Excel = Weakness

Submitted by Pluribus on Tue, 12/02/2008 - 16:04

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If you want to waste some serious money -- Buy Excel. It's useless. Utterly and completely useless. I was helping a co-worker do some fairly deep nested logic IF(,,IF(,,IF())), etc. She has 14 categories we needed to "IF". When she got to the eight level, Excel threw an error. It can't handle more than 7 nested statements!

This is on the latest and greatest version of Microsoft Excel.

Out of curiousity, I ran a quick test with OpenOffice.org, an open-source (Free) office suite. It allowed me to nest at least 10 levels of logic. I did not bother to test any further.

The moral of the story: When you can't get your work done, it's probably because you paid too much money for your tool!

</END RANT>

Disclaimer: Yes, I do understand that a spreadsheet is not meant to be a programming tool, but when the client wants something in a certain file format (grumble grumble) you deliver what they want. Personally, I think all complex pivot tables should be built using a dedicated tool capable of doing complex vector logic like PSPP or R or just use a simple database.

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Use SPSS

Submitted by admin on Thu, 12/04/2008 - 12:02.

And export .XLS. You're golden.

DD

Ummm, No

Submitted by Pluribus on Sat, 12/06/2008 - 12:43.

This particular co-worker has a hard time using Excel. In this case I am trying to minimize the number of applications I need to teach her. Last week we learned about inserting formulas and logic into Excel. I really don't think I should introduce her to SPSS yet. But true, SPSS could do what I was trying to do . . . . . but so could OpenOffice.org.

 

(besides, the data set was only ~250 rows. SPSS is a little over-kill for that.)

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Submitted by landywong on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 03:42.

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There is never a bad time to use SPSS.

Submitted by Dirty D on Sun, 12/07/2008 - 21:41.

I'm a big fanboy. If you need to use SPSS to handle all your massive layers of logic and contortions of the data, it's always a good idea to use it, even if the dataset is small.   Why struggle with Excel just because you're using fewer than 65K cases, when it can't do what you want it to?

DD

Dirty D writes about polling, analytics, data and whatever else may cross his mind as being neat. Feel free to contact him by email : D I R T Y D AT O V E R D E T E R M I N E D DOT N E T.