I heard once a senior researcher criticize a doctoral student for having chosen a particular software tool to do his data analysis.

I was sitting on an International Energy Agency task meeting and the student (let’s call him Sam) was showing results from his analysis. Someone from the audience asked him what tool he had used for some of his intermediate results; when he replied awk, the senior researcher (let’s call him Max) went into a tirade against the use of anything else than Microsoft Excel when analyzing, saving and sending around data.

I would have had some respect for his opinion, if only he had not then given the main reason for his preference: “Everyone should use Excel, because it’s a program that secretaries know how to use.”

I firmly believe that in any craft, a good craftman will be defined by his choice and use of good tools. Excel, as a tool for scientific analysis, may in some restricted cases be doing a good job but suffers from several well-known deficiencies for me to use it on a daily basis.

But that is beside the point here. Max was not saying we should use Excel because it was good for the job; he said we should use it so that secretaries could open our files, display our results and include them in reports.

Has our profession grown so complacent that our work is now done by our support staff? What then is the work we, and we alone, as experts, are qualified to do? And whatever that work is, are we not free to evaluate and select the best tools for doing it, instead of allowing marketing pressures to guide our choices?

I hope this incident is an isolated one and that it does not reflect on our profession’s current best practices. Let us make sure it remains so.