I found the first one (Excel errors) very interesting, in particular,
because much of the coverage highlighted that a spreadsheet application is
the wrong tool and that researchers should ditch it in favor of R or
Python.
This makes sense.
However, it is rarely as easy as that much repeated sentence makes it
sound. There are reasons why scientists use spreadsheets, and they may be
ignored. Some ideas:
- Excel is well known. An unfamiliar tool may do even more damage.
- Import and Export are rather easy (preview) in in Excel or Calc. This
concerns usecases like cleaning data, sharing data, quickly eyeballing…
- Along the lines: Eyeballing! An underestimated topic said Tuckey, too,
quite a while ago! (Exploratory Statistics).
If you know the syntax, you can easily create diagrams in R. But a GUI is
easier and quicker to use and leads probably to fewer errors. Totally
absent from (most) statistical packages is conditional highlighting of
cells. All in all: Exploratory statistics are important but much undeserved
by (open source) software.
In my opinion, yes, let's ditch Spreadsheets! But only after we can support
the needs that is satisfies.
Jan
PS.: Some years ago, I did some minor qualitative research on use of
statistical programs. If there is interest, I dig it up again.
PPS.: For the eyeballing, Polestar is great (
https://github.com/vega/polestar ) and open source.
2016-08-28 21:02 GMT+02:00 Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com>om>:
Two articles of potential interest to medical and
Wikimedia researchers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/opinion/sunday/do-you-
believe-in-god-or-is-that-a-software-glitch.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/26/
an-alarming-number-of-scientific-papers-contain-excel-errors/
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/26/an-alarming-number-of-scientific-papers-contain-excel-errors/>
Pine
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/26/an-alarming-number-of-scientific-papers-contain-excel-errors/>
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Jan Dittrich
UX Design/ User Research
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