MIT The World of spreadsheets and simple graphing

Spreadsheets

give a simple explanation

• As explained by Wikipedia
• Best application for data gathering/collection

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

The Good

• Spreadsheet's is a low entry point for an application framework, in the same way that WordPress is a website framework
  • You don't have to be a developer/programmer

The Bad

• Spreadsheets are used to make applications
  • You don't have to be a developer/programmer
  • Complex spreadsheets suffer from errors; become difficult to troubleshoot

The Ugly

• On the Numerical Accuracy of Spreadsheets

The World of Spreadsheets

• Gnumeric most powerful spreadsheet program
  • Single editor environment
  • Size Limit: Max rows: 16,777,216; Max Columns: 16,384; Max Cells: 274,877,906,944
  • Project doesn't provide Windows binaries; lag for latest version to be ported to Windows or Macintosh
• Libre Calc
  • Single editor environment
  • Size Limit: each sheet can have a maximum of 1,048,576 rows and a maximum of 1024 columns.
    • Each document has a size limit of 4 GB
• Google Sheets
  • Multi-editor environment
  • Size Limit Up to 2 million cells
• Microsoft Excel
  • Single editor environment
  • x32 bit vs. x64 bit
  • Size Limit: 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns
    • x32 bit: Each document limited to 2GB
    • x64 bit: Each document limited by system physical memory
• Microsoft Excel Online in Office 365
  • Multi-editor environment --Maximum of 5 concurrent editors
  • Size Limit: 250 MB

Tidy Data

by Hadley Wickham

1. Each variable forms a column,
2. Each observation forms a row,
3. Each table (or file) stores data about one class of experimental unit.