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Comment by ReactNative22 | Hacker News Reader

Python and Pandas > Excel for anything outside of exploratory spreadsheet-y like calculations (I work frequently with 200k rows + of data, I _had_ to learn Python as Excel was too slow eventually and broke...now having a programming language to do formulae, I can't go back for any of my production processes, using excel now mostly for pivot tables and exploratory analysis (Excel is pretty awesome at that)

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Hiya! I'm a cofounder of Mito [1] - where a spreadsheet extension to Jupyter Notebooks / Lab. Our most used feature is our exploratory graphing and Excel-like pivot tables - which seems super relevant.

Totally no pressure (although this is clearly a pitch), but if you get the chance to check it out and have feedback on where we fall short of being as awesome as Excel, your feedback would be super appreciated!

[1] https://trymito.io

Unfortunately I'm restricted on the programs I can use at work, but it does look good! Good luck with it!

Well, yes and no - nothing can compete with Excel in terms of modeling speed and agility. A capable analyst can do miracles with Excel, find other routes to a solution, and then produced model can go to Python/Pandas developer for the processing optimization.

Excel > * for communicating with anyone not a data scientist and still knows what they're doing

...Of course, you need to do professional data manipulation (whether in Python or with a real database) for 200k rows of data. Excel is never meant for handling that amount of information

Blockpad (https://blockpad.net) is also pretty good for this in the engineering space.