For April Fool’s day, I wanted to do something different, so I planned to pan the very tool that served me through undergrad: Excel97. As luck would have it, some other folks had the same idea and scooped me! So, I decided to go through my usual paces of learning a tool, but this time with Deep Excel (and still the MNIST model, of course)

Mostly, I malign spreadsheets because they’re the wrong tool for the data science and machine learning job. They are great for some tasks, like tabularizing and doing simple computations on data. And Excel gives you the ability to easily see your variables as you manipulate them. But I still remember how much I fought Excel trying to implement something like a “for loop”. This was before I knew Python or even MatLab; if only I’d known there was a better way.