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10 Reasons Excel Users Should Consider Learning Programming

10 Reasons Excel Users Should Consider Learning Programming

John High's photo
John High
·Oct 25, 2020·

6 min read

Microsoft Excel is in business for over 30 years, and many things have changed in these years. Microsoft Excel has various challengers like Google spreadsheets, so Excel improves and changes things to get better. Apart from that, there are millions of people who can use Excel easily and perform every single task on it. That's why you need to stay updated or learn skills to become different from the crowd. Microsoft Excel has included programming languages in their system for simplifying the tasks and work amazingly. Nowadays, Excel training also includes the learning of basic programming languages for simplifying things. Hence, Excel users should consider learning programming for many reasons. In this article, we will give you 10 reasons Excel users should consider learning programming and become an expert.

Your Work Can Become More Reproducible

Programming is a basic part of the data analysis, and it is the most helpful technique which is used for explaining everything. In other words, data analysis is a way to explain, confirm, and reproduce the data. However, data analysis is a little bit harder because there is no specific way to do it, but if you have a good knowledge of programming, then you can do data analysis easily.

Data analysis helps you to reproduce the results in a programming language such as R. If you want to re-run an analysis, then you need to press the Enter button because it is easy to add any comment in your code which can explain the process completely so that anyone can check your work without having any issue.

Easier to Automate Things

We can't deny that MS Excel has a GUI feature that means you have to click buttons instead of writing code. GUI offers great convenience, but sometimes big obstacles occur when a user tries to automate the process or use the same analysis repeatedly. Hence it is good to know a programming language to make automated work easier. In case you want to run a specific analysis on different data sets regularly, you need to open various files manually and re-enter the formulas or other information required for data analysis. So, you can do the same analysis process automatically in a programming language such as R.

Open Sourced Accessibility

MS Excel is a good platform for the users, but Microsoft owns it, so there can be many bugs. So, R is a great programming language that can improve any key function by making changes in the codes. You can easily examine R code for the computation you do in the analysis. Apart from it, Python is an amazing open-source, so if you learn to program, then you easily create packages for increasing the functionality. Both R and Python are well known and most used packages which were developed by third-party developers for building data analysis and easy visualization. However, Excel also has third-party add-ins, but it is not that powerful and easy to use. By learning a programming language, you can go for open sources instead of working on Excel.

Good Cross-platform Stability

Programming languages such as Python and R can run on any platform without having any issue. So, you can become a bit more confident that R scripts will work on Windows, Linux, and Mac devices, but it is not possible for Excel files.

Learn Machine Learning capabilities and Advanced Statistics

Programming languages like Python and R offer advanced statistical capabilities as compared to Excel because these languages allow you to create machine learning models. Programming languages can help you to improve the quality of the work with advanced techniques that can make your work easier. Hence, if you go for a programming language, you can understand advanced statistics and machine learning.

You Can Learn Advanced Data Visualization

Excel offers different features to create charts, but programming languages can offer you more because languages like R offers more advanced, state-of-the-art graphics through the lattice, shiny and ggplot2 packages. If you learn a programming language, you can create informative and attractive visualizations that are particularly important for business contexts. It becomes easier to create understandable data, then you can have good impacts.

Powerful Data Manipulation and Importing

Programming languages like R works well in typing and reading data. R packages are particularly designed for reading SPSS, SAS, XML, JSON, STATA, and Excel data files. You can scrape data through websites then execute SQL queries. Apart from it, different tasks such as subsetting, recoding data, and merging are easy in R. Hence, if you want to save lots of time in merging and cleaning datasets in Excel, then you can do it in R with various packages such as dplyr, plyr, and tidyr, etc.

You Can Fix Errors Easily

It is difficult to figure out when you made an error in Excel because there are many cells in the excel sheet, so it can become hard to find the specific error in the sheet. However, if you made an error in the programming language, you can easily find errors because you get the comments that explain every line of your code, so you can easily recheck every step for removing errors. This programming language also has a version control system to compare the current code with their previous iteration for obtaining the error easily. Still, you will not always be able to find and fix the error immediately, but it is easy to find errors a bit easier in programming languages than in Excel.

You Can Handle Lots Of Data

As we know, you can organize the projects in Excel spreadsheets, so you need to manage tons of data in every sheet. If you work on an Excel sheet, you know that managing huge amounts of data in spreadsheets is a little complex and slower. Hence programming language can manage and handle a huge amount of data easily, and there are no more chances of crashes than Excel.

Easy Data execution

If you are using programming languages like Python, then you can execute data easily. In Excel, you need to use different formulas and appropriate management for the required execution of data. However, programming language helps you to handle and execute data easily by removing errors easily.

Conclusion

In this article, we have provided complete information regarding the 10 reasons Excel users should consider learning programming. As we have previously discussed, you need to stay updated or learn skills to become different from the crowd. Microsoft Excel has included programming languages in their system for simplifying the tasks and work amazingly. This article will help you to understand every single reason so that you can go one step further to learn to program. So if you are going for Excel training, you must go for the programming languages to learn advanced techniques.