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A comment on The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook. Parent comment

Re:The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook by moftz on Saturday February 13, 2021 @07:22PM (#26128434)
I use Excel in my data processing workflow. I'll grab a small subset of the data to play around with in excel to see what it is I actually need out of it. Then, I'll do all of the real processing in python along with matplotlib for any charts I need to produce. Excel could almost entirely handle my use cases but there is usually some bit manipulation I need to do because my data is usually telemetry encoded as ASCII. Also making if-else statement in Excel is exhausting.

I could also just use MATLAB but I'm more used to using python.

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Re:The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook by slaymaker1907 on Saturday February 13, 2021 @08:24PM (#26128812)
Excel is exceptionally good at telling you what the shape of your data is. I love being able to just turn something into a table and then see the distinct values as a filter.

Sure, SQL and most environments can tell you distinct values of a column and their counts, but they are much slower and more cumbersome to explore with. I often start out with broad filters then go through many more specific ones depending on what I see from the first filter.

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Re:The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook by LaszloKv on Saturday February 13, 2021 @09:49PM (#26129216)
Another great tool for data exploration is visidata! This is a good example of what it can do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU
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Re:The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook by sam_bristow on Sunday February 14, 2021 @02:06AM (#26130308)
Visidata is great. My main problem is that I use it so infrequently so it's hard to build up the muscle memory to use it really effectively.
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Re:The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook by waheoo on Saturday February 13, 2021 @09:52PM (#26129228)
Isn't all excel data tabular in shape?
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Re:The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook by DavidPeiffer on Saturday February 13, 2021 @10:46PM (#26129479)
>Also making if-else statement in Excel is exhausting.

About a year ago Excel added =SWITCH, which is effectively {Logic Test | Output} pairings executed until one is true. Many if/then/else nestings could be eliminated with it.

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Re:The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook by rakoo on Sunday February 14, 2021 @08:11AM (#26132127)
It looks to me datasette (https://datasette.io/) could fill the same need: load the data into SQLite and explore it with a host of tools and visualisations, all profiting from the power of SQL
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