
Two Spreadsheets, Microsoft Access, and a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service - agronaut
http://blog.danwin.com/pulitzer-winner-daniel-gilbert-s-two-spreadsheets/
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lmg643
Great article. Microsoft Access was my first introduction to databases. (For
those who don't know, MS Access is like "excel for databases.") Gave me a
good-enough sense of what was happening under the hood. Started me on a career
in software. 15 years later, I'm in a recently updated version of enterprise
SQL Server (say what you will, but it works for us). I chuckle every time i
get to write IIF(x,y,z) in a SELECT statement. I was doing that in access in
2003.

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mirimir
Excel and Access are _amazingly good_ products. The Jet SQL syntax is a little
strange, but Access will handle substantial datasets. You can workaround the
table size limit using views. It won't be fast, but it will work.

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ianamartin
I'm not so sure I agree about access, but I totally agree about excel. I
mostly use Mac and but I will always keep a Windows box around if only to run
excel.

Sometimes that's the tool you need for the job, and no other will work as
quickly or as well. The windows excel team knocks it out of the park pretty
much every time.

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mirimir
I love mainly two things about Excel. One is calculation on multiple cores.
The other is grace in handling huge files. I've worked with 100MB files in
Excel. If I turn off auto calculation, that's actually workable. Linux
spreadsheet apps tend to fall over and die when files get too big, or there
are too many formulas.

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Vexs
Libreoffice calc is the only bit of libre software I've ever found inferior to
the non-libre version. Excel is just that good, and most people use it as
"Microsoft Grid Paper 2016"

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Vexs
Excel is one of the best, and most misused tools in the world. I know one,
maybe two people besides myself that do anything beyond using it as grid paper
or to render graphs, and that's a shame. The MS office classes around here,
from what I know, don't even mention functions beyond adding numbers.

Hell, Excel was basically the first thing I ever programmed in. Just playing
with it to see what I could make it do. Nowadays I see people spending an hour
making a python script to parse a file, when I can just drop it in excel use a
couple functions and maybe a macro, and have it parsed in 10 minutes.

It's a real shame. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of things in companies
could get a lot better if everyone learned excel overnight. Some people's job
basically amounts to doing something a spreadsheet and a little macroing can
do.

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throwaway049
It generally takes me much longer to parse data in Python (I use Pandas
sometimes) than in Excel/Access but I like to think that's because I've put
much more practice in the latter and have to spend more time reading the docs
for the former.

~~~
Vexs
Plus with standard scripting languages you have to do a lot of backbone work
too- load the file, parse the file, etc before you can ever get into doing any
sort of computations. Plus excel is vastly easier to debug, thanks to it all
being live.

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cypherpunks01
Nice! SQL is good like that, in my experience I've found that non-devs are
able to understand and use it somewhat surprisingly quickly. Probably has
something to do with the clause structure & parsing being fairly similar to
that of a natural language sentence.

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vandinem
Good article, but the spreadsheet/database skills did not seem to be the real
story. Yes, very useful, and powerful, but LOTS of people have developed those
skills. Instead, I found myself asking, "Where did the data come from?" He
asked for it. Who did he ask? The power of the story seemed to me to be that
he asked a powerful question, figured out how to get the data to answer that
question, and then figured out what skills he'd need to sift the data.

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fiatjaf
This article shows why you shouldn't trust journalists.

