this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Science Memes
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the reason to make plots programmatically is typically because you're already processing the data in python in ways that would have been too complicated if you'd do it in ~~excel~~ a table calculation program.
Dump it out as a CSV and import it to excel?
that is manual labor each time you run the script, while plotting in python re-makes the plot automatically.
You could just automate the generation of the excel sheet as well - it's really just pick your poison.
Having worked on a programs that automatically generate and process data from excel spreadsheets for a large company, I shuddered when you said that.
Oh my, no the other way round, spreadsheet loads the data and let excel handle it. I think you can probably even embed python at this point. I'm not seriously advocating for this approach either, to be clear.
This doesn’t help with reproducibility much. In fact it would make it worse as now you’re throwing windows into the mix needlessly as well as implicitly depending on excel at a point in time. Let’s not introduce more non determinism when it isn’t needed.