Yesterday I finally found out why some fellow scientists use Excel to analyse their data.
There are many much better tools for the job, such as the free, open-source and multi-platform statistics package R or well known packages like Matlab or Mathematica. Data analysis can be done more accurately and more automatic with these programs. I have always wondered why people use Excel.
Fortunately, I found this comment on a news website, which, for the first time, explains the reasoning behind using Excel. Here is the comment:
“[…] The […] big reason to use spreadsheets is that they make data more [maleable]. Normal scientific tools make it difficult to micromanage the data that you acquire, partially because the people who produce that software have this mistaken notion that data has to be managed in a consistent way. So you’re usually stuck doing the same thing to an entire dataset, and it’s even difficult to treat different datasets in different way. But spreadsheets expose all of that data, so it is easy to tweak an observation here and a variable there to get the desired result to maximize your grant.”
The original can be found here, as part of this news article.