On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 03:35:18PM -0700, Hsi-Kai (Kai) Yang wrote: > I think mixing Excel with VBA might be a better idea than mixing > Excel with R. … Then we can focus on "programming" and "problem > solving" and let the market do language comparative analysis.
Focusing on best-practices while working with student's existing tools sounds good to me, but I think it depends on how committed students are to their existing tools. If you've worked with something for twenty years, six hours of “hey, try this new tool” is going to be a tough sell ;). If someone came to me with that much sunk effort, I'd definitely try and point them towards an Excel+VBA workshop. However, I'd tell them that *I* wasn't qualified to teach that workshop (it's been about 10 years since I've used Excel, I'd just look silly telling them how to use it more efficiently). On the other hand, if they'd only been using Excel seriously for a few months, I'd recommend they give my tools a spin, and see how it worked for them. Cheers, Trevor -- This email may be signed or encrypted with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
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