"Why do we use R rather than Excel?"


Binary code displayed on a screen.

I recently had cause to take a beginners course in R - a language I'm fairly familiar with. One of the other students had never used it before, so we were buddied up in order for me to show them the ropes. The first lesson of R is always the same. Read a CSV, manipulate […]

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Excel as a mapping tool


System dialogue saying opening Hospital Map XLSX.

About a million years ago, my wife's work sent her on a training course optimistically titled "How To Use Excel As A Database." We were both horrified. Excel is a perfectly good spreadsheet program - but it is categorically not a database! OK, it has rows and columns which sorta look like a database table. […]

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