You would be surprised at the number of Excel plots in the literature.<p>Most astrophysicists use IDL or IRAF, I&#x27;ve never seen anyone use Matlab. The benefits are tons of functions specifically tailored for astro data analysis. Python is gathering momentum though, there are libraries like sunpy and astropy. Plenty of IDL fanatics are floored when you can show them just how easy it is to process data with the Numpy stack.<p>I&#x27;m _not_ an astrophysicist, but I work with a lot of them. I use Jupyter notebook daily. It&#x27;s the perfect balance between REPL python and standalone scripts. My typical workflow is to hack something together in a notebook, which lets you iterate very quickly, then once I&#x27;m happy I freeze the code into a module.