Re:An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors
by sghi on Saturday August 27, 2016 @09:43AM
(#12372308)
I'm an Ecology student, and the last few days there's been a lot of (justified) criticism of Excel. I use R and Python for data analysis, but a lot of what I do is gathering data, inputting into Excel and then exporting this as a CSV for use in R/Python for statistical analysis - are there any other tools that can replace Excel for this step?
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Re:An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors
by VodkaHaze on Saturday August 27, 2016 @10:56AM
(#12372594)
How do you gather the data? You could learn scraping in python, for example. If you manually input the data, a simple spreadsheet is fine for that.
If you have the data in a non csv format and use excel to transform it into csv, python and R have utilities for that job (python has pandas, I don't use R as much for data cleaning, but I know it can).
Re:An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors
by sghi on Saturday August 27, 2016 @05:30PM
(#12374268)
Yeah, it's a lot of manual entering of data (eg finding abundance of certain species of lichens, and lat/long, then manually entering all data and exporting this as a csv either for heatmaps with GIS or for more stats analysis and the same with animal species abundance) so it's good to know I'm not missing something fairly obvious!