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Why use R First up R is really fast spreadsheets that take over an hour to calculate in Excel usually due to things like vlookups and sum ifs can calculate in less than a second in R Related to speed Is capacity Where Excel can really only handle thousands of records R can handle millions Now Although technically Excel can handle a million rows of data If you've ever tried to add a calculated column to your dataset you'll very quickly find out that's not the case Now to understand this Let's say that you're adding a vlookup to your data And it had a million rows You enter your formula once but then you copy it down a million times That means the calculation has to calculate 1 million times If you then have to look up 5 columns that becomes 5 million calculations If you get fancy and try to automatically look up the column name using a match formula You've just doubled your calculations to 10 million calculations that need to run every time you accidently touch something in your spreadsheet which is why people often do copy paste special values In R All that is a single calculation Reduce risk make your work reproduceable and automated all at the same time Now in excel if you have a bunch of process notes which include things like copy and paste over this data set here add a new column insert this formula Fill the formula down Copy Paste Special Values and then update your formula ranges to make the whole thing work again You're introducing manual processes and risk to your work Now if you know a little bit of VBA you might think well I'm actually automating those processes instead The thing is typically the VBA code to automate these processes is around 10 times longer than it is in R Now to understand this R is designed to work directly with your data So if you need to add a calculated column that's around one line of code which basically specifies your formula in business logic in VBA you're effectively coding all the steps that you would have manually done in Excel This is why VBA takes so much longer to write and also takes much longer to run Risk is reduced in R because you can always get back to your original data set Every step of the process that you've got in place is part of your script Which means if you need to tweak or update and make a change to that logic you can very quickly make that change and run the entire script from your original data within seconds Visualizations and dashboard's The visualizations in R are much closer to a product like Tableau than they are excel The other benefit of producing the visualizations in R instead of something like Tableau is the licencing costs If you do all your fancy working in Tableau if you want to send that work to somebody you usually need to export it as a static format like a pdf or an image file If you want to send your work with all of its interactivity your users are going to need to have Tableau installed on their computer or you...