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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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Best replacement for excel is: anything that doesn't rape your data whilst pouring sugar in you gas tank. /s
TLDR - R, Python, mariaDB, for real data analysis stuff + minor role for whatever spreadsheet package.
For hobbies / analysis / data manipulation , storage , graphs and general stats fuckery here's my advice; as someone who does this stuff - "badly I might add" - for a shitty public sector organisation that just can't decide whether to bend over M$ barrel or Oracle's barrel:
use R (via R-studio if you need an "environment") for more statsy stuff and easier graphs.
Python for more general mathsy / programmy / web scrapy stuff - can do decent graphs with libraries like plotly and matplotlib stuff like that, scipy, numpy, and pandas are the other basic libraries for analysis and maths and large datasets. peopl like using 'jupyter notebooks' - I don't get it personally - but 50 Phil Ochs fans cant be that wrong.
Set up a mariadb or something if you need databasey stuff, I doubt you need to look at more hardcore stuff like postgresql for "hobbying" ; my personal (1 user) databases were built several years ago and mariadb is just fine for that. but some of the high vol transactional DB at work do use postgresql.
These are all good to learn in my experience, even if you think they're harder than excel; ( are they tho'? array formlae!?). They're sort of interoperable - subject to learning. They - naturally - have their open-source annoyances.: a million ways to do everything, and versioning issues. (Excel still has fucking vlookup() tho' - talk abut legacy baggage - but no it's not as bad as the open souce maelstroms).
You can still ouput data into a spreadsheet for viewing formatting and messing with stuff - but there are other ways.
Footnote: Yes I do still use excel, but normally mostly for final formatted report for customer who wants it. Having R/python directly write data into excel is so much better than letting excel open anything. Excel just can't let an innocent SNOMED code go unmolested; you have to be on high alert if you let excel actually do anything.
Also spreadsheet for messy data cleansing - for looking at mess, to help refine the R/python cleansing script. I'd happily use libre/ods for any of these but I don't fancy putting the request in to IT and . . . having to speak to IT about it.
Yeah I'm just gonna tell our group of 55+ year old mechanical engineers to learn Python; that'll go over really well /s
Surely they have to use stuff like mathcad or equivalent to be an engineer? I've never really used it but it can't be that far off just doing the calculations in python. I think there's "sagemath" too availabe for linux - i'm sure that's not as good as mathcad - but aimed at the same thing i think - and i'm sure it will interoperate with python libraries and R and stuff like that.
I know there are people who claim to be "good at excel" well i only used it for about 15-20 years but then i guess never got "good" at it - i just learned moreabout how bad it is. . Those that were genuinely good at it , as far as I think, did a lot of extra work to mitigate the limitations or create crutches for it. I just got pissed off by it, so i was quite desperate to stop using it as much as possible - it's just only recently i've been allowed to use what i think are more appropriate tools- and i;m grateful for this small, but likely closing "window" f opportunity.
If they're happy with it though, who am I to judge. But if I was doing gemoetry and engineering calculations and ultimately cad, I know i'd not want excel anywhere near my data or my calculation methods.
I wonder if age is really their issue, or if they just DGAF - again if that's the case, good for them.
I on the other hand will probably be walking out when they force us on windows 11 however good or bad it is. /management has already fucked us with sharepoint and dynamics - so maybe i'm just as bad as them when it comes to new fangled shit like: clouds, data-lakes, fabrics and other MS shite. I just want our data on a proper fucking filesystem, that we own. And our data somewhere I can SQL it.