As Sir Francis Bacon said, “Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile^[1]; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.” And Windows stupid.

He should have added the last sentence if he were a Windows user in this age.

1. Avoid Using M$ Excel

A lot of R users often ask this question: “How to import MS Excel data into R?” Well, my suggestion is, avoid using M$ Excel if you are a statistician (or going to be a statistician) because you just cannot imagine how messy Excel data can be: some cells might be merged, some are colored, some texts are bold, several data tables can be put everywhere (e.g. cell(1,1) to (10,4), and (17,3) to (25,9)), stupid bar plots and pie charts are inserted in the sheets, silly statistical procedures that are wrong forever… If you don’t trust my words (yes, I’m a nobody), just read the examples here: Problems with Excel (collected by Prof Harrell).

I know there are reasons for you to continue using Excel. Your boss required you to do so; you don’t have time to learn more about various data formats; everybody is using Excel, and you don’t want to be so cool to use R; or if you finish your tasks too quickly and accurately, your boss will doubt whether you have really spent time on working, hence you will get less money paid (this is a REAL story for me – though I didn’t get less payment, I was indeed doubted when I used R); …