Excel is amazing and it royally sucks

So much work is still done in Excel. It’s crazy how useful Excel is as a tool, and how horrible it is for doing a high quality analysis. Everybody works in different versions of a file, or they wait for somebody else to get out of one. You’re not sure which version is the right version. It’s hard to document what’s going on. It’s hard to save code in a re-usable way. I could probably come up with 10 more.

Jupyter notebook is slightly better because at least it can be checked into git and you can see the workflow 108.40.10.10 Data Analysis - Standardized working environment. Still not ideal, especially not for the simple calculations on structured data which are so easy in Excel.

Google spreadsheets are at least preferable to Excel because multiple people can work in the same file at the same time. There are also better collaboration tools and native cloud storage.