Re: “Standard” software (was: Re: Early-2014 Macbook Air and Linux Mint Cinnamon)

On Sat, 27 Jun 2026 18:22:31 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> In fact, I prefer LibreOffice's spreadsheet to Excel ...

You’re not the only one. Actual researchers who have studied the issue
have come to the same conclusion
<https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008984>:
don’t use spreadsheets to try to do professional-quality data
analyses, but if you must use a spreadsheet, LibreOffice Calc is
preferable to Microsoft Excel.

In general, I absolutely love the recommendations that they make. The
first one is a biggie:

    Scripted analyses are preferred over spreadsheets. Gene name to
    date conversion is a bug specific to spreadsheets and doesn’t
    occur in scripted computer languages like Python or R. In
    addition, analyses conducted with Python and R notebooks (eg:
    Jupyter or Rmarkdown) capture computational methods and results in
    a stepwise fashion meaning these workflows can be more readily
    audited. These notebooks can therefore achieve a higher level of
    computational reproducibility than spreadsheets. Although this
    requires a big investment in learning a computer language, this
    investment pays off in the longer term.

Note that bit: “capture computational methods and results in a
stepwise fashion meaning these workflows can be more readily audited”.
Here I thought reproducibility was an absolutely non-negotiable
foundation stone of scientific research, yet it seems people have been
publishing results with nothing to back up their analyses other than
an Excel spreadsheet.