Anil Dash makes an interesting observation: many nerds, at some point in their lives, have made an Excel spreadsheet documenting some aspect of their lives. Dash concludes his post by asking readers to comment about the spreadsheets they’ve made. Truly entertaining stuff.
As for myself, I made an Excel spreadsheet of my daily weight a long time ago.
No, I was not fat or conscious of my weight. In fact, those that knew me at that time would have described me as a really skinny person. So why did I choose to document my weight? The answer is simple: boredom, curiosity, and the joy of statistics. I wanted to see if my weight dramatically changed on a day to day basis, depending on how much I ate. My results were inconclusive. Although I was disappointed, it had given me something to do…
On another note, the topic of spreadsheets and statistics reminds me of another thing: a weakness in open-source spreadsheet programs.
As an engineering student, I often have to perform statistical analysis on tons of raw data. In most cases, I get my raw data in CSV format. Using Microsoft Excel, I can import the CSV data, plot it, and perform a regression upon the data with a few clicks.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy with open-source spreadsheet programs. For example, take OpenOffice’s spreadsheet program, Calc. With Calc, I can import the CSV data and plot it with a regression curve, but I can’t get the equation of the regression curve to show up on the graph. I’m also unable to modify the appearance of the regression line.
It’s even worse with Gnumeric. The last time I tried, Gnumeric was only able to import the CSV data and plot it, but it was unable to plot a regression curve. After much Google-ing, I realized that the only way to plot a regression curve was to use Gnumeric’s statistics tools to calculate the regression coefficients and then manually plot the curve. Very annoying (especially when you want to add more data points; everything has to be done all over).
As a result of these issues, I’ve decided to stick with Excel for my data analysis. And yes, I know gnuplot is powerful and that I could do statistical wonders with Octave, but everything is so much easier with Excel.
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