Dear all, I suggested to a friend living in Africa (Lomé) to use Sage instead of using Excel for semi-professional work.
Excel is great - I'm a big fan - but not for semi-professional work as you have to use multiple tables, sheets, not-that-easy-to-learn VBA et cetera. Sage origin is mathematics, but over time it has become a great tool for normal work too (especially rural areas). The new notebook (arriving with version 5.7?) will probably boost this. I listed the following arguments: - Excel has a free format approach, and an (small) error is easily made - Excel is basically two-dimensional; Sage endless - It is difficult to combine text (explanations) plus calculations; Sage is integrated - It is (more) difficult to reuse parts of an Excel sheet; in Sage you can define classes and therefore parts are immediately reusable - Downloading and saving data goes better in Sage; you can more safely use linkages to external databases (with up-to-date data) - In Excel you can use Sage... - Advanced use of Excel requires to learn VBA; in Sage all can be done via one (easy to learn) language Python - In Sage you can have as output formula; in Excel not. - Finally, Sage has access to a huge set of routines, packages, classes and functions. Excel is limited. In total: Excel is a great tool for a simple problem where you can swiftly get nice output. For semi-professional work, Sage wins on almost all aspects IMHO. Especially when things become more complicated, Sage saves you time... Link with a few arguments: http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Math_Software Links which Sage easily can tackle: https://controls.engin.umich.edu/wiki/index.php/ExcelModelingGeneral and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/excel-statistics-for-seo-and-data-analysis N.B.: The Excel example my friend was referring to: http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/excel_doc/0020/8354/LifeMIPricingModuleIFOAWGv097.xlsx Thanks in advance for your comments, additional links and experiences! Roland -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-support" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support?hl=en.
