Question: I feel that a large bulk of work can be done in Excel sheets much faster. Hence wondering if there are more examples to show case the benefits of R over Excel.
It is true that Excel can also do many analyses and create visualization. I think “which is faster” really depends on what you need in your missions, and also how skilled you are in these tools though.
Here I would list some advantages of R over Excel from my point of view.
- R is available on all platforms including MS Windows, MacOS, and Linux, which makes it much easier to transfer data and analyzed results. On the other hand, Excel does the best only on MS Windows, not to mention it has compatibility issues between xls and xlsx.
- R handles “big data” like millions of rows or separated files from multiple resources much more efficiently than Excel does in terms of not only cleansing and organizing data, and also computation.
- R has plenty of tools for users to get data from the outside world directly. For example, one can crawl desired data from the Internet, or connect to a SQL server where the enterprise stores data, and then do following analyses within R sessions. Apparently Excel is not able to do this.
- The statistical results generated from R are much more credible than those from Excel since R language and its related packages are mostly designed by mathematicians and computer scientists. The credibility is critical especially if you are in academic fields.
That’s it for now. :)