach). It breaks the boundaries of the limited vocabulary of computers and therefore can only be fully leveraged by humans.
It's both a great reminder that most people in the world are not on the same level as the crowd around here [1] and that as the group who create tools used by such an audience, we have to be mindful of that.
On a positive note, I think there are some interesting work being done to rethink how to approach those tasks, I remember using one product in particular that had the right mix of being visually engaging while enforcing boundaries. But this won't solve the issue of users having to hack their way into getting what they want how they want it.
I'm not sure whether there's a good answer to your question If there is, I'm sure that most 'Excel pros' don't know it.
I've come across a few spreadsheets that made me want to meet and learn something from the authors. Some have been very elaborate and surprisingly resilient.
A super simple example is keeping track of monthly bills when you have flat mates, and need to split them every month. It’s not so critical that I feel the need to version control it etc, but it’s still nice to have a visually inspectable record. Even though I spend most of my days writing code, anything I can dream up that involves python or whatever just seems unnecessarily opaque and baroque. A spreadsheet is ideally suited to the task.
If your data can be manually entered it's decent, or if you just need to filter CSV by some columns. But anything above that please choose a proper programming language and data format.