Excel to the rescue! Took me about five minutes to extract exactly what I needed.

This is the beauty of Excel. It’s a powerful text manipulation tool that everyone has.

If it's Windows there should be PowerShell ISE installed.

With just the tidyverse library (which includes dplyr), R can be very useful in a data analysis pipeline. It is great for data cleaning and aggregation, especially when a process needs to be done multiple times. It is much faster than excel/power query. I am an accountant in SaaS and spend a lot of my day waiting for excel/powerbi automations to refresh. Similar solutions in R/sql/python would be nearly instant. Also excel/powerbi automations are a bitch to troubleshoot, and are unnecessarily complex.

When following tidy principles, a framework designed by the tidyverse dev Hadley Wickham, R code can be very easy to interpret, similar to SQL. Additionally the R community has made libraries for everything, and I consider R a great general purpose language as well.

https://www.easydatatransform.com/data_wrangling_etl_tools.h...

The ability create a relational database in Excel with vlookups and hlookups, then capture it all into a macro is amazing.

I've really enjoyed using Excel as a Postgres frontend, with a real Postgres DB instance handling data, and then using the report functionality to dump to Word.

While a pro reporting engine and cutting out MS Office altogether would be a better longterm solution, it is hard to beat for quick & dirty results.

The commercial devart plugin [3] looks pretty neat too but I haven't used it yet

I've also tried the JDBC connectivity option too [4], but with some different use-cases in mind for Postgres (not about Excel)

[1] https://datacornering.com/how-to-connect-to-postgresql-datab...

[2] https://www.postgresql.org/download/products/2-drivers-and-i...

[3] https://www.devart.com/excel-addins/postgresql/

[4] https://jdbc.postgresql.org/

Do yourself a favour and ditch vlookup and hlookup in favour of the recently introduced xlookup, which even obsoletes index/match !

I try to keep my exploratory joins out of Excel, but I admit that I often don't resist the immediacy of Excel's poor man's joins located right where I need them.

So useful I like it despite how it always goes out of its way to waste my time by trying to misrepresent a number of different types of strings and numbers as American dates :-|

Trivia: JMP stands for "John's Macintosh Project".

Also, the entire semiconductor industry depends on JMP just like the entire pharmaceutical industry depends on Minitab.

Still use Excel for quick stuff but otherwise it's pandas for me.

This isn't specific to JMP of course. A good thing about Excel is that businesses are OK with just paying for "everybody" to have it.

Also, people use Excel for more than analysis. It's also a crude database and platform for creating small "apps" that do things, that are easy to share with others.

But, given the problem “I have some unfortunately formatted data which I need to analyze”, there is no better solution than sanitizing it in VS Code and then analyzing it in Excel.