One of the first things a traveller notices when going to Costa Rica is that almost every town or city is named after a Saint. Growing up in Costa Rica, I just assumed this was something true of all Latin American countries, a legacy of Spanish colonial times. California has San Jose, San Fransisco, etc. I thought it was like that from California to Argentina.
After some travelling in Latin America I realised this was simply not true.
This week I had an interesting conversation (as interesting as these conversations can get) about the use of spreadsheets in business. I am still a little bit surprised by how often they are used for things they are not really good for. Now, I don’t want to write about how there are better alternatives to spreadsheets. Instead, I’d like to illustrate how powerful non-spreadsheet tools are by describing a task I completed this week using R.