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A comment on Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates. Parent comment

Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by importantbrian on Thursday August 06, 2020 @03:22PM (#24074480)
Whenever people ask me about getting into the field and if they should learn Python or R or Scala or whatever else, I always respond with you need to get really good with excel/Google Sheets and SQL. Then worry about everything else. I can't tell you how many times I've done an analysis I'm really proud of in something like R Markdown only to have the end user say that's great now can I get it in an excel? I just deliver everything in excel as a default now.
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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by goatlover on Thursday August 06, 2020 @05:25PM (#24075616)
> good with excel/Google Sheets and SQL

Those aren't very good for cleaning and wrangling data, even if the output for analysis ends up being a spreadsheet.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by importantbrian on Friday August 07, 2020 @02:44PM (#24085155)
Agreed that spreadsheets aren't great for that, but totally disagree about SQL. SQL is the best cleaning and wrangling data tool out there. There's a reason the trend in the industry is towards tools like DBT. There are certainly things for which you need to use Python or R, but for 95% of tasks some combination of SQL and a spreadsheet will get you where you need to go.
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