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A comment on The Norway Problem. Parent comment

Re:The Norway Problem by mattkrause on Saturday April 03, 2021 @09:56AM (#26681062)
The analysis itself isn’t (usually) happening in Excel.

A lot of tools operate on CSV files. People use Excel to peek at the results or prepare input for other tools, and that’s how the date coercion slips in.

Sometimes, people do use it to collate the results of small manual experiments, where a database might be overkill. Even so, the data is usually analyzed elsewhere (R, graphPad, etc).

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Re:The Norway Problem by imtringued on Sunday April 04, 2021 @01:24PM (#26691249)
>A lot of tools operate on CSV files.

The mistake was to believe that Excel can operate on CSV files. It doesn't support them in any meaningful way. It supports them in a "I can sort of pretend that I support CSV files" way.

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Re:The Norway Problem by Arrath on Monday April 05, 2021 @01:47PM (#26702124)
What is a good alternative to working with CSV files than Excel? Excel sure isn't ideal but it's always there as part of the MS Office suite, so I've never looked for anything esle.
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