"Sometimes Excel is what's available."

I worked for a Big Company that was cutting back and dropped their Oracle contracts, forcing all the DBAs to work in Access. Then they fired all the DBAs, forcing everyone to either try to figure out Access or switch to Excel. Guess which way they went.

In my last job at that company, my department had built an Excel spreadsheet (database) so large and full of calculations they had to request money to update our machines to 64-bit Windows and 16GB RAM just to run it.

we aren't in college to learn a specific skill so much as we are there to learn how to be taught.

I really like this idea, but prefer one small change: I think it's best to learn how to learn.

Learning how to be taught is part of that, and a large part. Understanding when to absorb information, rely on experts, and apply yourself until you improve is fundamental. You won't get any arguments from me there.

But being taught is only one facet of learning. Sometimes experts aren't really experts, or don't have the learner's best interests at heart, or omit things to protect their own interests or ideology.

Learning how to learn involves fostering fundamental curiosity, not being afraid to fail, asking all the questions even dumb ones or those with seemingly obvious answers. Finding out "why" something works instead of just "how". Fundamentally curious people who learn as a habit tend to also develop a scientific method-like approach to evaluating incoming information: "Ok, this is the information I'm presented with, let's assume the opposite, can I prove the null hypothesis?" This acts as a pretty good bullshit detector, or at the very least trains learners to be skeptical, to trust but verify, which is enormously important in the age of misinformation.

Being taught generally tapers off as someone gets older, or becomes an expert. Learning never needs to taper off, so long as your brain still works.

https://www.visidata.org/

Blows Excel out of the water, and it's not even close. And it's free, open source, and completely extensible (with Python, not some godforsaken excuse for a programming language).

I heard its good for databases...

My high school IT teacher said this outright. He was a FOSS guy, but he said employers will expect MS Office, so we're going to be learning that.

Funnily enough proprietary software is frowned upon in my professional domain. Im not mad though, the excel commands and whatnot still work in libre office spreadsheets.

Unrelatedly, doing statistics in a spreadsheet program sounds like absolute hell.

The point is that learning institutions should not prefer one commercial companies solutions vs another.

In fact, they should not use or be dependent on commercial companies at all.

Learning stuff and implementing what you learned should be available for all. Not just people with the money.

Companies know this so they give away their stuff for free to these schools knowing they will contain these people for life.

We need to break out of that extreme vendor lock-in.

I have coded VBA-based shadow-IT back in the day, but I seriously think this is something that needs to disappear in most firms that still have it. It is typically unmaintable automation of tasks at the department level that is super dependent on who is around and is still often in use after the programmers are long gone. I have seen a few old VBA tools in use that should be done with standard python/R or god forbid even JS Code in a decent documented repo.

I can never say this enough: the best tool is the tool that gets the job done

Hmm. What about CAD? The professor going to teach FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, F360, OnShape, etc?

I think requiring one tool is OK. You're there to learn the process in a way that you can migrate to what you want later. Teachers aren't paid enough as it is, so it should be made as easy as possible for them to manage the flow of work.

Hell, R was being used in colleges in 2000. Unfortunately, whether it was SPSS for the soft sciences or forcing stats work in Matlab for the engineers, professors always seemed bad at promoting the right tool for the job.

R is great. Your boss will give you excel.

This is only tangentially related to your story, but you reminded me of an old maths teacher who had a PhD in maths and once upon a time, had applied to work at an accounting firm. As part of the interview, he was told that he would have to sit a numeracy assessment. He responded "you do know I have a PhD in maths, right?". They sympathised with his point but told him that everyone had to sit the test, as a matter of course.

So my maths teacher goes and sits their silly test, and he scores so well that they accuse him of cheating! I can only assume that this debacle broke him in some way, because it wasn't long after this that he started teaching. It's a particular kind of weirdo who has a PhD in a subject and decides to teach teenagers. He was probably one of the best teachers I ever had (I wonder if I can find contact information for him to tell him that)

Have you got recommendations for learning how to use tex, R, or Python for those that haven't learnt how to programme?

It's the tool that she's learned to get the job done, the virtue of the tool does not matter to a master crafts~~man~~person, only their proficiency.

Not sure if the post is about GUI vs non-GUI. I read it as use R or pandas instead if SPSS.

I agree. I learned a lot of bioinformatics stuff from the ground up, because I was learning python at the time, and found it super useful as practice. Years later, I discovered https://rosalind.info/ and cursed the fact that I hadn't had access to that when I was learning.

R (and Python) are increasingly common, in my opinion. 14 years ago when I started university I learned SPSS but never used it, then I learned a lot of Stata which I use currently because it is the lingua franca at my institute, but prefer R for my own research.