Why not use MS Excel?
Microsoft Excel (or, insert your favorite spreadsheet here) has become a powerful, mature application for number analysis. Spreadsheets are widely known and used, and they are visual in their analysis. However, spreadsheets are best suited for ad-hoc analysis rather than formal database-oriented analysis. For example, Excel is an excellent choice for tracking your investments or calculating a home mortgage schedule. It is less suitable for querying, stratifying, summarizing, joining, matching, trending–routines Picalo specializes in. Picalo is meant to work with data retrieved from large databases; Excel is meant to work primarily with small sets of numbers in free-form. While Excel can only handle about 65,000 records, Picalo can handle millions upon millions of records (limited only by available memory in your computer). A simple example illustrates this purpose (this example comes was first given in the sed and awk book published by O’Reilly). Most home owners don’t own expensive wo
