To Excel or not to Excel?

Microsoft software product names are a pretty good source of ironic amusement. Of those I use regularly “Excel” and “Access” vie for the top spot, which is probably why I found the paper on the HSUG mailing list a week or two ago by David Lawunmi so interesting.

Lawunmi uses a wealth of interesting references to tour some of the drawbacks of Excel. These include - without rehashing his entire article - a variety of statistical flaws or missing functions, use of binary rather than decimal floating-point arithmetic, and generally appalling charting. More damningly to my mind though is the lack of record keeping involved in analytical spreadsheet work. Generally at the end of a piece of Excel work you’re left with your raw data file, your results, a mish-mash of semi-processed data, and a grim smile. There’s no audit trail or log of what you’ve done, and your results can’t be replicated by anyone else (or often yourself). Not that using spreadsheets makes good practice impossible of course, but they certainly do discourage it.

The analogy between programming projects and spreadsheets that Lawunmi refers to from the NPL document is pretty close, but a tighter one is to the subset of scripting languages within the set of programming languages. Quick and dirty solutions to small problems, and a method of making large problems functionally insoluble. However, friends who work in the software biz tell me that wherever there is an interface between large proprietry systems you will find a nest of script jobs providing the cushion and the interface. And of course we live in real world. Excel is ubiquitous and we will all continue to use it:

“Excel is utterly pervasive. Nothing large (good or bad) happens without it passing at some time though Excel”
Source: Anonymous interviewee quoted by Croll.

So where do we go from here?

You’re going to use Excel for many (most?) things but make the effort to supersede it where it counts – don’t get sucked into software monolingualism. For proper stats use a proper stats package. For proper graphs use a proper graphical package. When you do use Excel be careful, and if you can't be careful be lucky. Or perhaps you could move to Open Office. Hmmm, must check that out...

In the final analysis perhaps the question should be rewritten wryly: “To excel when Excel doesn’t?”