Joris Dobbelsteen wrote:
Personally I've found nothing that will beat Excel for doing data analysis. Learn to use the pivot table and pivot charts. They are extremely powerful.
Funny, there is an on-going discussion about this on one of our internal mailing lists. Excel is perhaps okay for simple analysis, and drawing pretty pictures, but the statistics routines, necessary for any kind of detailed analysis, have historically had lots of problems. Here're a few explications of the many ways Excel seems to fall down:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jcryer/JSMTalk2001.pdf http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jsimonof/classes/1305/pdf/excelreg.pdf - John Burger
