Microsoft Excel is one of the more useful tools for data science. First and foremost, Excel is of the most widely used spreadsheet applications. With add-ins it can do almost any data science process, and Excel by itself has a lot of data analysis capabilities. With add-ins these capabilities can include things as complicated at the simplex method for linear optimization problems. It also offers filters, sorting, and formatting options.
In fact, for 2D data and matrices, it may be one of the most straightforward tools out there.
On the other hand, if you need to work with matrices in more than two dimensions, programming in Jupyter Notebook with Python my be the best option.
Excel for Data Science on Mac
Also, if you happen to have it on a Mac, your version of Excel may suffer from somewhat reduced capabilities. Up until Office 2016 for Mac, you could add a data entry form automatically without having to resort to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
Microsoft intentionally deleted this tremendous but often overlooked functionality. I have checked on half a dozen websites, including Microsoft itself, and they have no answer. The company only suggested that if enough people recommended that they keep a feature, they might decide to add it back in.
I understand that Office 2019, for Mac–the version that I have–is the red-headed stepchild of Microsoft’s software offering. So, any improvements are significantly slower to be adopted.
I suspect, many reductions in features that the company intends to bring to all of their software versions, may first be tried in the mac version, to gauge the response.
Excel 2019 VBA on Mac
Another reduction in features appears to be in VBA. I found that the text box is not even linkable to the data, but only a graphical object. So, if I wanted to create my a data entry form with VBA like the form that Excel almost instantly produced previously, I could not do so.
Such a form should be possible with the Javascript API if I can figure out how to run it a Mac.
VBA can only run on Macs that have it especially installed. On the other hand, any computer with a browser can run Javascript. This universal use can make the use of Javascript a more straightforward option for developers.Despite these drawbacks, Excel is still a powerful tool.
With programming, it may even be able to run artificial neural networks. Nevertheless, running neural networks would not be an easy feat, and could be accomplished much more quickly with Python and well-developed libraries like Google’s Tensorflow.
While Excel has many features that a data scientist will find useful, like all software packages, it has significant limitations.