I guess I am what you would call an R power user.

What’s really crazy is I never realized how fast and easy excel pivot tables were to work with.

I know I know it sounds ridiculous.

But if you do a lot data splicing and dicing, excel can actually get your cuts out way faster through pivot tables than writing R code.

So if you use R for almost everything, give Excel a try as well. And the nice thing is this is even more powerful if you work with non data science folks, because then you can say I just did this in excel (where excel skills should be required by everyone in the company, and R for the data scientists) and they’ll probably just leave you alone the next time they need something since they will try to do it in excel first.