My first programming, instead of opening excel and making a plot I did (after setting up jupyter lab with anaconda):

    import pandas as pd
    
    data = pd.read_excel('my_excel_file.xlsx')
    data.boxplot()

Amazing! And then someone showed me a loop [1] and I was plotting the columns I needed from hundreds of Excel files. Crazy efficient! Programming clicked right away for me. It was exactly what I needed at that time. It helps tremendously that in Jupyter notebooks you can just type a variable (in this case `data`) and it shows you what it looks like, and it looks like... An Excel file (indeed, a table).

You know what is hard? Opening 20, roughly the same, Excel files and copying some of the data into a new Excel file without making any mistakes (and that includes Excel not reformating your data to something else, like a dd-mm-yyyy to mm-dd-yyyy or making a date out of your Gene names [0]).

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...

[1] The loop:

    excel_files = os.listdir('.')
    for excel_file in excel_files:
        data = pd.read_excel('excel_file.xlsx')
        data[['Column A', 'Column D', 'Column X']].boxplot()