I got bad news for this guy, his employer is only going to pay for excel and his coworker only knows how to use excel so he better learn to use excel. Also people do a lot of things in excel that have no business being done in excel.
Thoughts??
Submitted 1 day ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/b019e155-86ba-47e5-871b-b198167520a2.jpeg
Comments
Newsteinleo@midwest.social 1 day ago
funkyfarmington@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I heard its good for databases…
Gustephan@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I used to maintain an excel database along with an ecosystem of internal engineering tools in excel/vba. I worked in a vault, and one day I asked my isso if I could get python on some of the machines in my lab. A full 1.5 years later they got back to me that some security office was finally ready to consider my request and sent me a bunch of paperwork to fill out to justify why I needed python. And separate copies for each individual library I wanted to come with it. Needless to say I went on continuing to maintain my excel database and toolkit
Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 1 day ago
My high school IT teacher said this outright. He was a FOSS guy, but he said employers will expect MS Office, so we’re going to be learning that.
Funnily enough proprietary software is frowned upon in my professional domain. Im not mad though, the excel commands and whatnot still work in libre office spreadsheets.
Unrelatedly, doing statistics in a spreadsheet program sounds like absolute hell.
poinck@lemmy.one 1 day ago
That is interesting: In Geography we could choose a seminar using R or SPSS. There were more R than SPSS seminars available. I did choose R, of course.
The fun part: now it is beneficial to be able to do the same in Python. (:
Safeguard@beehaw.org 1 day ago
The point is that learning institutions should not prefer one commercial companies solutions vs another.
In fact, they should not use or be dependent on commercial companies at all.
Learning stuff and implementing what you learned should be available for all. Not just people with the money.
Companies know this so they give away their stuff for free to these schools knowing they will contain these people for life.
We need to break out of that extreme vendor lock-in.
merari42@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I have coded VBA-based shadow-IT back in the day, but I seriously think this is something that needs to disappear in most firms that still have it. It is typically unmaintable automation of tasks at the department level that is super dependent on who is around and is still often in use after the programmers are long gone. I have seen a few old VBA tools in use that should be done with standard python/R or god forbid even JS Code in a decent documented repo.
rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio 1 day ago
I’m no academic, but it seems wrong to me that any field would require the use of a particular proprietary software in order to do one’s homework assignments.
May Excel or SPSS be the best tool for the job? In many cases, sure! But students should be allowed to use whatever other software can also get the job done, as long as the software exports the assignment in a data format that the professor can reasonably ingest (e.g.: turning in a CSV file, which can be understood by many different kinds of software, not just Excel).
blarghly@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It is extremely common for classes to require students to learn to use proprietary software. It’s a tool of the trade. If they graduate you without teaching you how to use it, they’d be fucking you over and ruining their own reputation. Like, imagine an accounting student graduating not knowing excel, because they did all their assignments using MatLab because they liked it better. It would be absolutely unthinkable for any potential employer to hire such a student. Excel is the software they use in that field. If a student wants to learn a different option in their free time, that’s fine and dandy.
rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio 1 day ago
It is extremely common for classes to require students to learn to use proprietary software. It’s a tool of the trade.
I understand that; my position is more ideological than practical. In an ideal scenario, AutoDesk, Adobe, Microsoft, etc wouldn’t be so deeply entrenched in their respective fields such that they are the de-facto tools of the trade for every business which must be learned in order to be hired. I know a given student has to learn certain proprietary tools in the current academic and professional environment. My comment was saying I would prefer this not to be the case. I am fully aware that proprietary software domination in the academic and professional spaces is not going away any time soon.
feinstruktur@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
What does not knowing excel even mean? If you’re in STEM and would be tought the fundamentals of statistics independently of any software tool, you would gain the knowledge to apply these skills to any tool. And sorry to say, but after that Excel is just learning syntax.
icelimit@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
I can never say this enough: the best tool is the tool that gets the job done
Goodeye8@piefed.social 1 day ago
Found the guy who would use a flathead screwdriver to regulate a demon core.
Midnitte@beehaw.org 1 day ago
Also the tool available.
Your business likely pays for Outlook… which means you get Excel for free and it’s probably installed by default.
Otherwise, you’ll have to spend time convincing your manager and IT to approve some new installs
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 day ago
Hmm. What about CAD? The professor going to teach FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, F360, OnShape, etc?
I think requiring one tool is OK. You’re there to learn the process in a way that you can migrate to what you want later. Teachers aren’t paid enough as it is, so it should be made as easy as possible for them to manage the flow of work.
BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 1 day ago
Yeah, FreeCAD is open source and great (I use it at home)
But you’re not landing a job requiring it, you’ll use SolidWorks like everybody else
And if you find yourself in the 10% of companies which use some other CAD program, you will have to learn on the job
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I understand professors have limited time to check homework and thus don’t want to spend time learning how to do anything but open a single, specific filetype, but that’s besides the point.
If professor is too old to learn new shit, like how their students work, they have fallen off and have no business teaching anymore
KTJ_microbes@mander.xyz 1 day ago
R was around in 2010, lol
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
R is great. Your boss will give you excel.
austinfloyd@ttrpg.network 1 day ago
Hell, R was being used in colleges in 2000. Unfortunately, whether it was SPSS for the soft sciences or forcing stats work in Matlab for the engineers, professors always seemed bad at promoting the right tool for the job.
shalafi@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Excel dominates the world of number crunching. Want to change that? You can’t.
Imagine proposing an alternative for your organization that has been using Excel for two decades. Will every single sheet and workbook translate perfectly? If not, not good enough for dealing with numbers. The risk/reward calculation (heh) is not a fit for open source spreadsheets.
ryedaft@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Haha, Microsoft absolutely changes shit all the time. Millions of organisations around the world have an octogenarian computer standing somewhere in a corner because they need it running the old software.
shalafi@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Not Excel they don’t, not ever.
ftbd@feddit.org 1 day ago
the world of number crunching
Weird, I’ve never heard of excel being used on HPC systems
esc27@lemmy.world 1 day ago
In my experience the people relying on Excel cannot be bothered to learn Linux or job scheduling. So instead they get 10-20 thousand dollar dedicated workstations for excel, spss, etc.
Thankfully the newer hires are more flexible.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 day ago
yup its used alot in chemistry classes for measuring alot of experiments, or if you taken college gen chem you will be using it very often.
Grimtuck@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Not just within your organisation, but imagine trying to share something other than Excel outside of it!
sunstoned@lemmus.org 23 hours ago
That’s not very Libre(office) of you there, partner
Chrobin@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
That reminds me of a story my bachelor’s supervisor in astrophysics told me: One of his best PhDs applied at an insurance company. They got an Excel sheet with data that they had 1 week to analyze. All the other applicants took the whole week. He just put it in Python, solved it in a few hours, and got the job.
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
This is only tangentially related to your story, but you reminded me of an old maths teacher who had a PhD in maths and once upon a time, had applied to work at an accounting firm. As part of the interview, he was told that he would have to sit a numeracy assessment. He responded “you do know I have a PhD in maths, right?”. They sympathised with his point but told him that everyone had to sit the test, as a matter of course.
So my maths teacher goes and sits their silly test, and he scores so well that they accuse him of cheating! I can only assume that this debacle broke him in some way, because it wasn’t long after this that he started teaching. It’s a particular kind of weirdo who has a PhD in a subject and decides to teach teenagers. He was probably one of the best teachers I ever had (I wonder if I can find contact information for him to tell him that)
Chrobin@discuss.tchncs.de 21 hours ago
Also related, I had a psychology teacher with a PhD in psychology. But because in German schools, you need to teach two subjects (with the exception of the arts), he also taught physics. He was a terrible physics teacher, but a pretty good psychology one.
ComradeRachel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
R is best
flora_explora@beehaw.org 1 day ago
Came here to say this :)
Gustephan@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Old people and technology man. My advisor during my masters was an absolutely brilliant woman; she’s one of the people who has been basically defining the field of data science since the early 90s. The first time I ever published with her, I sent my first draft and her response was “can you convert this to docx? I don’t know how to work with tex.” I still think she’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known but damn did it hurt to work on Microsoft word documents with her
Taalnazi@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Have you got recommendations for learning how to use tex, R, or Python for those that haven’t learnt how to programme?
davidagain@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think there are free editors for LaTeX that show you the code and the end result next to each other, and let you edit either.
You need to learn the ability to resist the urge to tweak layout. You’re using a professional document preparation tool that well make your document look professional. Playing with trendy fonts and margins and placement is how regular people make documents in word that look less professional than LaTeX.
LaTeX gives you the respectability of the corporate style of the professional science researcher, but if you want free-form do-it-how-you-like, you really really really don’t want LaTeX.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Start out with Python. It’s easy to learn and there are tons of courses and tutorials out there. Unless you want to be a professional programmer, it’s all you’ll ever need. Learning tex in this day and age is a waste of time, if you ask me.
sunstoned@lemmus.org 1 day ago
Use markdown instead ;)
zeca@lemmy.eco.br 1 day ago
For tex, i would suggest taking a basic template, and writing what you need, looking up how to do things as you need them. Theres a bunch of documentation on sites like overleaf, and you can learn a lot by looking at stackexchange threads.
Gustephan@lemmy.world 1 day ago
YouTube. Straight up. When I learned to code my yt search history was a million different versions of “how to <do thing> in python” for months. I also really liked the “Computational methods for physics” textbook (you can find the pdf for free on cambridge website), but that book is written for an audience that knows near graduate math but starts praying if their advisor asks them to write a program
icelimit@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
It’s the tool that she’s learned to get the job done, the virtue of the tool does not matter to a master crafts
manperson, only their proficiency.Gustephan@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That might be the stupidest thought terminating cliché ive ever heard. The virtue of the tool absolutely does matter. I’m not out here trying to metaphorically mine iron with a pickaxe when we have metaphorical excavators available, and no amount of expertise will allow somebody to be more efficient with the pickaxe than any random novice with an excavator.
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
If the math underneath is valid then I don’t really care what calculator I use.
kadup@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Excel I agree with.
But sometimes there is value in teaching the old tools/frameworks for doing something. For instance, in bioinformatics, I prefer students that can explain what the FASTA format is versus just boinking the pretty GUI button on the proprietary format used by their sequencer.
sfjvvssss@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Not sure if the post is about GUI vs non-GUI. I read it as use R or pandas instead if SPSS.
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
I agree. I learned a lot of bioinformatics stuff from the ground up, because I was learning python at the time, and found it super useful as practice. Years later, I discovered rosalind.info and cursed the fact that I hadn’t had access to that when I was learning.
steal_your_face@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
LinkedIn ass title
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Heh. I actually was using SPSS in 2010 for statistics. Weird memory resurfacing there.
wowwoweowza@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Should we also allow them to let AI write their essays?
radix@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They were living in 2025 when they posted that in 2023. I don’t think the stats software is the biggest story here.
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
What’s the current software for this?
Gieselbrecht@feddit.org 1 day ago
R (and Python) are increasingly common, in my opinion. 14 years ago when I started university I learned SPSS but never used it, then I learned a lot of Stata which I use currently because it is the lingua franca at my institute, but prefer R for my own research.
ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 day ago
btw I think libreoffice calc supports python macros, like excel did with visualwhatever
very_poggers_gay@hexbear.net 1 day ago
For replacing SPSS? R and JASP
Idk about Excel
callouscomic@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I learned how to do econometric proofs. I learned regression and probabilities and all kinds of bullshit. I also learned to get RESLLY good at all kinds of shit in Excel.
Guess which helped my career on an actual practical way the most? Guess which made people seek me out at work for help with things?
Sometimes Excel is what’s available. Sometimes it’s just faster to do it that way too rather than code up some ridiculously overdone solution in some programming language. Having both skills etc is best, but don’t shit on opening an excel and just fucking getting it done, whatever it is.
If used right, it can also be a great equalizer with those less technically skilled in your workplace. You can quickly format and tune things and even layer a little bit of vba to make their lives easier without having to get into the complexity of an entire bespoke coded solution.
rockstarmode@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I really like this idea, but prefer one small change: I think it’s best to learn how to learn.
Learning how to be taught is part of that, and a large part. Understanding when to absorb information, rely on experts, and apply yourself until you improve is fundamental. You won’t get any arguments from me there.
But being taught is only one facet of learning. Sometimes experts aren’t really experts, or don’t have the learner’s best interests at heart, or omit things to protect their own interests or ideology.
Learning how to learn involves fostering fundamental curiosity, not being afraid to fail, asking all the questions even dumb ones or those with seemingly obvious answers. Finding out “why” something works instead of just “how”. Fundamentally curious people who learn as a habit tend to also develop a scientific method-like approach to evaluating incoming information: “Ok, this is the information I’m presented with, let’s assume the opposite, can I prove the null hypothesis?” This acts as a pretty good bullshit detector, or at the very least trains learners to be skeptical, to trust but verify, which is enormously important in the age of misinformation.
Being taught generally tapers off as someone gets older, or becomes an expert. Learning never needs to taper off, so long as your brain still works.
expr@programming.dev 9 hours ago
www.visidata.org
Blows Excel out of the water, and it’s not even close. And it’s free, open source, and completely extensible (with Python, not some godforsaken excuse for a programming language).
TomMasz@piefed.social 1 day ago
"Sometimes Excel is what's available."
I worked for a Big Company that was cutting back and dropped their Oracle contracts, forcing all the DBAs to work in Access. Then they fired all the DBAs, forcing everyone to either try to figure out Access or switch to Excel. Guess which way they went.
In my last job at that company, my department had built an Excel spreadsheet (database) so large and full of calculations they had to request money to update our machines to 64-bit Windows and 16GB RAM just to run it.
keepcarrot@hexbear.net 16 hours ago
Noooo
Adalast@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Learning to learn is what the 12 years of babysitting we all go through is supposed to be doing. The fact you overlook that is why we have a >50% illiteracy rate in the USA. Post secondary education is 100% about learning advanced skills and developing the techniques needed for a career. Saying otherwise is why companies are looking for doctoral degrees for entry level positions and they can all burn in hell.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
FOSS is always available. R is always available. Your points remain but you’re never in a situation where Excel is the only thing you can use.
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Where I worked, many of the contacts specifically said we could not use open source software, so no, it is not always available.
onslaught545@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
You are if company policy dictates that’s all you can use.
enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
R, the language where dependency resolution is built upon thoughts and prayers.
Say what you want about Excel, but compatibility is kinda decent (ignoring locales and DNA sequences). Meanwhile, good luck replicating your R installation on another machine.
sunstoned@lemmus.org 1 day ago
This is more of an argument for LibreOffice (and in line with the post you’re replying to) than it’s an argument for using a programming language, let alone a specific one.
BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 1 day ago
Lemmy Silver™🥈 incoming !
sevenapples@lemmygrad.ml 1 day ago
This is true to the extent that you won’t be solving Organic Chemistry 1 or Linear Algebra exercises at your workplace, but I think it’s misleading. If anything, from my experience, people focus too much on producing the results and not enough on learning the skills. A lot of people stay on the mindset of “I only need the degree / where am I going to need that / the industry has moved on from this” and don’t build strong foundations