There is no debugging tool and no testing frame to inspect whether all cells keep working as expected, for example after a change. One main issue that came out of many conversations with fellow data scientists: How can you find errors in Excel? Excel spreadsheets have no error control and are therefore error prone.Īccording to Meta Brown and Karen Hardie, “It's easy to inadvertently change a cell or make mistakes - I’ve seen people suddenly realise that a macro was wrong by one cell after using the process for a long time and then have to go back and figure out when that happened.” Thank you to everyone for contributing! 1. For this post I used answers provided by fellow data scientists in this thread on LinkedIn. You do not believe me? Then let’s start with the list of most common issues when working with an Excel spreadsheet to transform data. However, when the game becomes harder and requires larger amounts of data, Excel starts showing its limitations. Excel spreadsheets are a great tool to collect and transform small amounts of data. I know you are still using Excel sheets to transform and/or analyze your data! I know, because most of us still use them to some extent.