The New York Times course to teach its reporters data skills is now open-source

Re:The New York Times course to teach its reporters data ski... by rahimnathwani on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @11:18PM (#20171553)

I found it both amusing and annoying that the first line of the article mentions VLOOKUP.

In my experience, there's never a good reason to use VLOOKUP. You can always achieve the same functionality using INDEX (in conjunction with MATCH). Using VLOOKUP means that your formulae break as soon as someone inserts a new column in the middle of your table. And clicking the cell with the formula doesn't immediately show you which two columns are used by the function.

More (opinionated) Excel tips here: https://www.encona.com/posts/excel-best-practices

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Re:The New York Times course to teach its reporters data ski... by drej on Thursday June 13, 2019 @02:39AM (#20172334)

That is unless you parametrise that column index as well - you can do a MATCH to retrieve your desired column number and safeguard it against column insertions/deletions. (It weakens the case for VLOOKUP, but being quite a light Excel user, this is usually how I do things.)

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Re:The New York Times course to teach its reporters data ski... by samdfonseca on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @11:47PM (#20171651)

So you just decided you were gonna find something to criticize before you even clicked the link, eh?

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Re:The New York Times course to teach its reporters data ski... by rahimnathwani on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @11:51PM (#20171671)

Yup. Without clicking the link I correctly guessed that the first sentence mentioned VLOOKUP

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