I agree with Joseph's general stance here, and support
his recommendation strongly. However, while it
is clear that Excel is widespread, it is an exaggeration
to describe it as "ubiquitous", which when I last looked
had the meaning of occurring everywhere.
For all sorts of pretty obvious reasons your friends
and colleagues tend to use more or less the same kind
of computing environment as you do, but jumping from
that to assuming the same the whole (statistical) computing
world over is a jump too far.
I interact tenuously with groups like meteorologists, for
whom it seems that the only sane computing environment
is based on (1) flat ASCII data files with documentation
(2) Fortran programs transparent to all (3) some flavour of Unix
as OS. These scientists are not computing dinosaurs:
they write heavy-duty programs, and they know what they are doing.
Such experiences are salutary.
Because of Excel's popularity, it is ubiquitous and therefore convenient
for sharing data with colleagues. But Excel and similar spreadsheet
software really are intended for different purposes than use as a master
data repository. So, if your working environment permits, I recommend
to eschew Excel altogether for this purpose and keep master data sources
in some other manner.
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