100% in agreement on Excel. Even when coding in Python I frequently save an intermediate file as xlsx to explore/debug, or even load into Tableau for viz.
The ability create a relational database in Excel with vlookups and hlookups, then capture it all into a macro is amazing.
I've really enjoyed using Excel as a Postgres frontend, with a real Postgres DB instance handling data, and then using the report functionality to dump to Word.
While a pro reporting engine and cutting out MS Office altogether would be a better longterm solution, it is hard to beat for quick & dirty results.
> The ability create a relational database in Excel with vlookups and hlookups,
Do yourself a favour and ditch vlookup and hlookup in favour of the recently introduced xlookup, which even obsoletes index/match !
I try to keep my exploratory joins out of Excel, but I admit that I often don't resist the immediacy of Excel's poor man's joins located right where I need them.
With just the tidyverse library (which includes dplyr), R can be very useful in a data analysis pipeline. It is great for data cleaning and aggregation, especially when a process needs to be done multiple times. It is much faster than excel/power query. I am an accountant in SaaS and spend a lot of my day waiting for excel/powerbi automations to refresh. Similar solutions in R/sql/python would be nearly instant. Also excel/powerbi automations are a bitch to troubleshoot, and are unnecessarily complex.
When following tidy principles, a framework designed by the tidyverse dev Hadley Wickham, R code can be very easy to interpret, similar to SQL. Additionally the R community has made libraries for everything, and I consider R a great general purpose language as well.
Note that different flavours of R have very different performance. 'Base R' is quite slow. But R + data.table is blinding fast. Power Query perforamnce is awful, even compared to base R. Some benchmarks of these plus other data wrangling software (including my own product) at:
I got to play around with Tableau when I was helping my wife in a collage programming course and though I don't have a current use to justify the significant cost, I must say that the tool was amazingly flexible and easy to use. I'd highly recommend it.
The ability create a relational database in Excel with vlookups and hlookups, then capture it all into a macro is amazing.
I've really enjoyed using Excel as a Postgres frontend, with a real Postgres DB instance handling data, and then using the report functionality to dump to Word.
While a pro reporting engine and cutting out MS Office altogether would be a better longterm solution, it is hard to beat for quick & dirty results.