8 ms·
3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae
- foxX 8y agoGod save us all! The finance people are becoming hackers (or whatever it is that finance people turn into once they go hackers)! Doomed.
- iamdave 8y agoor whatever it is that finance people turn into once they go hackers Payroll analysts
- tomrod 8y agoEconomists and data scientists. /waves
- iamdave 8y agoANECDOTE TIME! And actually a career related question: I'm an absolute nerd for sports stats, and have a friend that moved out of the finance/BI world in the hospitality sector and landed herself an impressive gig at ESPN-of all things, as a stats editor. It seems a relevant jaunt (because all I know of her profession is that she's an incredible mathematician) but the gap seems wide just from a perspective of domain knowledge; she openly states not caring at all for sports but the new job location puts her close to family. My question is: is Data Science so applied that one can make that kind of jump domains easily? This gal is one of the smartest people I know but the more I look into what it is you folks do, the more I am simultaneously intimidated yet interested in the field.
- tomrod 8y agoDomain knowledge is always useful. But can also introduce biases in one's analysis. For these types of professional roles you generally see specialized teams in three broad groups: data engineers, modelers/analysts, domain experts. Unicorns sometimes exist, but usually you see T-type experience with depth in one of the three.
- make3 8y agoquants eventually I guess
- billrobertson42 8y agoExcel w/o vba is the ultimate in functional programming.
- MaxBarraclough 8y agoI'd go with 'functional reactive masochism'. (I was surprised to find 0 results on Google for this term.)
- MrEldritch 8y agoYou jest, but people really do underestimate Excel. Yes, it sucks - but there is a reason that despite all its flaws, people keep trying to use it for things. (And no, that reason is not "they're too stupid to learn how to code") And I'm not sure the things that make Excel so crappy could really be fixed without sacrificing the things that make it such a flexible and useful tool. For instance, adding the ability to recurse or iterate sanely would remove the transparency of having every iteration of a computation clearly visualized cell-by-copy-pasted-cell.
- skriticos2 8y agoFor me it usually is "I would like to use some sensible tools, but corporate policy requires me to not do that (because they are not available) - so I have to (ab)use Excel/Office/VBA to get things done." It's not pretty, stable, efficient or really maintainable, but if you are forced to use a hammer.. ps. Excel does some things OK, like drawing pretty graphs on smallish datasets and visualize quick analysis with pivot tables. It just lacks a sensible scripting language and is generally very brittle once the data is getting nontrivial and more than one person is involved.
- MrEldritch 8y agoIt's also really quite good for automating numerical calculations; a sort of poor-man's-Matlab. Having every intermediate value in a multi-step computation both immediately visualized (and thus easily sanity-checked) and accessible as a variable, without having to keep track of names, is very powerful.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- slacka 8y agoThis reminds me of the 3D roller coaster simulator in Excel[1]. The difference here is this was made for readability in mind and even works without macros. [1] http://www.excelunusual.com/coaster/ http://www.excelunusual.com/coaster/
- globuous 8y agoI love how the suggested video at the end is "Introduction to pivot table" anyway, that's absolutely insane. The 3D engine seems to be laggy, on the video anyway, whereas this rollecoaster is pretty smooth !
- helpfulTroll 8y agoWell, the roller coaster sim is wireframes only, which is always much easier to compute. You’ll notice that the Doom clone has lighting and shaders, which, however primitive, add complexity to the render. It’s like the difference between text rendering versus decompressing JPEG images. Both can pile up enough data to exhibit lag, but you get more bang for your buck with the lighter data stream.
- bazooka2th 8y ago"Ok, we're definitively in hell" - C Bel, 2018. This is amazing, computation in Excel is becoming a solid meme. I've got to ask (and I hope this isn't non-PC or some such), but is English the author's first language? Where's he from? I wish that I had Excel so that I could try it out! :) More about the choice of random digits, sin x + cos x, would be nice to read.
- fibers 8y agothe author's email is yahoo.fr, so possibly french
- akx 8y agoProbably French. The free.fr email/www addresses and the French typography of having spaces before punctuation other than plain commas and full-stops (like this ..., or this :, or even this ?) give it away. :)
- rustcharm 8y agoI love Excel, and to show how it really is "better" notice nobody does these things in the FOSS spreadsheet wannabees...
- laumars 8y agoI'm not going to argue that one spreadsheet solution is "better" than another as that is really a question of personal preference. However it should be noted that people do actually do these sorts of demos in other programs as well. And not just FOSS solutions but ive seen people do fanciful stuff in Google Docs too.
- jlg23 8y ago> computation in Excel is becoming a solid meme Somebody said that a decade ago and the responses provided invaluable pointers into regions of PL-theory I would not have consider explored this well... Happy reading ;) [1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2710 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2710
- mesozoic 8y agoSomeone was reaaaallly really bored at work.
- swingline-747 8y agoLord help us when an Excel workbook becomes self-aware, replicates itself (outside of big4 auditors) and decides to KILL ALL HUMANS.
- wiz21c 8y agoA bit off topic, but Excel has many dangerous features. Is there a spreadsheet that is safe to use ? I just know about gnumeric and LO's calc, but I don't know how goo they are (I rarely use spreadsheets, most of the time to draw simple curves)
- Jonnax 8y agoCould you explain what the dangerous features are?
- adiusmus 8y agoDangerous is mostly the spaghetti business logic that results when excel spreadsheets get scaled up into systems. “Dangerous” in lighter ways: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM Nostalgia requires this... https://www.smore.com/clippy-js https://www.smore.com/clippy-js
- adiusmus 8y agoTo those that think spreadsheets can’t be dangerous: https://www.cnbc.com/id/100923538 https://www.cnbc.com/id/100923538 From that link: “Spreadsheet errors are costing businesses billions of pounds, according to a financial modeling company, which is calling for the introduction of industry-wide standards to reduce the risk of mistakes. F1F9 estimated that 88 percent of all spreadsheets have errors in them, while 50 percent of spreadsheets used by large companies have material defects. The company said the mistakes are not just costly in terms of time and money - but also lead to damaged reputations, lost jobs and disrupted careers.”
- mynewtb 8y agoMaybe they meant https://www.owasp.org/index.php/CSV_Injection https://www.owasp.org/index.php/CSV_Injection
- anticensor 8y agoWrong tool for duty. Arc might be more suitable.
- kaveh_h 8y agoSpreadsheets are pretty good for using when exploring the execution of an algorithm or computation graph. You can basically book keep every step of an execution. Efficiencies or lack of it is visible in the spreadsheet in a very concrete way. How many used cells are there, how many “steps” or rows is required to finish a computation and how many times are cells addressed clearly relates to time and space complexity of an algorithm.
- freeflight 8y agoThis feels like there's a joke, about Skyrim being ported to yet another platform, hidden in there. Context [0] [0] https://www.wired.com/2012/01/skyrim-calculator/ https://www.wired.com/2012/01/skyrim-calculator/
- songnameq 8y agoSide note but what is the music with the video? I liked it
- godelski 8y agoDance Macabre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM
- louthy 8y agoCamille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre I can't listen to it now without thinking about Mr Tourette [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mr+tourette https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mr+tourette
- chris_wot 8y agoI should open this in LibreOffice :-) Actually, I’ve been wondering how to create a comprehensive spreadsheet that tests all of Excel’s features. Kind of like an ACID3 for spreadsheets...
- slacka 8y agoYes it actually works quite well as long as you use the 1st, macro version. If you have LibreOffice installed, it takes less time to actually try it, than to post a comment.
- chris_wot 8y agoA bit snarky of you, given I didn't actually ask a question. Did you notice the bit where I mentioned an ACID3 style document? I'm in the commit logs of LibreOffice, incidentally.
- exabrial 8y agoAnyone created a RESTful framework for excel yet? Maybe a package management tool as well?
- chrsstrm 8y agoI wrote this [0] little quick and dirty snippet to enable a Google Sheet as a JSON data source via GET requests. Unfortunately Google App Scripts only accept GET and POST requests [1] so it wouldn't be semantically RESTful, but adding update and delete features in the script are trivial if you send an action param along with your POST. Using that data source snippet I wrote a 'static' CMS that pulls the JSON data from sheets in the workbook and then compiles and deploys a Jekyll site. I've been enthusiastically replacing WordPress sites with this wherever possible when clients only need data to change and don't require actual page editing (this system is perfect for restaurants - think menu changes). The "deploy" event is a little convoluted since I wanted to control what happens and when it happens, but it is all kicked off by submitting a Google Form which is attached to the Sheet. The script as-is returns one object per row but converting it to key/value responses is also pretty easy. If Office365 has an equivalent to Google App Scripts that can publish a script as a web app, I'd love to hear about it. [0] https://gist.github.com/chrsstrm/3fb0ce6820acecf62c5490d220d4ec5f https://gist.github.com/chrsstrm/3fb0ce6820acecf62c5490d220d... [1] https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/web https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/web
- thrower123 8y agoI'm surprised that Microsoft hasn't plugged the Roslyn .NET compiler into Excel as a first-class scripting environment yet. LinqPad in Excel would be miles better than VBA.
- kgrizzle 8y agoReminds me of a related project presented at SIGBOVIK demonstrating the Turing completeness of PowerPoint. It is also art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8
- oldandtired 8y agoExcel has been an interesting tool that has been abused by many different people for many different subject areas, from petro-engineers to asset management to budget forecasting to drug sales forecasting to activity planning and on and on and on. With a judicious use of vba, many of the tasks above, especially those related to forecasting, planning and reporting can be automated down from hours to just seconds. I have seen inordinate amount of hours wasted by people using excel to do all sorts of tasks that were repetitive to the max. A thinking programmer can work with such people to change those tasks from being hugely manual to simply automatic. Mind you, the vba that has been written by non-programmers is usually so bad that you don't want to even try to attempt to change or fix it. It is far better to just start from scratch. It is a tool that can be used in quite novel ways, but it does have its gotchas that will cause interesting failures for businesses that rely on it. But when it is the only tool you have, then you use it any way you can.
- sebazzz 8y agoWhat we have often seen in the business, is that Excel gives a flexibility and freedom that purpose-built tools often don't have. Want a extra field? Done. Field need to have a date larger then xx-xx-xxxx? Done. Even if the purpose-built tool has some kind of custom field system that accomodates these wishes, there always will be some feature the developers need to build. And that costs more turnaround time (and money) then doing it yourself.
- oldandtired 8y agoThat is certainly something that I have seen as well. The problem lies in validating the spreadsheets. Often, the amount of validation is minimal, whether that is the actual formulae used or the relationships that bare created or even the data that is used. I have seen some outstanding examples of well written spreadsheets but these tend to be the minority case. Depending on the organisation and the priority it puts on validation, the spreadsheets can range in quality from vry poor to mediocre. I have seen critical spreadsheets that were a disaster of coding. Many times, the IT costs for getting the IT developers to do the work for you is so far above what it costs for you to do it yourself or even to get a developer in specifically to work for you, outside of any controls that your IT group would exert. Plenty of the work I have done in the last 20 years was based on the end-user employing me to do the work taht was not cost effective or even allowed for by the company IT teams.
- kerng 8y agoDoes that also work in the online Excel app? That would be a neat abstaction layer for running crazy cool Excel apps/games in the browser. Lol