So down vote when someone says. I am not a fan of Excel? I can list several.
1) Excel your end result can not be replicated
2) Excel use in most shops use macros extensively and it is easy to not have your Excel environment available
3) The graphing capabilities of Excel is the reason why people still use pie charts
4) When doing analysis you want everything scripted? Excel as part of the tool chain is not something scriptable.
5) People usually have bad workflows with Excel and it takes learning R or Padas or Matlab or another statistics language to leave their current mindset
6) I can't think of one added benefit for having Excel as part of a good practice workflow unless you are mandated to produce some Excel spreadsheets which R can also do without touching Excel
I used Excel to do some basic data analysis tasks to see whether it is a reasonable alternative to using a statistical package for the same tasks.
Excel is a poor choice for statistical analysis beyond textbook examples, the simplest descriptive statistics, or for more than a very few columns. The problems I encountered that led to this conclusion are in four general areas:
[1] Missing values are handled inconsistently, and sometimes incorrectly.
[2] Data organization differs according to analysis, forcing you to reorganize your data in many ways if you want to do many different analyses.
[3] Many analyses can only be done on one column at a time, making it inconvenient to do the same analysis on many columns.
[4] Output is poorly organized, sometimes inadequately labeled, and there is no record of how an analysis was accomplished.
'Here’s an example of how the numerical inaccuracies in Excel can get you into trouble.'
