For Excel users getting started with R, pain oftentimes finds its way into the learning process. Gordon Shotwell feels your pain and provides a primer to shifting to a different approach to your data.
At the beginning, when you are trying to accomplish simple things like balancing a budget or entering some data by hand, R is definitely harder to learn than Excel. However, as the task gets more complex, it becomes easier to accomplish in R than Excel, because the core structures of Excel are designed for relatively simple use cases and are not the best for more complex problems. This isn’t to say that you can’t solve a lot of complex problems with Excel, it’s just that the tool won’t make it easy for you.
Worth that little bit of extra effort in the beginning IMHO.
