Look, I get the impulse, and might have agreed with you 10 years ago. At the end of the day, though, we have to work with non-computationally savvy people who (reasonably) want to look at their data sometimes. Not every lab tech or PI can or should learn Python/R/your favorite scripting language, and frameworks like Galaxy take time to set up and maintain, etc etc. Our job is to meet the users where they are and push the biology forward. Any time that I can push them onto a better path, I'll do that, but sometimes the right move is to tell them: "Yeah, go ahead and play with the data in excel, then tell me what you find", and I'll code something proper up afterwards to verify it, get solid stats and a make a pretty visualization.
rbanffy|2 years ago
The amount of learning required is minimal, even more when compared to the contortionist required to process data in Excel.