For me, it is worth the time I have spent (and will continue spending) to learn the R programming language. I work in the digital marketing space and while I do not believe it is necessary for everyone to learn R, I would recommend giving it a go if you are already interested.
Here are some of the pros and cons as I see them:
PROS
- It’s difficult to deal with very large data sets in Excel, so R is a language and environment where you can analyze large data sets in a relatively fast and powerful way
- There’s so much you can do — from connecting to APIs to statistical analysis to forecasting to word clouds to modeling to clustering to creating interesting visuals (I could go on)
- It’s not THAT difficult to learn and there is a tremendous community of people just like you and me who are contributing daily so that we can more or less copy and paste their work in order to apply it to our data
CONS
- It does take some time and dedication to learn what you need to know in R
- Excel is pretty great. It works well for most things like reporting and data analysis. It’s only when we are talking about using extremely large data sets or doing analysis outside of Excel’s capabilities where R is necessarily needed.
- Even if you figure out how to use R, you should still practice responsibility when it comes to forecasting, regression, etc. In other words, you really should learn the nuances of those disciplines as well in order to make sure your analysis is accurate.
Anything I am missing? Please feel free to leave your thoughts below and continue the conversation!