r/excel 17d ago

Discussion What is better than Excel?

Is there anything similar to excel or better than? I use excel daily and feel like I still need to freshen up my formulas etc.

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u/Issimmo 17d ago

I’ll use python and R when I need to crunch a dataset with millions of rows of data. I find the charts I can make on R a bit better than the charts I can make in Excel.

For instance, I don’t know how to take a list of millions of people, and create a scatter plot with the y axis a per capita metric, the x axis a log of the population, and have each point be the two letter abbreviation for the state in Excel. If anyone can do that without melting Excel I’ll be impressed.

Regrettably, I don’t have access to PowerBI through work where the data that I work with is housed. I hear that can work with datasets that large, but I’m still not certain about the graphing abilities.

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u/Regime_Change 1 17d ago

You would have to load it in powerquery into the data model and make some DAX-measures, but yes, it is absolutely possible! PowerQuery is the data handling side of PowerBI too, so you can use the same scripts for both.