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You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky (2015) [video]
- hkmurakami 10y agoThings in which people consistently overrate their skills: Super Smash Brothers, Scalable Backend Systems, Microsoft Excel.
- swampthing 10y agoMicrosoft Word
- scarmig 10y agoAre there things where people consistently underrate their skills?
- taneq 10y agoProcrastination.
- loeg 10y agoMath.
- edroche 10y agoRating things
- hkmurakami 10y agoCourage. /straight face
- xbryanx 10y agoEmpathy
- harry8 10y agosilly replies
- TorKlingberg 10y agoTo give a serious answer I read somewhere: unicycling. Very few people can actually ride one, so if you can ride a regular bicycle you are probably above average at unicycling.
- x1798DE 10y ago> Very few people can actually ride one, so if you can ride a regular bicycle you are probably above average at unicycling. I don't understand, are you saying that the average person can't ride a bicycle?
- nommm-nommm 10y agoUnicycling is seriously difficult! I failed at learning to ride one.
- mathattack 10y agoAdd Predicting Completion of Tasks and Driving.
- xutopia 10y ago80% of drivers think they're better than average.
- ourmandave 10y agoI'm a 23rd level VBA ninja-rockstar and epically hate myself.
- rezashirazian 10y agoI would add Photoshop to this list.
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoMemory management in C.
- Tomte 10y agoSSB? No. I've bought it because of everyone posting about how awesome it is and how their six year old sister is good at it and so on. I've read all kinds of tips and tricks guides. I still haven't found out how coming back from a fall off the platform works. I can hammer the key that the Nintendo leaflet and all the online guides say and nothing happens. Probably there is some other prerequisite to it. Or whatever.
- collyw 10y agoPersonally I don't want to get good at Excel. Its a horrible piece of software for the majority of the tasks it is used for. It would probably make a decent spreadsheet but I hardly ever see it used as that.
- misterdata 10y agoSex
- xiaoma 10y agoHumor is possibly the most egregiously self over-estimated skill.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoPaste values isn't almost always what I want. When copying formulas around I usually want the actual formulas which have been judiciously constructed with fixed row and column references where needed. The default paste is ideal for people doing actual calculation in Excel.
- EnFinlay 10y agoThat's half the skill!
- LukeShu 10y agoI've often wanted some references in the formula to shift when I paste, while having others be fixed. This can be accomplished by putting the fixed references as string argument to the INDIRECT function (ex `indirect("F7")`).
- gberger 10y agoYou can also use $F$7. Or if you do just F$7, only the column changes when pasting. Or $F7, only the row changes.
- DiabloD3 10y agoThis right here is maybe the most important thing anyone can learn in Excel. The second most important thing is how to use vlookup() for cross-sheet lookups, using a column in the other sheet as a foreign key.
- fu9ar 10y agoidk im pretty good at exporting to CSV.
- taneq 10y agoDunno why you're getting hammered, this is part of a good Excel workflow. Do what you can using the nice GUI, if you have bulk changes to make that are easier to script than find-and-replace then dump it to CSV, do the grunt work with some command line tools or a script, and re-import it.
- smallnamespace 10y agoWhile this is a fine workflow if you're more familiar with command line tools than Excel, bulk changes are usually easily doable in Excel with judicious use of cell formulas and copy-pasting of values. On a lark, I did a couple dozen Euler problems in Excel a couple years ago and found it was actually quicker and easier than doing it in a 'real' programming language; at least part of that is that loops and recursions are easy to visualize and debug in Excel because you can just break intermediate calculations into cells.
- rspeer 10y agoI have never seen anyone with an Excel workflow that involves exporting to CSV that does not immediately mojibake every non-ASCII character. Yeah, I know there's a well-hidden option to export in tab-separated UTF-16. Nobody uses it. So I guess you're fine if your data is just numbers, and if it's not labeled with words, names, or places.
- yen223 10y agoExcel also messes with CSV values that look like integers but aren't (think serial numbers or IDs), leading to many frustrating days of support.
- jhbadger 10y agoNot to mention the famous mangling of gene names that look like dates. Yes, I know scientists shouldn't be using Excel -- I agree. But I'm a computational biologist. Experimentalists know how to use exactly three programs 1) Microsoft Word 2) Microsoft Excel 3) Microsoft Powerpoint.
- TallGuyShort 10y agoI've been using Linux on the desktop for years and have never missed Microsoft Office (except for Project, a little bit). Now seeing R1C1 notation is making me want Excel... Any recommendations for FOSS spreadsheet software that supports R1C1 notation or that is generally better than LibreOffice Calc?
- jldugger 10y agoR1C1 isn't much different than normal calculation. You can already use $ for absolute row / column references.
- Tomte 10y agoThe point is that it is much more intuitively understandable what happens when you fill whole columns with that formula. In R1C1 notation it's obvious because the formula doesn't change. In normal notation the exact same thing happens under the hood, but the cell references you're seeing change.
- jldugger 10y agoMaybe, but named ranges make the whole thing somewhat moot. Your formulas should be human readable, ideally.
- Tuna-Fish 10y agohttp://ccm.net/faq/24592-libreoffice-calc-switch-to-excel-r1c1-formula-syntax http://ccm.net/faq/24592-libreoffice-calc-switch-to-excel-r1... I recently had to use a spreadsheet for a first time in a few years, and LO Calc seemed to be dramatically better than OOo Calc back when I last used it.
- riboflava 10y agohttp://www.gnumeric.org/ http://www.gnumeric.org/ is pretty good.
- ams6110 10y ago
- circa 10y agoYou instantly brought me back to the "You suck at photoshop" series. Enjoy and you're welcome! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M&list=ELME28FkTdZHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M&list=ELME28FkTdZ...
- gberger 10y agoWoah, the introduction is exactly the same
- gfody 10y agoAlong the same line - here is Scott Hanselman with some Word basics: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VIDEODoYouReallyKnowHowToUseMicrosoftWordThePowerOfTabsAndIndents.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VIDEODoYouReallyKnowHowToUseMi...
- IANAD 10y agoFirst, I learned a lot from this. But, here's some light criticism: 1. Joel saying "I didn't understand that question" and then moving on might have been succinct and practical, but it was just not a good reflection of him. 2. He acts like R1C1 mode is the only way handle relative references for the first 13 minutes. One of the first things I learned in Excel was $ to pin a reference to row or column in what he calls "baby mode". I think it's not babyish to use $ which is more succinct; you can edit the formula and see the calculated value right away. It seemed like he waited a long time to talk about that. 3. "Almost none of which you can do in Google spreadsheets" at 18:15. Sounds so pro-Microsoft, right? Yet, if you look, he's obviously using OS X, which is surprising to me, because MS Office has historically sucked on OS X compared to its Windows counterpart, and it's been incomplete: https://9to5mac.com/2016/01/21/windows-mac-ipad-microsoft-office-comparison/ https://9to5mac.com/2016/01/21/windows-mac-ipad-microsoft-of... even though, yes, it's a lot better than it used to be. Also, Google docs is free.
- cdolan92 10y agoAgreed on the R1C1 mode. Its very helpful to explain "this is what is actually going on behind the curtain", which is likely why he stresses it so much when speaking with developers. However, its really unnecessary in the 'real world'.
- seanc 10y agoThe big win in Google spreadsheets is that functions are nearly universally composable. Unlike Excel.
- graham1776 10y agoIs there a standardized excel knowledge test and or certification? As a senior analyst excel expertise is requisite, but is very hard to interview for...I had to make an excel test just to empirically rate our analyst candidates. I know there are the excel competitions (http://www.modeloff.com/ http://www.modeloff.com/) and great resources (http://www.chandoo.com/wp http://www.chandoo.com/wp), but no rating system for knowledge (even basic) of excel. Think the big investment banks would be interested in "testing" their analysts empirically before hiring them?
- soared 10y agoCan I take your test? I work in an entry level analyst role and am curious how I'd stack up.
- cdolan92 10y agoyou can take mine if you want, whats the safest way to share email addresses on this site so I don't get a million ZipRecuiter invites?
- cdolan92 10y agoeveryone employed to a relevant position at our company takes a pretty in depth excel assessment so we know what they need taught on Day 1. Named ranges/tables is always top of the list! edit: business schools usually make you take an excel course/exam your first year. Its always awful, using some absurdly priced flash-based webapp from 2003 that has such strict validation on answers/inputs, you often struggle just to input your answer because you solved it in a different manner than they expect. So, the IBs likely think you know Excel before getting in the door (which is not always the case).
- tominous 10y agoIn my line of work I often see tech vendors and consultants trying to plan infrastructure changes using Excel (or worse, tables in Word, but we won't go into that). The results are horrendous. They start with a manual inventory of the configuration in question, type it ad-hoc into a spreadsheet, then go through making manual changes, notes and additions until it feels good. There's lots of highlighting, different coloured text, etc like layers of sedimentation. Formulas are only used for sums and counts in an ad-hoc way. The end plan always contains mistakes and omissions that really hurt during deployment time. The correct way requires discipline: immutable input sheets (from machine-generated config dumps), a parameter sheet, output tables (with consistent usage of formulas with "$" notation to lock rows and columns), and cross checks with conditional highlighting. Unfortunately this is really hard for people without programming instincts/experience. Good job security I guess. But if you can do it, it's both faster and safer than the manual free-form method.
- vehementi 10y ago> They start with a manual inventory of the configuration in question, type it ad-hoc into a spreadsheet, then go through making manual changes, notes and additions until it feels good. There's lots of highlighting, different coloured text, etc like layers of sedimentation. Formulas are only used for sums and counts in an ad-hoc way. Oh man that hits home hard. And all the sums and counts are in random cells "beside" the tables right?
- pjmlp 10y agoWorse, try putting all the user stories and bug reports into Jira or similar tools only to have managers request to duplicate it and have email ping-pong about project status with Excel sheets as attachments. Or place those Excel sheets on Sharepoint.
- cm2187 10y agoIn my line of work I see an organisation regularly burning $50m in IT budget for developping a software that is completely flawed, horribly designed, not fit for purpose, though take years to develop and for that amount of efforts and money, could be much more efficiently done in Excel for 1/10000th of the cost! This week I am trying to extract data from a data cube that was created for reporting. Problem, the cube was designed so that only one node can be retrieved at a time, and so if I need a bulk retrieval, which I need, it needs to be queried a billion times, sinking the server, timing out the queries, taking hours. The IT team is trying to figure out a way to run an overnight job so that it sinks the server during quiet hours. Basically these guys designed a vault where you can only add data but never retrieve it. They should be fired. [edit] and before someone starts to think "yeah but this is big data", the underlying populated numbers in this cube would fit in a 5MB spreadsheet. I am not sure that the audience of hacker news realises how terrible is the reputation of IT and developers in large companies from the business side. They are seen as a world of hyper-bureaucratic, common sense-free, business sense-hostile, half-assed lemmings. Excel is not great but one has to have a hard look at the alternative.
- partycoder 10y agoFor many uses, I dropped Excel and replaced it with R. Doesn't hang with thousands/millions of rows.
- roel_v 10y agoOnce you know what to do, yes. But for scenario analysis and prototyping, anything with a code/run cycle is just painful. I've tried switching many times. Plus, Excel has a 'gui' (of sorts) build in. (Shiny is not a substitute for that - here too, shiny is fine for productizing once you know what you want to do, but not for quick one offs)
- em500 10y ago> for scenario analysis and prototyping, anything with a code/run cycle is just painful For scenario analysis and prototyping, you'd use RStudio as GUI and the command line for REPL. But personally, I find Jupyter notebooks with Pandas even better.
- roel_v 10y agoRStudio is not a gui, it's an ide. If you change a parameter somewhere you still have to re-run the code and hunt for whatever it is you're calibrating. In Excel, you just change values and you see immediately what has changed. In Excel, you can trivially show subsets (with a dropdown that show you all values in a range), or checkboxes for booleans, do conditional formatting to highlight special values (< 0, within ranges etc). All of which is a pita with R and with anything that has a code/view report cycle, basically.
- em500 10y agoThe table viewer in RStudio shows any changes in dataframes live as you change them in the REPL, so I don't really see your point.
- jackinmyshoes 10y agoThat was incredibly boring, why is this getting so many up-votes?
- whorleater 10y agoBecause it was moderately enjoyable, I learned quite a bit, and I assume other people did too? That table shit in excel? Blew my fucking mind.
- Graphon1 10y agoWhat's the table shit? vlookup() ? edit: oh, 37:00, I see.
- whorleater 10y agoThe actual tables function, it's about 2/3rds of the way through the video.
- branchless 10y agoInteresting, any recommended resources to take it up a level?
- robterrin 10y agoDoes anybody else feel that the vast majority of these things are either available in Google sheets or worth just doing in R? My last consulting project was on a VaR model built in VBA/SQL with a bunch of Excel sprinkled about and it was horrendous. Not Excel, VBA or SQL's fault, but it felt like a more thoughtful architect would have used better tools.
- msl09 10y agoYeah if excel was coughing with a few dozen tables I wonder what starts to happen when you process thousands or hundreds of thousands of values. The pivot table got me jealous though.
- vehementi 10y agoYou can do pivot tables in Google sheets
- blahi 10y agoIf you are a masochist .
- em500 10y agoBoth R (https://www.rforexcelusers.com/make-pivottable-in-r/ https://www.rforexcelusers.com/make-pivottable-in-r/) and Python (http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reshaping.html#pivot-tables http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reshaping.html#p...) can do pivot tables.
- greggyb 10y agoCheck Power Pivot if you just want an Excel interface to lots of data. I posted elsewhere in this thread about it, but the fun demo is to load up a dataset with a largest table of several hundred million rows. This is still quite snappy on a typical desktop machine.
- criddell 10y agoI went to Google Sheets and tried it and it was a pretty bad experience compared to what Joel shows in the video. Excel Online worked very well though.
- oli5679 10y agoExcel is super useful for the range of tasks where speed and transparency to business execs is more important than flexibility or maintenance. Its great to rattle something off in a couple of hours that you can email to your boss to tinker with It's absolute hell flicking through tabs trying to find a bug or trawling through stack overflow looking at grim VBA contortions which have one-liner equivalents in python.
- abricot 10y agoWith named ranges and named tables it is a hell of a lot easier to debug a sheet. (Not commenting on VBA)
- oli5679 10y agoThe problem is if enough people have been working on a sheet for long enough it becomes very difficult to replicate your work. this is particularly true for projects involving data processing and if they have poor version control practices.
- orbitingpluto 10y agoReal men use PowerShell to edit their Excel files. :j edit: I did do this once, but it didn't scale to larger files. Also, it was the only option on those Windows RT Surface tablets.
- ishtanbul 10y agotalking about the importance of variable input cells in minute 43 smh. working in finance this is not very impressive. also excel on a mac is inferior. I think only about 1% of excel users actually build models with it so the need for advanced skills in using the program just aren't necessary, such as for storing data and maybe making pivot tables...
- Gustomaximus 10y agoI can't agree with'always name a cell/range' and dont put numbers. This gets very confusing for a second person working on the workbook. Typically sheets get large and they get all these names building up over time. You end up with no idea with what someone is referring to. Also for 'paste special' I dint notice him mention Crt+Alt+V which is really shortcut vs using menu dropdown. Ctr+D was new to me. Thats a great one.
- Tomte 10y agoRe: seeing what it refers to: Do you know the trace to predecessor/successor feature in the Formula tab?
- Gustomaximus 10y agoYeah I'm familiar. It can be useful. I just find it easier to move around workbooks/sheets via sheet/cell reference, especially with multiple users. I used to do the naming thing but I found it less efficient.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI disagree with your disagreement. The principle of naming your cells/ranges is basically the exact same principle as "don't put magic numbers in code, use named constants".
- kilgor13 10y agoI mostly agree with you. Where the names are clear and obvious, naming is very helpful. However, when it is no longer obvious what the name refers to, there is no more benefit than the original cell reference. In fact it is even worse because it's not immediately apparent where the cell is now the reference isn't showing. I often run into this problem with very large spreadsheets where every cell is named. Our workplace has a strict "everything has to be named" in Excel and it really makes life much more difficult when working with extremely large calculations. Often I will want to know what a certain formula is doing. I will look at the formula. There are about 6 named cells that I have no idea what they refer to. I then have to use the drop down list (which includes about 500 names) to find the cell it refers to. Looking through this list is a lot slower than just reading the cell reference and looking at that cell. It's also quite easy to pick the wrong name in a list of 500, because there is likely to be a lot of similarly named cells.
- vba 10y agoJoel played a part in creating VBA for Excel (and likely the other Office clients) when he was a program manager at Microsoft in the early 90s (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html). I'm a developer on XL (at Microsoft), only half way through the video and have learnt a thing or two. Out of academic curiosity I sometimes ask old-timers if they ever worked with Joel. So far nobody recognizes his name, though there is next to none left in Excel who were XL in early 90s or before.
- yuhong 10y agoAs a side note, current versions of Excel still opens and even can save Excel 5.0 files by default but no longer ships with VBACV10.DLL that converts the VBA code. It was easy to find bugs in this code when I was fuzzing using HxD years ago.
- harry8 10y agoI'm sorry, you're probably a nice person, kind to animals and children but still I kind of, well... Excel, just say NO. Friends don't let friends use excel. Ever. Microsoft has no interest in fixing the bugs, the bugs are extremely costly. People regularly misallocate resources based on excel bugs. These screw ups happen at vast scale with hugs sums of money and worse. Here's a couple of links I didn't read closely. Any web search will find so very many it's silly. http://andrewgelman.com/2013/04/17/excel-bashing/ http://andrewgelman.com/2013/04/17/excel-bashing/ https://oit.utk.edu/research/documentation/Documents/ExcelStatProbs.pdf https://oit.utk.edu/research/documentation/Documents/ExcelSt... Gnumeric is better than excel.
- criddell 10y agoThat's a pretty good demonstration of some of the strengths of the ribbon interface. After watching this, I went to Google Docs to try to reproduce some of this and it felt very clunky. The first thing I realized I didn't have is a styles manager but I was able to install an add-on. For other parts (like creating tables) I was stuck. I wonder if a similar demo in Libre Office would be as impressive? Edit: I just tried Excel Online and it worked surprisingly well. Last time I tried it, Google Sheets felt way better but now I'm not so sure.
- Benjammer 10y agoThis video of Martin Shkreli using Excel [1] is what really made me realize I suck at Excel... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be&t=211 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be...
- agumonkey 10y agoMore about finger speed. The excel part isn't that impressive. It is impressive, just that Excel has a lot to offer in terms of formulas and matrix generations that I didn't see here. I have to show this to emacsers, they're gonna feel jealous a bit.
- Kiro 10y agoDoes everyone love this guy all of a sudden? I thought he was the most hated person in the world but I don't see a single bad comment about him here or in the YouTube comments. Quite on the contrary.
- harryf 10y agoPerhaps this helps http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/martin-shkreli-pharmaceuticals-ceo-interview http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/martin-shkreli-pharma... > The identity he creates, he says, is “an extremely weird form of sarcasm.”
- FLUX-YOU 10y agoNo, he has a following. I'd say most people have no idea he does lessons and streams video games on youtube.
- kchoudhu 10y agoI'm not a fan, but I do see and appreciate his point of view. His twitter is usually a gas too.
- Bartweiss 10y agoIt feels like people react to him the way they do Al Capone or Jordan Belfort. Obviously he's a jerk, it looks like he was probably eyeballs deep in securities fraud, but it's so audacious and disconnected from real life that it's like watching a scumbag in a movie. Probably we're all better off with the law coming down on him, but that doesn't preclude a day-to-day fascination.
- Globz 10y agoGreat video, it actually reminded me of CTRL+D! One of my many assignments at my job is to work with excel on a weekly basis exporting data dumps from MYSQL to excel ranging from 50k to 100k rows. At first it was a daunting task but once I learned how to build some solid templates then all I had to do was to dump the data set into a tab and let the formulas do the work, everything was already formatted so I could just start validating the data then email it to the sales team for further analysis. If you take the time to analyze your data sets and get to know how to handle each type of data then you can build some really solid template in a fairly short amount of time. I try to avoid using excel as much as possible but this damn thing is so deeply rooted into the "business analyst" world that you can't really escape it so this is why I told myself that I would be better off mastering it and build solid reporting templates instead of trying to change their mind about using alternative software. On a side note we started using WebFocus... that's another monster to tame...
- trymas 10y agoGood content, but could he please stop calling listener a dummy baby! I understand that he is presenting to his employees or to some company, but it's still disrespectable. If he is not my greatest buddy - don't call me a dummy baby.
- unixhero 10y agoYeah. He probably has a crowd that sucks at Excel because that goal seek stuff is not exactly a revolutionary Excel trick.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoThis guy was an ex PM for Excel at Microsoft. He even had Bill Gates review his spec: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
- rtpg 10y agoAs a person who doesn't get to use Excel much but wants to... is there such thing as "fun" Excel problem sets? Like Eurler Problems but for Excel? Some kinda meaty stuff rather than just "here's how you sum"
- infinite8s 10y agoHave you tried solving the Euler problems in Excel?
- cm2187 10y agoThere are lots of things he does that are still rookie mistakes! Like index/match without doing a strict match (microsoft: when are you going to add a shorter syntax for that??). Then he probably does that to make it visual but he should be using his mouse a lot less. F2, CTRL Enter on a range to apply the first formula without applying the formatting. Also two data tables one above the other. As one expands it will hit into the other. That's where excel lacks a feature that apple introduced in numbers: not using a unique grid but a table being its own grid, placed as a shape on a sheet. That solves lots of problems. Range names are not a good solution with experience. You get name clashes when merging spreadsheets, ambiguous duplicate names when duplicating tabs. For formula auditing F2 is your friend. And there are some third party add-ins to go to a reference within a formula and come back with keyboard shortcuts. And no demo of excel is complete without showing the power of array formulas. In particular SUM(Col1 * Col2 * (Filter1=Col3) * (ABS(Col4)<4)) to do a sophisticated conditional sumproduct.
- NamTaf 10y agoFYI your last point's equation is displaying wrongly - you need to put astericks either side of "Col2". HN parses text inside * as italics
- cm2187 10y agoThanks!
- willvarfar 10y ago> There are lots of things he does that are still rookie mistakes! A fun allegation, given Joel's Excel history :) Joel invented VBA: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html However, its quite likely he's not the world's best Excel poweruser :)
- cm2187 10y agoWell, that's the case for many developers, they are often not the user of their own software. The most spectacular exception is Visual Studio, written by developers for developers and one can tell. They re-write it from scratch regularly and add major features that really make sense, catering for both basic and very advanced users. Visual Studio is by far the best software that Microsoft makes. Office on the other hand is a software written by developers who are trying to imagine what a user does with it. And it shows. No major new feature since Excel 2007, and particularly very bad at certain scenarios that are really core usage of excel (linking a powerpoint deck to a spreadsheet, formula auditing (visual studio had "go to reference" forever), a VBA editor that hasn't changed since 1999, etc. If the dog doesn't die it means the food is good enough! [edit] VBA is a fantastic tool, but it's frozen in time. The worst is that Microsoft did attempt to fix it, it was called VSTA, and was basically a light version of visual studio embedded in office like the VBA editor, to be able to script office in .net. That would have been a great feature. And they shipped a version, if I remember the early version of visio had VSTA. But for some reason they killed it. Let's not change the dog's habits!
- mooneater 10y agoThe Goal Seek part was painful to watch. Why would rounding completely break that? And why would it end up at 9 billion?
- princeb 10y agolike he said the rounding made 975000 an impossible result. if you have rounding or some kind of non-continuous function the right feature to use is actually Solver (which is an included add in you have to enable in Excel options) which provides you with an fmin function (or several) as opposed to goal seek's fzero.
- lgomezma 10y agoI really suck at Excel
- Erwin 10y agoI had a chuckle at Joey calling @ "a bagel". I guess that's a New York thing. Over here we call them "elephant-trunk-A" (interestingly elephant symbols are quite common here in e.g. royal/government coats of arms and the "Order of the Elephant" being the highest chivalric order).
- duncanawoods 10y agoI liked it too... but its clearly either a Chelsea Bun or a Cinnamon Swirl :)
- avindroth 10y agoIs there Excel with vim bindings? Or anything with equivalent speed/modal editing? Or is the default Excel good enough to warrant relearning all the navigation hotkeys? And how is org-mode as an alternative?
- MagnumOpus 10y agoNo Excel with vim bindings or model editing. Excel has its own set of arcane keybindings that make using it really fast. If you are a heavy user, you can print out a reference sheet just like you did with vim when you started out. Org-mode is not an alternative, there is zero overlap in functionality between it and Excel.
- eriknstr 10y agoI think the most interesting thing in this video was the explanation of R1C1. I've always thought of the apparent automatic changing of references as almost magic. Now I know. For me, the most useful things he talked about was, in order; giving names to cells and columns, use of INDEX and MATCH, leaving space around tables, defining and using tables, pivot-tables, copying formatting with the paintbrush, goal-seek, and finally, control-semicolon to insert today's date. The various forms of paste special, I knew about from before, and I also knew about the dragging to fill in values stuff. All in all, a very good video with a lot of things I didn't know.
- greggyb 10y agoThis is not a judgment on you, but I've seen this echoed in a couple places in this thread and yours is a top-level comment that starts with it. I really grokked the concept illustrated with R1C1 notation within a day or two of being exposed to $-pinning with A1 notation, and the concept of a relative offset was my mental model in Excel for a long time before I even learned about R1C1. Yes, R1C1 notation is helpful because you literally type in an offset if you want it, but it seems pretty apparent in playing with Excel that the automatic reference rewriting is based on the relative offset of one cell compared to another. Seeing it rewrite a range as you drag a formula around seems to illustrate this concept very clearly. On the other hand, I came from a non-technical background and came up as an analyst in a sales department. The person I learned Excel from didn't know about pivot tables, so I didn't learn about pivot tables for some time. What I did learn was how to make my own (much less flexible) pivot tables by hand very quickly. I got to the point that I put off learning pivot tables better once I was introduced to them, because they were an inefficiency for me. I eventually learned better.
- eriknstr 10y agoI should probably have phrased what I said a bit differently. I have not had trouble understanding relative offset and how to use it. What I've always wondered about and finally got an answer to in this video is how the implementation works so that Excel is able to preserve the offsets even when pasting a cell in a random location into a spreadsheet :)
- s_chaudhary 10y agopandas anyone?
- erikb 10y agoHe is so entertaining despite only having taught me one or two minor things.
- pgt 10y agoThis is great. I just made a little internal slideshow for everyone at our company to get them to watch this. Link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d00Cetvp8_4fW7Y854tFcGtfEKTe0T5fUzXLksXTNIk/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=30000 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d00Cetvp8_4fW7Y854tF... Thanks, Joel!
- aeinstein1 10y agoBulle! ;-D
- rietta 10y agoThis is the first time in my computer science career that I've heard Excel (and spreadsheets in general) called a functional programming language! What an excellent, excellent point!
- pgt 10y agoThe lambda calculus is incredibly value-oriented. Consider that it is impossible to write a formula that injects another formula into a blank cell: all values flow from other values. To overcome this, you need to write a side-effecting Excel macro. This is why some people have integrated Python into Excel. It's a shame that the CLR (and more functional languages like Clojure) is not better integrated into Excel. Story time (MS rant): When Microsoft pulled Access (the best relational DB UI) to avoid competition with SQL Server, stopped adding features to IIS (still no wildcard domains!) and did not fix the botched Visual Studio deployment story (publish 10MB binaries for 1-line changes when you control the web server and the OS?), they ceded the "IDE" wars. Excel is sort of a business IDE, except sharing spreadsheets is a nightmare, which is what Google Sheets is really good at. I reluctantly started switching to other "IDEs" like IntelliJ (still worse than VS) and the Google Apps suite. However, SQL Server Management Studio is still the best SQL writing interface for me.
- hellofunk 10y agoI take offense at this. Mr. Spolsky, you do not know me! King Kong ain't got nothing on me! I excel at Excel!
- Hunnert 10y agoVery educative, I hope I don't forget all this until the next time I have to use Excel.
- GrumpyNl 10y agowow, i want a i-phone so i can play a 25 year old game on it.
- thomasthomas 10y agoi've worked for many banks. amazing how reliant the whole industry, therefore the world economy, relies on excel. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-12/how-rookie-excel-error-led-jpmorgan-misreport-its-var-years http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-12/how-rookie-excel-er...
- FabHK 10y agoThat is very true, and scary indeed, given how easy it is to make mistakes and how hard to find them in Excel.
- FabHK 10y agoJust to expand on that - many banks employ Excel basically as a frontend for their own analytics/database (using own functions with addins). A popular trick is to allow functions to return handles that stand in for objects. Using that, you can run not only Monte Carlo simulations and PDE solvers in a pricing sheet, but even run a whole trading book including risk in Excel. Of course, you can then also overwrite certain cells to pad your PnL, as a few Credit Suisse traders did in 2007/2008 to hide their losses in mortgage backed securities. They basically overwrote bond prices to some fictitious value, overstating the PnL of their position by $540m or more...
- dagw 10y agoAnd despite this, and despite the mind boggling amount of money at stake, no one seems to making moves to actually do something about it. It's like the finance industry has collectively decided that a few billion in losses each year is an acceptable price to pay to get to keep using Excel.
- FabHK 10y agoNot quite right, there is considerable pressure from auditors to switch from Excel to "systems".
- sten 10y agoI’m in the industry, everyone here uses spreadsheets for everything. They only have us working on other stuff now because we’re reaching memory limits and row limits for calculations. But primarily we have a few factors working in excels favor. 1. Inertia. 2. Difficulty in switching to a more advanced solution for non-technical folks. 3. Speed. If you can get a MVP up and running before another firm you have an advantage. Even if it’s in Excel and held together with spit and string.
- FabHK 10y agoDid he cover volatile functions? Did he cover F9 vs Shift-F9 vs Ctrl-Alt-F9?
- guyzmo 10y agowell, the main feature Excel really suck, and makes it almost impossible to use: Undo/Redo. Why the hell did they make undo/redo work across spreadsheets (eventually reopening closed spreadsheets)? And then, why is it impossible once you wrote some content, to copy it, undo writing it and paste it? The copy gets undoed! To me, that behaviour makes Excel unusable. And anyway, why would any decent SW engineer want to use Excel, which is like a 2 dimensional view of the world, whereas after a career designing software I can see the multiverse.
- ForFreedom 10y agoHe says,"I am not taking your questions because your questions are stupid and check the internet"
- youdontknowtho 10y agoThis is a great video. If you look at what they are doing with Excel services in the Microsoft Graph it will finally mean that you can use whatever platform and whatever language you want to generate the data.
- madengr 10y agoMany years ago there was a harmonic balance (circuit) simulator in Excel. Pretty crazy.
- swingbridge 10y agoBeing an Excel jockey was "cool" in the 90s and 00s but all the cool number crunching kids are much more likely to be using something like Jupyter Notebook, R or homebrew command like stuff these days.
- rietta 10y agoOne thing I find interesting is that on the Mac OS X Excel, Cmd+T is the toggle for the relative/absolute cell references, but in Google Sheets it's F4, just like Windows Excel.
- andythro77 10y agohi, am Anderson, i had my friend help me hack my ex's email, facebook, whatsapp,and his phone cause i suspected he was cheating. all he asked for was a his phone number. he's email is (cyberlord7714@gmail.com)..IF u need help tell him Anderson referred you to him and he'll help. Am sure his going to help you do it, good luck
- TimesOldRoman 10y agoWow I've read stuff by Joel but never watched; he comes across as a total prick.
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