Rant of the night…

Good heavens. Microsoft Excel is profoundly worthless for trying to do any sort of statistical analysis other than the most painfully rudimentary.

And, for that matter, Excel is really profoundly worthless for most of its intended functions. As a basic spreadsheet cruncher, it’s semi-functional, but it produces painfully ugly graphs which, at least as of Excel 2003, are painfully cumbersome on manipulate in to graphs that don’t look downright awful.

So… for any sort of professional use, Excel really fails. Fails.

I guess its time to learn how to use a more sophisticated statistical analysis program, like Stata. Ug… though. Really? Why can’t there be a simple but full-featured spreadsheet application that not only can do simple spreadsheet tasks but also has a full-featured function set that can be used for slightly more sophisticated tasks?

For example: I have a list of ~5000 songs. In one column, I have the length of the song. In the next, I have the number of times each song has been played. I would like to be able to create a bar graph of weighted average, in 30 second intervals, each song has been played. But … I haven’t been able to figure it out, short of writing a bunch (40+) of functions by hand… ar!