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Over the last two years I have moved away from Excel, Word and PowerPoint to R/Sweave/LaTeX/beamer/git as fast as possible. I got so sick of version changes in VBA breaking code, 3rd party modules that were locked and couldn't be fixed, and binary files that suck up space in version control. I see my coworkers using spread sheets and PowerPoint files where databases and complete, reproducible reports should be used. Tremendous amounts of tacit knowledge is buried on network shares and forgotten. I find the community support for R/RStudio/LateX/git much better than Microsoft's support.


Oh I do use R + Numpy a lot too, but Excel has really been indispensible.

I agree with you about spreadsheets being used where databases make more sense though.




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