Slicing and Dicing Pizza Data with Julia and Gadfly

Advantages of using Julia over MS Excel for Data Analysis

Whether you are a scientist trying to understand the spread of COIVD19, or in a sales organization trying to figure out what your most successful products are, you likely work with large tables of data.

The goto method for beginners is to use a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel or Apple’s Numbers. These applications allow you to look at data in tables with named columns.

But if spreadsheet applications are so easy and quick to get started with, why would you care to do this with a programming language?

Data Cleanup

If data is not well structured and needs a lot of preparation and cleanup, then a Spreadsheet tool is not well suited for that. You would want a programming language. This is one of the things we will explore here.

Reproduction

By using a programming language you can easily reproduce analyses repeatedly and with very different datasets.

Since Excel’s user interface is point-and-click, you’ll need to rely on memory and repetition frequently. You cannot import code or scripts as you would with Julia, Python, R or another programming language.