R was around in 2010, lol
Excel I agree with.
But sometimes there is value in teaching the old tools/frameworks for doing something. For instance, in bioinformatics, I prefer students that can explain what the FASTA format is versus just boinking the pretty GUI button on the proprietary format used by their sequencer.
Not sure if the post is about GUI vs non-GUI. I read it as use R or pandas instead if SPSS.
Should we also allow them to let AI write their essays?
I learned how to do a fucking LOT of statistical shit in my degree. I also learned to get REALLY good at all kinds of shit in Excel.
Guess which helped my career on an actual practical way the most? Guess which made people seek me out at work for help with things?
Sometimes Excel is what’s available. Sometimes it’s just faster to do it that way rather than code up some ridiculously overdone solution in some programming language. Having both skills is best, but don’t shit on opening an excel and just fucking getting it done, whatever it is.
If used right, it can also be a great equalizer with those less technically skilled in your workplace. You can quickly format and tune things and even layer a little bit of vba to make their lives easier without having to get into the complexity of an entire bespoke coded solution.
Also, a reminder for those in the back. For most of us, we aren’t in college to learn a specific skill so much as we are there to learn how to be taught. To prove we are capable of taking instructions and producing results as requested.
If you never understand this, then you’ll never understand later why you fail to land a high quality job.
“Sometimes Excel is what’s available.”
I worked for a Big Company that was cutting back and dropped their Oracle contracts, forcing all the DBAs to work in Access. Then they fired all the DBAs, forcing everyone to either try to figure out Access or switch to Excel. Guess which way they went.
In my last job at that company, my department had built an Excel spreadsheet (database) so large and full of calculations they had to request money to update our machines to 64-bit Windows and 16GB RAM just to run it.
Lemmy Silver™🥈 incoming !
FOSS is always available. R is always available. Your points remain but you’re never in a situation where Excel is the only thing you can use.
Where I worked, many of the contacts specifically said we could not use open source software, so no, it is not always available.
This is more of an argument for LibreOffice (and in line with the post you’re replying to) than it’s an argument for using a programming language, let alone a specific one.
You are if company policy dictates that’s all you can use.
R, the language where dependency resolution is built upon thoughts and prayers.
Say what you want about Excel, but compatibility is kinda decent (ignoring locales and DNA sequences). Meanwhile, good luck replicating your R installation on another machine.
You heard about conda/containers/pixi/whatever?
PS: Excel will often fail if your system has a different default language. Like in many European countries one and a half is 1,5, not 1.5. Excel can’t take it.
If the math underneath is valid then I don’t really care what calculator I use.
I got bad news for this guy, his employer is only going to pay for excel and his coworker only knows how to use excel so he better learn to use excel. Also people do a lot of things in excel that have no business being done in excel.
The point is that learning institutions should not prefer one commercial companies solutions vs another.
In fact, they should not use or be dependent on commercial companies at all.
Learning stuff and implementing what you learned should be available for all. Not just people with the money.
Companies know this so they give away their stuff for free to these schools knowing they will contain these people for life.
We need to break out of that extreme vendor lock-in.
Libre office exists
That too!
I heard its good for databases…
I used to maintain an excel database along with an ecosystem of internal engineering tools in excel/vba. I worked in a vault, and one day I asked my isso if I could get python on some of the machines in my lab. A full 1.5 years later they got back to me that some security office was finally ready to consider my request and sent me a bunch of paperwork to fill out to justify why I needed python. And separate copies for each individual library I wanted to come with it. Needless to say I went on continuing to maintain my excel database and toolkit
some businesses just deserve to die, and are actively working towards it
A lot of companies are like this.
I’d hazard it’s most companies.
My high school IT teacher said this outright. He was a FOSS guy, but he said employers will expect MS Office, so we’re going to be learning that.
Funnily enough proprietary software is frowned upon in my professional domain. Im not mad though, the excel commands and whatnot still work in libre office spreadsheets.
Unrelatedly, doing statistics in a spreadsheet program sounds like absolute hell.
That is interesting: In Geography we could choose a seminar using R or SPSS. There were more R than SPSS seminars available. I did choose R, of course.
The fun part: now it is beneficial to be able to do the same in Python. (:
I have coded VBA-based shadow-IT back in the day, but I seriously think this is something that needs to disappear in most firms that still have it. It is typically unmaintable automation of tasks at the department level that is super dependent on who is around and is still often in use after the programmers are long gone. I have seen a few old VBA tools in use that should be done with standard python/R or god forbid even JS Code in a decent documented repo.
That reminds me of a story my bachelor’s supervisor in astrophysics told me: One of his best PhDs applied at an insurance company. They got an Excel sheet with data that they had 1 week to analyze. All the other applicants took the whole week. He just put it in Python, solved it in a few hours, and got the job.
I’m no academic, but it seems wrong to me that any field would require the use of a particular proprietary software in order to do one’s homework assignments.
May Excel or SPSS be the best tool for the job? In many cases, sure! But students should be allowed to use whatever other software can also get the job done, as long as the software exports the assignment in a data format that the professor can reasonably ingest (e.g.: turning in a CSV file, which can be understood by many different kinds of software, not just Excel).
I understand professors have limited time to check homework and thus don’t want to spend time learning how to do anything but open a single, specific filetype, but that’s besides the point.
Hmm. What about CAD? The professor going to teach FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, F360, OnShape, etc?
I think requiring one tool is OK. You’re there to learn the process in a way that you can migrate to what you want later. Teachers aren’t paid enough as it is, so it should be made as easy as possible for them to manage the flow of work.
Yeah, FreeCAD is open source and great (I use it at home)
But you’re not landing a job requiring it, you’ll use SolidWorks like everybody else
And if you find yourself in the 10% of companies which use some other CAD program, you will have to learn on the job
It is extremely common for classes to require students to learn to use proprietary software. It’s a tool of the trade. If they graduate you without teaching you how to use it, they’d be fucking you over and ruining their own reputation. Like, imagine an accounting student graduating not knowing excel, because they did all their assignments using MatLab because they liked it better. It would be absolutely unthinkable for any potential employer to hire such a student. Excel is the software they use in that field. If a student wants to learn a different option in their free time, that’s fine and dandy.
It is extremely common for classes to require students to learn to use proprietary software. It’s a tool of the trade.
I understand that; my position is more ideological than practical. In an ideal scenario, AutoDesk, Adobe, Microsoft, etc wouldn’t be so deeply entrenched in their respective fields such that they are the de-facto tools of the trade for every business which must be learned in order to be hired. I know a given student has to learn certain proprietary tools in the current academic and professional environment. My comment was saying I would prefer this not to be the case. I am fully aware that proprietary software domination in the academic and professional spaces is not going away any time soon.
In my ideal scenario, an interviewer at a company would ask, “Can you perform the following edits to a given graphic?” instead of “Can you use Photoshop?” since the former allows for candidates who can use alternatives like GIMP. I understand company pipelines aren’t set up for this, either, because company pipelines are also deeply entrenched in proprietary software.
The OP’s photo is specifically about professors allowing other software to be used. Which would be a good starting point for making these kinds of changes.
What does not knowing excel even mean? If you’re in STEM and would be tought the fundamentals of statistics independently of any software tool, you would gain the knowledge to apply these skills to any tool. And sorry to say, but after that Excel is just learning syntax.
True, but what I see in chemical engineering is college graduates not being very able to use Excel, because they all used Aspen and other very expensive software in college.
I can never say this enough: the best tool is the tool that gets the job done
Found the guy who would use a flathead screwdriver to regulate a demon core.
Also the tool available.
Your business likely pays for Outlook… which means you get Excel for free and it’s probably installed by default.
Otherwise, you’ll have to spend time convincing your manager and IT to approve some new installs
I understand professors have limited time to check homework and thus don’t want to spend time learning how to do anything but open a single, specific filetype, but that’s besides the point.
If professor is too “old” to learn new shit, like how their students work, they have fallen off and have no business teaching anymore
LinkedIn ass title
R is best
Came here to say this :)
Old people and technology man. My advisor during my masters was an absolutely brilliant woman; she’s one of the people who has been basically defining the field of data science since the early 90s. The first time I ever published with her, I sent my first draft and her response was “can you convert this to docx? I don’t know how to work with tex.” I still think she’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known but damn did it hurt to work on Microsoft word documents with her
Have you got recommendations for learning how to use tex, R, or Python for those that haven’t learnt how to programme?
Unironically – use markdown. It’s far more intuitive for most people, comes with similar git tracking benefits, and has simpler compilation / tooling steps.
For tex, i would suggest taking a basic template, and writing what you need, looking up how to do things as you need them. Theres a bunch of documentation on sites like overleaf, and you can learn a lot by looking at stackexchange threads.
I think there are free editors for LaTeX that show you the code and the end result next to each other, and let you edit either.
You need to learn the ability to resist the urge to tweak layout. You’re using a professional document preparation tool that well make your document look professional. Playing with trendy fonts and margins and placement is how regular people make documents in a word processor that look less professional than LaTeX.
LaTeX gives you the respectability of the corporate style of the professional science researcher, but if you want free-form do-it-how-you-like, you really really really don’t want LaTeX.
Ah, I use OpenOffice for writing.
YouTube. Straight up. When I learned to code my yt search history was a million different versions of “how to <do thing> in python” for months. I also really liked the “Computational methods for physics” textbook (you can find the pdf for free on cambridge website), but that book is written for an audience that knows near graduate math but starts praying if their advisor asks them to write a program
Start out with Python. It’s easy to learn and there are tons of courses and tutorials out there. Unless you want to be a professional programmer, it’s all you’ll ever need. Learning tex in this day and age is a waste of time, if you ask me.
It’s the tool that she’s learned to get the job done, the virtue of the tool does not matter to a master crafts
manperson, only their proficiency.That might be the stupidest thought terminating cliché ive ever heard. The virtue of the tool absolutely does matter. I’m not out here trying to metaphorically mine iron with a pickaxe when we have metaphorical excavators available, and no amount of expertise will allow somebody to be more efficient with the pickaxe than any random novice with an excavator.
Absolutely true - and that’s when ‘masters’ become obsolete.
He said 2010, I was teached how to use the Microsoft Office suite in 1999. This goes way back.
(As a matter of fact one of my first website I made in FrontPage back then. I actually discovered Word on Windows 3.1 when I was around 5, hence my father’s friend calling me mehdi.doc lol)
Heh. I actually was using SPSS in 2010 for statistics. Weird memory resurfacing there.
What’s the current software for this?
R (and Python) are increasingly common, in my opinion. 14 years ago when I started university I learned SPSS but never used it, then I learned a lot of Stata which I use currently because it is the lingua franca at my institute, but prefer R for my own research.
btw I think libreoffice calc supports python macros, like excel did with visualwhatever
They were living in 2025 when they posted that in 2023. I don’t think the stats software is the biggest story here.
