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A comment on You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky [video]. Parent comment

Re:You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky [video] by bshipp on Saturday July 08, 2023 @07:26PM (#36649787)
I enjoy using SQL but the idea of using it instead of Excel to visually explore and manipulate data makes me wince. I can do without Word or PowerPoint but Excel, despite all its data handling warts, remains an exceptionally powerful tool for quick one-off data explorations.

I prefer combining SQL with Excel by generating a query that gets most of what I want inside the database and then importing it into excel's powerquery to further explore the individual vectors.

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Re:You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky [video] by magicalhippo on Saturday July 08, 2023 @10:03PM (#36650788)
> I prefer combining SQL with Excel

For so many one-off data importing jobs I just end up generating SQL in Excel after using the text import wizard to get the data into Excel.

It's kinda stupid but it just works so well most of the time. If I sense I might do it again I tend to script it in something more proper tho.

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