Program or use Excel? Why stop using spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are a popular tool for manipulating and calculating large amounts of data. However, a better option may be to use the programming language Julia.

In 2010, two respected Harvard University economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published two articles that were used around the world by politicians to support austerity plans.

Reinhardt and Rogoff argued that average real economic growth slows (down 0,1%) when a country's debt rises to more than 90% of gross domestic product (GDP). However, when using Microsoft Excel they made a simple mistake with serious consequences.

Economists did not select the entire row when averaging the growth figures - they omitted the data from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark. By adding these countries, the 0,1% decline turned into an average 0,2% increase in economic growth.

In general, spreadsheets have three problems:

• They do not allow the automatic and systematic validation of the data obtained.
• The way the information is presented makes it extremely difficult for third parties to discover errors.
• They encourage mechanical behaviors. Sometimes to save time formulas are copied and pasted to which modifications must be made, which they forget to do.

Maybe because the creation of a specific program forces you to pay more attention to what you do or, because they have a versatility than pre-programmed formulas that the spreadsheets do not provide, the truth is that more and more open source programming languages ​​are being used in economics.

Program or use Excel? Why Julia is better than Excel

The Julia programming language has officially been with us for two years. Its version 1.0 was published in August 2018, after a decade of development. Those twenty-four months were enough to make it one of the main tools for data analysis.

Julia is an open source, dynamic type programming language. Although it can be used for general programming, it was designed with the needs of scientific and numerical computing users in mind. Julia supports parallelism out of the box, offering three main levels of parallelism that are classified as Julia coroutines, multithreaded (currently experimental), and multicore or distributed processing.

Dynamic type languages ​​are those that allow modifications to be made while the program is running.

With parallelism we refer to a way of solving problems in computing that consists of subdividing large problems into several smaller ones and solving them in parallel.

Some advantages of Julia over Excel

• It is open source, so you don't have to pay expensive licenses to use it.
• Supports use with a version control system, which allows peer review of the work carried out.
• It is multiplatform; it is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, and Docker machines.
• No need to resort to another programming language. If the user needs to create new libraries, he can do it perfectly in Julia. In Excel it is necessary to resort to a macro language)
• Higher performance. Julia is optimized for faster calculations.

Of course there are other factors to consider. In many places the user cannot decide what to use. Even if any Windows computer supports programming with Julia, it is likely that you will have to share that data with other people who refuse to stop using Excel. However, Julia has libraries that allow you to import and export data from Excel.

Second is the learning curve. It is not the same to complete data in an assistant than to make a program. Not to mention that there is a lot more documentation on how to do something in Excel than there is in Julia.

Even today, colleges and universities continue to teach the use of Excel for business calculations and programming as an off-the-hook subject. With the use of languages ​​like Julia, not only would students be given a sense of integrity in what they are learning. They would also be better prepared for a world where data interpretation will be a critical skill.