I can vouch for this. I thought spreadsheets where stupid and useless until I was forced to use them by my boss at the CS department here for grading. I didn't realize how easy having your computation and data being in the same place.
It makes it slow, but usually for these sorts of things you want your data to be available on the scale of days, not nanoseconds so it works out. We have a complicated grading sheet here that manages all of the students information all one the same sheet in a google drive. Grades, attendance, recitation attendance, and at the end of the class homework.
It also verifies the test answers against the correct ones to make sure we score exams correctly.
Excel is great for fixed sets of data that need simple map/reductions & input verification because that's all we really use it for. After that move to something like Python&Numpy/R/Julia/Matlab.
I used to work at an NLP company, and we made extensive use of Google Sheets for doing P/R/F calculations on the results of various tests. It was so useful.
The nice thing about Excel is that it does resemble a functional programming tool.
Would love to work with a replacement, even if it is some sort of Pandas/Python/Matplotlibb derivative - but it takes too long to set up things with these tools, and it seems not all operations are as trivial as I want them to be.
It makes it slow, but usually for these sorts of things you want your data to be available on the scale of days, not nanoseconds so it works out. We have a complicated grading sheet here that manages all of the students information all one the same sheet in a google drive. Grades, attendance, recitation attendance, and at the end of the class homework.
It also verifies the test answers against the correct ones to make sure we score exams correctly.
Excel is great for fixed sets of data that need simple map/reductions & input verification because that's all we really use it for. After that move to something like Python&Numpy/R/Julia/Matlab.