Flame wars are usually vituperative, often entertaining, and occasionally productive. Excel is good for accounts and for taking notes, sometimes for back-of-the-envelope calculations. It is not so suitable for statistics and its formulae can be incomprehensible when you try to understand what they mean later (what on earth might C2*B $4 once have meant?). R is great for statistics, but frustratingly linear (though Philippe Grosjean sees linearity as an advantage; people work in different ways). Having previously run scripts and being able to rerun them is only useful if you can remember why they were written that way in the first place, so that you can adjust them for different situations. As with all software, it is an advantage to know what you are doing. Familiarity with the software, whatever you use, helps.
Erich Neuwirth recommended pivot tables and they can be quite effective. I prefer the graphical alternative of interactive mosaic plots, as in iPlots. Both are needed. Erich's more important point is that you need to speak the language of the people you cooperate with and often that language includes Excel. Antony Unwin ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
