5 December 2020
Excel is Evil - Why it has no place in research
Recording of talk given to the Dept. of Civil Engineering on 4 December 2020. Abstract To a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This talk will examine the characteristics of good scientific research, and will show how the use of spreadsheets is mostly incompatible. From both practical and philosophical stances, the argument will be made, using a wide range of startling case studies, and even research into the use of spreadsheets. While the insidiousness of spreadsheets mean that their use is unlikely to be completely eliminated in research, the goal of this talk is to at least prompt the question in the researcher’s mind: is there a more appropriate tool for this task? Bio Associate Professor Colin Caprani is a recovering award-winning developer of spreadsheet programs, and survivor of Excel Hell. For many years he felt no emotions wielding 10 levels of nested-if statements, spiced with indirects and address operators. But at the age of 42, he was forced to question the meaning of life after a vicious fight with a circular reference left him gasping for air. Since that day he has journeyed beyond row 1,048,576 and column XFD in search of a tool chain that encourages good scientific endeavour, and is compatible with modern scientific data analysis and publishing tasks. With the hope of preventing others from entering the caverns of Excel Hell he is spreading the message that there is more to life than spreadsheets. He also likes bridges. Resources - European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group http://www.eusprig.org/ - Martin Héroux & Joanna Diong: https://scientificallysound.org - Practical Business Python: https://pbpython.com/ - Best Practices for Scientific Computing https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.100174 - Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiolc - Talk Python To Me https://talkpython.fm/: Episodes #200, #252, #288 - Richard McElreath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwRdO9_GGhY - Stand-Up Maths: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUp8pkoeMss About Made in markdown using neovim (https://neovim.io/) with vim-pandoc (https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc) for pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) to convert to beamer slides. Presented using the wonderful pympress (https://github.com/Cimbali/pympress), through OBS (https://obsproject.com/) to Zoom using the Virtual Cam add-on (https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.949/).