
Ask HN: What do the enlightened use when the rest of us use Excel? - crux
So, I've come into a large amount of statistical data. It's all quite simple and uniform: just a sequence of scores for three actors, which form a series of games. Every so often there's one of a couple discrete events that can be overlaid on top of a score.<p>So I want to parse it; just do a bunch of your standard avgs and sums. I've never used Excel in such depth before but as of right now it seems awfully ill-suited for the job. Simple (cognitively) operations like 'if this is the highest value in the column', or 'return the number of times the following string appears in the search region' (already I have to kludge in faked strings, because there's no way that I can see to tag a cell with metadata to represent an event) are either totally missing, or implemented in such a roundabout manner that they're very brittle.<p>So what do you, hacker news, use when you need to slice and dice your numbers? Short of starting from scratch in Python or Perl, what (hacker-friendly) environments are there that will allow greater flexibility and modularity when it comes to spreadsheet applications?
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murrayb
I use and like Gnumeric- <http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/> it tends to be
lighter and faster than the Open Office equivalent and I haven't found any
features which it lacks. Excel has more prettiness options for display/print
but from what I have read Gnumeric beats it's pants off in terms of math and
statistics functions.

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mindcrime
OpenOffice Calc. One nice thing about OOo is that you can write scripts /
extensions in pretty much any language you feel comfortable with. I think I've
seen some reference to some integration between R and Calc as well, which
would make Calc incredibly powerful for statistical analysis.

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olefoo
I would just start w/ python, but I know several people who are in love w/ R
<http://www.r-project.org/> which is deigned for statistics (there is an
RPython interface, so you can tally your cake and have it too :)

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gaius
Your choices are many: R, Octave and Sage fit the bill, all are free and
battle-proven.

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psyklic
It sounds like Excel is well-suited. Another quick option (if you are familiar
with it) is Matlab.

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czcar
Hmmm not sure if it quite fits but SPSS for Statistical Analysis...

