"And there aren’t good “data browsers” that have as low a learning curve."

If someone is trained to the point of working on genetic data at this level, should they not also have been trained to a reasonable level in domain appropriate software and tools?

I consider myself pretty trained and still use Excel for “eyeballing” datasets of up to a million records.

There’s many times where I don’t want to do anything more than open, sort, filter, and never see the file again. And I’d like something better than Excel, but haven’t found it.

Maybe 70% the time, vi or BBEdit or shell commands work but otherwise excel.

For anything of significance, I use Python notebooks or dedicated data environment.

If there was a better tool, I think people would train. But there’s not, that I’m aware of, so Excel sticks around.

I'm continually shocked at how technically incompetent academics can be. Otherwise brilliant people with the most batshit technical workflows I've ever seen.

Like everybody else, they take the path of least resistance. Of course, when that path is Excel they're in for a lot of resistance later (like needing to rename genes), but at first it feels smooth.

People are very inventive to get their job done.

I’ve done some travel to Africa and am amazed at the ingenuity/batshit workflows that exist to get work done and live life.