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Comment by steve19 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the folks here dislike spreadsheets for working with data. I think the opposition is against spreadsheets being used to make mission critical but very brittle applications.

Also anything is better than SPSS.

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In my consulting career, I've seen major organizations track data in Excel, updating each month by creating a new set of columns. An absolute nightmare to handle. Of course every month the structure changed slightly, to make it more fun. I've also seen values stored as an #rgb only - no actual value in a cell.

Nothing wrong with analyzing data in Excel. Nothing wrong with running limited operations in Excel if it is done by the same people and highly standardized.

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....

To add to that, I have seen billions of dollars in EMD traded off an Excel model that took 30 minutes to run (come in to work, hit F9 to recalc / pull in updated market data) go get coffee, come back, send trades to trading desk

Agreed, and as an entry level program I think jamovi leads the pack https://www.jamovi.org/

That looks awesome. Thanks for sharing. I never use SPSS myself but occasionally have to look at other people's work in the app and I loathe it.

SPSS and it’s native format .sav are the industry standard for survey data. If anyone is in that field and hasn’t used Q (q research software) I highly recommend it. I used to do a lot of crosstabs and banner reports in SPSS and wincross and Q saved my probably 15 hours of work in that process per survey.

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