I can imagine there being a market for a javascript/browser based data collection/spreadsheet tool. Completely portable, coupled with D3 you could get great graphing OOTB. And the data could well just be local.
..d Dr David Martin Lecturer in Bioinformatics College of Life Sciences University of Dundee ________________________________ From: Discuss <[email protected]> on behalf of Noam Ross <[email protected]> Sent: 27 August 2016 00:41 To: Gabriel A. Devenyi; Tiffany Timbers; [email protected] Subject: Re: [Discuss] Excel errors.... (Tiffany Timbers) I have recently tried using airtable.com<http://airtable.com> for a couple of projects. With it, you can create databases of linked tables, enter data in a spreadsheet-like or form mode with constrained data types (including image/file uploads), and access everything via CSV download or REST API (for which there is an R wrapper). It has a nice mobile app for field data entry if the form is not very complicated. I like it a lot, though it is new, its versioning system is sort of weird, and it is online-only. [https://static.airtable.com/images/splashimages/airtable_static_shot_simple.png]<http://airtable.com/> Airtable: Organize anything you can imagine<http://airtable.com/> airtable.com Airtable works like a spreadsheet but gives you the power of a database to organize anything. Sign up for free. On Fri, Aug 26, 2016, 6:19 PM Gabriel A. Devenyi <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: LibreOffice also has a database tool https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/base/ On Fri, Aug 26, 2016, 18:16 Tiffany Timbers <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Emily Jane asked a good question about what are the other options, aside from Excel, Libre Office, or text editors as a means for data entry. Forms, whose output can later be accessed as tabular data (e.g., CSV), are a solution I have used and liked. Proprietary database software, such as Filemaker Pro exists, and from my experience, is fairly user friendly. For open source options, I would use Google forms, or if you want an option that doesn’t have to be hosted on the web, you could try out Dean Attali’s shinyforms R package (works, but is still under development) [1]. I especially like forms for data entry, as you can more easily constrain how the data gets entered (predefined columns, drop-down menus with limited options, etc), compared to the free-for-all that exists with a spreadsheet. I’d love to hear other’s favourite tools and opinions on this topic. Cheers, Tiffany [1] https://github.com/daattali/shinyforms Tiffany Timbers [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2016 15:02:06 -0700 From: Emily Jane McTavish <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> To: Software Carpentry Discussion <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [Discuss] Excel errors.... Message-ID: <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Great points. I have a question about alternatives to excel for data input. Following this paper I have seen a lot of 'never use Excel' tweets, but that seems to be ignoring a key step in real world data analysis pipelines. If data is not coming straight off a machine, such as in ecological surveys, behavioral experiments, meta-analyses of gene names, etc., those data need to be put into a tabular, machine readable, format (e.g. CSV) somehow. I don't think anyone is recommending using a text editor to do that. Libre office calc and google sheets have many of the same autoformat issues as Excel. (although that may be fixed in new versions of libre office?) I think when people say 'don't use excel', they often mean 'for analysis', or 'for statistics'. But this paper demonstrates it is problematic for even simple data input. I know what to recommend as alternatives in the former cases, but not for the latter. Am I missing good alternative options here? Thanks, Emily Jane -- Emily Jane McTavish Assistant Professor School of Natural Sciences University of California, Merced 5200 N. Lake Rd, Merced CA 95343 [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> On 08/26/2016 02:42 PM, Steven Haddock wrote: I was going to post that article too, but I dug into it (read the paper), and it is really just conversion of gene names (like SEPT5) in supplementary files. That was reported long ago as affecting some quantifications, but I would call it analytical errors as we have seen in the past. A bit of a tempest in a teapot, perhaps. Ironic twist, the paper provides a supplementary file listing all the gene-name errors they found, posted as an Excel file. -Steve On Aug 26, 2016, at 14:26 , Maxime Boissonneault <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi everyone, Some interesting content to use about how to not do science correctly with a computer.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/26/an-alarming-number-of-scientific-papers-contain-excel-errors/ Maxime Boissonneault _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss ------------------------------ Subject: Digest Footer _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss ------------------------------ End of Discuss Digest, Vol 37, Issue 19 *************************************** _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss The University of Dundee is a registered Scottish Charity, No: SC015096
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