Death to Spreadsheets
While the debate rages about a reproducibility crisis in academia, there’s a much more common one right under our noses
There was a time when the only way I knew how to do analysis was to use a spreadsheet. I spent over 15 years building highly complex models and analytics on those screens with the rectangular boxes that so many have come to rely on.
Then, in early 2016, it all changed for me. The fuss had started about R and Python, and I asked a few people who were ‘in the know’ which software they believed to be the best for conducting the widest range of analytics. The unanimous answer I received pointed to R (probably due to the people I spoke to). So I decided I am going to learn this thing, and find out if all the hype is worth it.
Six months later, after a lot of late nights and weekends, and through finding whatever chances I could to solve work related problems using R, I was in a situation where I could not bear the idea of working in a spreadsheet again. I’m serious. Today it is a chore to open them, and the only reason I do so is because I communicate with some people who are in the same position as I was 7 years ago.
I look at functions like VLOOKUP and I compare them to dplyr::left_join(). It’s like I am standing on a street littered…
