Even though I usually prefer another tool, Excel is part of my life as an engineer. Jeff Davis writes about an unconventional way to comment Excel formulas. There is some interesting functionality discussed in this post that I didn’t know about (the N-function), but I still feel like except for simple, tabular data processing, Excel is not a transparent way to communicate with collaborators.
How many times have you tried to decode a spreadsheet created by someone else, clicked in a cell to see the underlying computation, inadvertently clicked on another cell outside the current focus, and overwritten part or all of an expression? You can undo, but that isn’t exactly a selling point, is it?
This is exactly why I prefer simple Python scripts. They are transparent, plain text, and it’s much harder to accidentally delete the flow of logic.
(by way of Ben Brooks)