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Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

They succeeded in demonstrating their alternate thesis that Excel can be made to look less bad than default Excel. However, that is a lot of clicking for some cookie cutter visualizations.

I would posit that an "ultimate" visualization tool would allow me to exploratorily map aspects of my data to various aesthetic properties of the plot, such as size, color, shape, and transparency. I'd also expect to be able to get something reasonably close to publication quality straight out of the software without a whole bunch of tweaks.

I was hoping that this post would show me something about visualization workflow or extensions they'd written to ease some of the old pain points. As it is, they lead with a statement that is pretty laughable if we compare to ggplot2 or Tableau.

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ggplot2 and Tableau are high-end tools, meant for experts. My intent here is to show that an average organization can do a pretty good job with the tools they already have. The data discovery tech we're baking will actually totally simplify the way people visualize / discover their data. But until it's shipped, I'm just claiming people can use excel. Thanks anyway for your comment.

And I can appreciate that, though you can see why the sensational title might confuse someone on the intent.

Also, I'd argue that Tableau doesn't require any particular expertise beyond what is required for Excel. Though Tableau isn't my preferred tool, I've seen great results come from total novices. It has the side benefit of sneakily training people to "think beyond the canned" and to develop novel visualizations that may better get to the heart of the relationships present in the data.

I get it that ggplot2 requires some minimal coding ability, however I've also seen good (i.e. superior to stock excel) results come out of never-before-coded grad students in an only nominally quantitative discipline. Certainly the business people who power our economy and command great sums of wealth are capable of such modest feats?

"Certainly the business people who power our economy and command great sums of wealth are capable of such modest feats?" => unfortunately no, IMHO. I used to be a consultant, and I can tell from experience that there's no chance that any tool like R could possibly penetrate an audience of business people... Though, I share that dream with you!

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