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The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
- jgamman 8y agoI hate Excel. I use it extensively every day. It is amazing.
- intended 8y agoHah, Excel is the true weapon of mass destruction. And of course, it feels great when you know how to wield it.
- neonate 8y agohttp://archive.is/HkCDe http://archive.is/HkCDe
- paulcole 8y agoWhy are these links accepted here? The paywall exists for a reason.
- dang 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20paywall https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- drb91 8y agoReadable, non-paywalled version: https://outline.com/epLGYZ https://outline.com/epLGYZ
- onychomys 8y agoI'm "the excel guy" for a lab of about 100 people, and it is indeed a challenge sometimes. Mostly I just yell at them and tell them to stop using excel sheets as makeshift databases. Then I yell at them some more and make them switch from formulas (which, being written in reverse Polish, are terrible to debug) over to macros. Then I yell at them for recording macros instead of writing them themselves. Then I just do it for them. It's not a ton of fun, but the money is good and the yelling is cathartic.
- da_chicken 8y agoMy most dreaded words with Excel are: > Can you help me with VLOOKUP? Followed shortly by: > I'm having trouble with a Pivot chart.
- kchoudhu 8y agoI don't get people who have trouble with Pivot tables. Literally drag and drop things until you get what you need.
- da_chicken 8y agoPeople who have trouble with pivot tables almost universally have not organized their data in a way that a pivot table can use. They have a vision in their head of how they want the chart to look, and they can't get it to fit because the interface doesn't allow it or their data isn't organized correctly.
- function_seven 8y agoIf you're doing a simple Pivot, sure. But here are the things I run into constantly. 1. When I group by days (i.e. group by 7 day chunks), why does Excel refuse to sort chronologically? 2. How do I make my Grand Total column add up all the subtotals when those subtotals are averages of the underlying records? (It will only do an overall average) 3. Why can't I collapse just this row without collapsing the counterpart rows inside other groups? 4. Why can't I make a chart of just this part of the Pivot Table (rather than the whole thing)? 5. Every time I refresh the PivotTable, new column headers are a different font size/alignment/wrap. I have to manually update the formatting each time. Why? (It won't let me set font formatting in the PivotTable Styles) 6. My PivotTable won't let me add a new item to an existing group. It instead adds a new level to the group hierarchy and the whole thing blows up. 7. Whenever I try to hide the last row in a certain PivotTable, I get an error message: "You cannot hide this selection." Why?? If I move the row somewhere else, it then lets me hide it.
- css 8y agoI do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort. Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software. A lot of people struggle to find answers specifically because of this lack of community around using Excel as a tool. I know I personally have floundered learning things that would have been simple to understand had there been someone to guide me, so I try to provide that same support to other people when they face the same obstacles. Yes, its fun to cringe at people's inexperience. It is also important to recognize we all started there.
- aclave1 8y agoHelping others is great and I think most people enjoy it. I think what most people don't like is when it impacts their own work. I've definitely had this issue in my own jobs.
- mynameisvlad 8y agoIt's less "not wanting to help people" and more "once people know you're 'the Excel person' they come to you for everything to do with Excel". It's very similar to being 'the computer person' in a family/group of friends and everyone coming to you with all their various tech support questions. At a certain point, it starts ruining your productivity since you get taken out of your regular job to do these one time help requests.
- css 8y agoThere is a difference between "doing other people's job" and "enabling them to learn on their own" in my experience. Explaining to someone why it is better to use INDEX MATCH in lieu of VLOOKUP will never ruin my productivity.
- wernercd 8y agoExplaining it to the same person for the 15th time though...
- agumonkey 8y agoBut I can fix your printer.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoPC Load Letter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER
- dragonshed 8y agoI suck at excel, but confession: i know how to make Installer programs and I don't tell anyone anything about them, EVER. I learned how to make MSIs packages and NSIS installers about 15 years ago and it didn't stop until I completely redacted the info and experience and changed jobs.
- imhoguy 8y agoKnow your pain, I know how to use grep/awk/sed/..., now I am "logs investigation" expert too often, ugh..
- npmaile 8y agoI feel like grep/awk/sed (actually just perl) should be taught in High School just due to how often I find myself using them in day to day life. Maybe not even the entire programs/languages, but just regular expressions.
- zaphar 8y agoI'm not sure which is worse. Being that awk/sed guy or being that Git guy.
- dmos62 8y agoWho uses "guys" anymore? Didn't stackoverflow replace that?
- Klathmon 8y agoSO often can take hours to weeks for a good answer, and that's assuming it doesn't just get closed as a dupe when the other one doesn't answer the question. A good "guy" (or girl!) is a phone call away and can often solve the problem in minutes.
- zachberger 8y agoTotally agree, that network of SMEs is a huge productivity multiplier
- miki123211 8y agoFor me, this article shows as paywalled. Paywalled articles should be banned, or at least some indication of a paywall should be included in the title, as people sometimes do with PDFs.
- dang 8y agoIf there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20paywall https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- quickthrower2 8y agoLooking at their other comments it seems the OP is blind. I could see why this would be especially annoying for a blind person if you only found out once you start reading. Not sure what the answer is but I thought it was worth mentioning.
- claar 8y agoSounds like a cool startup idea. A legion of VLOOKUP gurus manning a helpdesk, only $20 per screen-share!
- hef19898 8y agoAdd another ten for pivot tables.
- octo6 8y agoMentioned this above: pivots, vlookups any help: all the same cost for a 20 minute collab session
- octo6 8y agoMentioned this elsewhere but we created a startup that does exactly this [1]. We charge a lot less than $20 though! Happy to answer any questions [1] https://www.excelchat.co https://www.excelchat.co
- ac29 8y agoHow is the pricing sustainable at $20/hour or $30/month "unlimited"? Do you just employ overseas where labor is cheap? Or are you counting on people paying $20 for questions that only take a minute or two to answer?
- atr_gz 8y agoFrom their website, it says they pay experts from $2-$10 an hour.
- cde-v 8y agoI love being the excel guy at my office. I wish it was my only job.
- Kenji 8y agoWhat's even worse is when you're good at actual programming and they know.
- kehrlann 8y agoJoel Spolsky used to be a Program Manager for Excel. He has a great, 1h long video doing an Excel demo a few years ago - here, now YOU can be the Excel guru https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
- kelvin0 8y agoThere should be a gameified excel online course. You've got challenges which you must overcome by learning ever increasing advanced excel concepts. This would have people more 'engaged' at learning the concepts instead of trying to find the 'excel person' and dump their woes onto them. Excel is great product (I hate it) but so often misused and abused by technically challenged individuals.
- csours 8y agoHeck, this could be an excel workbook itself!
- tareqak 8y agoIs there a word for being good/talented at something you find undesirable?
- jimmcslim 8y agoCursed.
- tareqak 8y agoFor certain curses I suppose [0]. I wanted something more general because not having words for certain concepts can affect the perception of that thing e.g. make it less relatable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago"Tech Support"
- wyoung2 8y agoIf the task is both undesirable, difficult to find people to fill, and yet widely sought after and greatly needed, the word you're looking for is "lucrative." Example: plumbers. Excel wizards: quit your whining and go make bank.
- lordnacho 8y agoHaving used Excel for many years on the trading floor, I have to say it's awful. It does everything, badly. Which is why it's popular. People can get by without properly thinking things through, just jamming a few formulas on a spreadsheet, and patching the calculation when something comes up. You're never forced to think rigorously. You can use it as a crappy database. Or a crappy UI. Or a crappy place to call external DLLs from. It's the perfect tool for that guy who "has a great idea, but just needs it coded up". If a guy comes to you with an Excel question, he wants you to help him. Contrast this with a range of other technologies. If a guy comes to you with a question about c++, you tend to be helping each other. Same can be said for any number of things that non-techies would not think to ask. When was the last time someone asked you about Haskell or Erlang where you were treated merely as a means to someone else's end?
- bachmeier 8y ago> Having used Excel for many years on the trading floor, I have to say it's awful. But the interface is not awful - it's absolutely wonderful as a quick way to enter and share data and do a fast analysis. The part that's awful is when you do more than that. And once you've got the data into Excel, why go through the trouble of changing to something else just to do one additional thing, even if that additional thing is complex?
- lordnacho 8y agoAs technological scrap paper, I admit it can be useful. But as soon as your "fast analysis" is done, you need to be hardening whatever process it is you are creating. After all, that is what your analysis is about, right? Building some sort of repeatable, often auditable, transparent process.
- bachmeier 8y agoI'm certainly not arguing in favor of Excel. I only open spreadsheets when I have no other choice, but I understand why others use them.
- 8y ago
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoExcel would be fine if people didn't keep creating spreadsheets with it.
- pge 8y agoit’s even worse when they use it as a database...
- csours 8y agoAnd even worse when you make full featured applications with it... But the absolute worst is when people turn excel based apps into a grid on a webpage.
- wyoung2 8y agoWhat's the alternative? Microsoft leaves Access out of many of its Office license plans, so it's an extra cost add-on to most people, hence uninteresting. Filemaker is very nice, but even more costly in most cases. I've never used Base in LibreOffice, but I also don't see people sharing their Base files, from which I infer that it isn't very popular. (Could be my myopia, though.) Even if LibreOffice Base is gaining users much more rapidly than I think it is, they're missing the cloud component for offline and mobile users, which acts as a brake on adoption, given Office365 and Google Sheets pushing people to stick with spreadsheets when they want to share tabular data across sites and to mobile users. Collabora Online is moving LibreOffice into the cloud, but they haven't done anything with Base, as far as I can see. Apple's iWork web apps are very nice, and they have native clients on many of the platforms I care about, but there's no GUI database component at all. Without a free, cloud-capable, normal-person focused GUI/web database system, I don't see Excel-as-database going away.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoEasy peasy. Everybody should just use SQL Server Express via VBA and ODBC to store and retrieve data for their spreadsheets. More seriously, It would be nice if MS added a better way to manage data tables outside of sheets in Excel. They have the underlying technologies to do it. It just needs a low friction UI.
- samspenc 8y agoI've always wondered: these clunky Excel sheets are used at billion-dollar companies. Why don't they invest in building a sane web application (or similar) that can do all the validation and calculations in a much better looking interface that is suited for the job / application?
- dmannorreys 8y agoSome do, but the way of working can be very deeply rooted. I work with an in-house made DCIM whose primary competition is excel. Switching way of working and also migrating bad quality excel spreadsheets is hard, especially when the spreadsheets have diverged between sites.
- commandlinefan 8y ago> building a sane web application Every time I build a sane web application, the first feature I'm asked to add is: "can you add an 'export to excel' function?"
- froindt 8y ago>Why don't they invest in building a sane web application (or similar) that can do all the validation and calculations in a much better looking interface that is suited for the job / application? Inertia, training cost, and risk of failure. 1 year ago I made a very extensive spreadsheet to analyze planned production and forecasts at a factory. It took about 6 months after the logic was thoroughly vetted to transition it into an IT supported auto-update to a database as the primary project for 1 IT analyst. No pretty front end to modify production parameters or anything like that. If we transitioned any earlier, it would have been the typical "our user keeps changing the scope and logic of the application we're trying to build for them". This was probably the best way things could have reasonably gone. No long term spreadsheet usage, spreadsheet had good documentation, used tables, names ranges to make the formulas easy to read, etc. Excel can do a decent job at figuring out the required logic. But it is used as an everything tool where task specific applications would be best. And people only know enough to be dangerous
- mr_toad 8y agoThe best reason is probably that the person creating the system doesn’t know at the outset exactly how, or even if, what they are building will work. Excel often gets used for prototyping new models. A new model for allocating overheads - try it in Excel and see what the effects will be. A new forecasting method - get a ballpark estimate of the impact on the bottom line in Excel. Once the model is in Excel it isn’t cheap or easy to get it out, so it often just stays that way, accumulating technical debt.
- octo6 8y agoShameless plug - we actually founded a service [1] that provides Excel experts on-demand, within 30 to 60 seconds. So if you're tired of being the "Excel expert" at work feel free to pass them on to us. Also happy to answer any questions. Tidbit: Most popular questions tend to be formulas, vlookups, conditional formatting, pivots. [1] https://www.excelchat.co https://www.excelchat.co
- kryogen1c 8y agoOh my god what an idea. Ill take a serious look. Theoretically, this could be a huge boon for all the small businesses I work with. I spreadsheet on my own for fun to solve physics problems and do video games calculations. I will take my free trial for sure.
- octo6 8y agocool, glad you like the idea. lmk how your session goes!
- severine 8y agoIs it english only?
- octo6 8y agoyes, currently all English. But the expert opens a shared sheet that you work together in, so you can collaborate in Google sheet or Excel. Hope that makes up for English only
- kalalala024 8y agoApple puts the user in charge how an mobile OS should look like or should behave and this is the biggest differentiating factor between iOS vs other platforms. The user in charge? Interesting. I have both an iPhone and an Android handset. It has been this way for years (work is the reason). I believe I will never be able to fully accept the iPhone. It seems like it wants to make a lot of (often stupid) decisions for me. https://www.reddit.com/r/ufc229livefights/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ufc229livefights/ When I want to connect my phone via cable to transfer some files it is always a hassle. I can't sideload apps that somehow goes against Apple's will. As an example, NewPipe is a blessing on Android if you enjoy YouTube (not available via Google Play). The fact that full phone backups are done via an video/audio player (iTunes) makes zero sense. I feel trapped and irritated when I use the iPhone. When I use the Android phone I feel like the OS trusts me to make my own decisions. I should perhaps mention that I chose to run Android without a Google account or Gapps. I've gone from Cyanogen via Copperhead to Lineage. Ironically, Android without Google is the best phone experience I've ever had.
- arrty88 8y agoEveryone should be using airtable now
- Dave_TRS 8y agoI agree it's incredible! Everyone owes it to themselves to try it for 5 min if not yet familiar. Its as easy and intuitive as excel (if not more) and has many of the benefits of a database plus a great interface, document attachments, integrated maps, etc.
- cpeterso 8y agoAirtable can be mistaken for "just a pretty spreadsheet" at first glance, but it has nice column constraints, user access control, and (my favorite part) Trello-like comment history for each row.
- ilaksh 8y agowhat's airtable
- sjy 8y agoIt would be nice if there was a local alternative though. You can’t always put all your data in a cloud service which doesn’t work offline or interact with the local file system.
- guelo 8y agoPeople say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Where are the easy adhoc reports? Where are the forms? I guess if you're on Windows you can use Microsoft Access, but that's the only accesible tool I know of that doesn't require a team of programmers or an enterprise license for some Oracle/SAP type monstrosity.
- Kagerjay 8y agoJust use airtable, its like microsoft access but easier to use and pickup. Or just use google forms + google spreadsheets
- schwinn 8y agoActually, I struggled making the transition to airtable from excel. Do you have recommendations for training? I do want to learn it, maybe no to a mastery level, but proficient
- Kagerjay 8y agoI actually didn't find any specific "airtable" training, I just used the docs and forums. I had prior knowledge working with microsoft access and database design, so airtable was an easy transition. If I were to learn it without any prior experience, I would just look through every template they have. See which industries I'm most familiar with. And look at how those databases are organized. https://airtable.com/templates https://airtable.com/templates They have a really good 12 minute overview though, hitting every major concept though. https://vimeo.com/165624533 https://vimeo.com/165624533 I would also learn a little bit about relational database design. This 5 minute video is a good starting point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvrpuBAMddw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvrpuBAMddw I like using databaseanswers.org as a reference resource. This is a very nice 5 minute introduction to designing a database. http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/5_minute_tutorials/feeding_time_at_the_zoo.htm http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/5_minute_tutorial... Basically, if you come from an excel background, it would help if you knew a little bit about database design, and relational databases. Its not necessary, but Airtable is practically excel + microsoft-access. Start with a template, and play around with it. I would get familiar with this page in particular though. Formula and lookups are something you'll use often in any airtable base. https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/202576519-Guide-to-formula-lookup-count-and-rollup-fields https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/202576519-Gui.... This was perhaps the least obvious concept for me to pickup naturally. If you need any help though feel free to reach out to me I have contact information on my username
- OskarS 8y agoYou know who's awesome at Excel? Martin Shkreli. You know, the Wall Street asshole who's in jail now? A while back, someone told me "hey, dude, there are these videos on YouTube where Martin Shkreli uses Excel, and they're fucking magic. It's like the first time you watched someone who's really good at Vim. " It's true: [0]. Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag, he's fucking awesome at using Excel. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw
- incadenza 8y agoTo think he could have chalked up the price hikes to an Excel formatting error! I think we all would have related. Real missed opportunity.
- toyg 8y agoBut maybe he’s so good, nobody would have believed he made an error. Or maybe he did make an error, but didn’t want to admit it to avoid damaging his “l33t excel skillz” rep. That would be the stuff of legend.
- joering2 8y agoSince we are in douchebags ratings, it is fair to point Heather Bresch which is much bigger heartless bitch than Shkreli. If there were justice in USA, she would be behind bars! https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/09/21/mylan-ceo-heather-bresch-epipen-congress-house-testimony/90773250/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/09/21/mylan-ceo-he...
- alecco 8y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw#t=1h1m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw#t=1h1m He is fast typing but I've seen spreadsheet jockeys do a lot more work much faster. They know all the shortcuts. They know all the obscure functions.
- cm2187 8y agoAnd looking at the video, I'd say that's a slightly above average level of excel skill compared to what you can find sometimes on trading floors.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoFirst rule of development, client needs a custom report, export to Excel or ask them their Excel files
- weliketocode 8y agoThis article seems like it was written 10 years ago. BI, Technical Account Managers, Sales Engineers, and Finance People should all have a decent excel grasp at minimum. Is it that common for there to be desperate needs for minimal competence in organizations?
- barry-cotter 8y agoYes. The world is full of overwhelming incompetence. After a brief honeymoon period where you're learning almost every job turns into "I'm surrounded by idiots" unless you're the idiot. The exceptions are very effective organisations, and when they're businesses, very profitable or fast growing. Lots and lots of people reach the level of competence sufficient to not get fired and basically stay there.
- guiomie 8y agoThere is a paywall sadly. I myself have stopped using excel for the last 3 years. My company runs on GSuite, and I love how there can be one source of truth updated in real-time for 1 document. For the better and the worst, some of our internal processes are Google sheets centric now. I believe the next generation of business will be "fighting" google sheets intrusion in operation processes. Some processes are fine in a Google sheets, but not all of them.
- hv42 8y agohttps://outline.com/epLGYZ https://outline.com/epLGYZ
- suff 8y agoThe truth is that Excel is an ODBC compatible data source, and can be scripted to run SQL queries against itself... but you didn't hear that from me.
- forkLding 8y agoHappened to me before as I used to be able to do VBA and use Excel's data analysis toolkit and then a lot of my assignments as a intern was to literally help department managers with their Excel spreadsheets even though that wasn't what I was hired for.
- lozaning 8y agoIf we're sharing awesome excel videos, You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky has to be among the best I've ever seen. Joel, being on the team that made excel, has an incredible amount of excel knowledge. The video is meant to be in the same vein as the You Suck at Photoshop videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
- lucidguppy 8y agoYou get a perceived performance boost when you get a keyboard with a sonorous click.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jjeaff 8y agoYa, I never get comments anymore on how fast I type now that I switched to a chicklet style keyboard from my mechanical. You can still hear the clicking, but it doesn't sound nearly as fast.
- riazrizvi 8y agosweats, "what don't I know?", watches hour long video (v. quickly), wipes brow "phew - it's just basic".
- michalxnet 8y agoIf you like to get better in Excel learn some nifty tricks with tables then watch You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c Replace vlookup() with index() + match() combination. https://chandoo.org/wp/vlookup-match-and-offset-explained-in-plain-english-spreadcheats/ https://chandoo.org/wp/vlookup-match-and-offset-explained-in...
- maybecorrect 8y agoI have a joke I tell about Excel: Excel is amazing, because it's the wrong tool for everything! Which is really impressive, since there aren't many tools you can do everything with! I realize it's not a very funny joke, but I do think it's true.
- seizethecheese 8y agoThis is great, thanks for sharing.
- codencart 8y agoVisit codencart.com for programming themed shirts!
- debaserab2 8y agoI've always said that if I ever do one thing with my child, I'll make sure they understand how to use VLOOKUP in excel. If I do that, I'm pretty sure they'll be set for life. Every office I've worked in those that can perform VLOOKUP's correctly become the Wizards of the office.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago> Every office I've worked in those that can perform VLOOKUP's correctly become the Wizards of the office Some of them don't use the power wisely, though, and create poor clunky databases spread over dozens of sheets. It would be nice if MS added more Access like data integration as an adjunct to spreadsheets. The current ODBC functionality is clunky at best and doesn't work well for shared documents.
- makecheck 8y agoThe widespread use of the Excel grid layout may explain why people seem to have a high tolerance for improperly-sized UIs. Personally it drives me crazy to see things truncated all over the place, peppered with useless empty cells, for no reason other than “somebody shoehorned this sparse data into a grid and never looked back”. It’s like people just don’t see how much time they’re wasting constantly doing a mental reconstruction of their poorly-described data because they can’t SEE most of it. We really need better tools.
- DailyHN 8y agoGoogle Sheets > Excel
- clairity 8y agothe best i've seen is a woman who did corporate financial planning and analysis. i could ask a question and she would have a pivot table spit out the answer as i finished the question. i consider myself a good* (but not great) excel user, but she was amazing! * having done complex financial modeling incorporating monte carlo simulation for predictive what-if analysis
- paulryanrogers 8y agoHow did she handle the precision problem?
- clairity 8y agonot sure which precision problem you're referring to, but in general, we understood that excel's precision issues are probably overwhelmed by the imprecision of the model. but i'd be more weary of using excel if we were doing scientific research (R or matlab would be better there).
- intended 8y agoModeling is very different from pivots. It’s practically an entirely different skill set. But man are they fun to use once you get the hang of them. Hmmm. This helps me realize one of the many things excel-should-be-replaced by code proponents miss. There will be far more excel masters over time, than language masters. Simply because excel remains stable, and is not prone to flavor of the year issues.
- julienfr112 8y agoI didn't now you could do monte carlo (and what-if) with excel. Can you tell us more about that ?
- Jabbermonkey 8y agohttps://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-monte-carlo-simulation-in-excel-64c0ba99-752a-4fa8-bbd3-4450d8db16f1 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-mon... https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-what-if-analysis-22bffa5f-e891-4acc-bf7a-e4645c446fb4 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-wha...
- dhairya 8y agoShameless plug, I'm an AI researcher at Talla (talla.com). This is a problem space we're fascinated by. We want to make it easier to allow users to ask natural language questions about data in Excel, Sheets, pdf tables or really any tabular source. What kind of questions and queries are difficult for you to do in Excel and require an "excel wizard"? Also my email is my profile, would love to hear about challenges folks face.
- kregasaurusrex 8y agoMeanwhile, my current job uses VBA scripts written in the 90s instead of properly training its employees on how to create multi-sheet formulas.
- tssva 8y agoForget Excel. Never ever ever let anyone find out you are good with Microsoft Project.
- allan_golds 8y agoPAYWALL
- srazzaque 8y agoThe true story of almost every finance/tech project: Trader: "I've got a problem with my spreadsheet." Tech: "You shouldn't be using Excel for that. Let's make this better." Trader: "OK - how?" Tech: (Proposes solution - involving databases, redundancy, risk management, GUI, streaming prices, booking, etc.) Trader: "Great! So I guess at that point there (points at whiteboard), we can import it back into Excel?" Tech: "Sure." (facepalm). This said - Python is fast becoming the new crack/Excel for front-office. Thank God for that.
- valgaze 8y ago"Excel Everest": https://exceleverest.com/ https://exceleverest.com/
- awl130 8y agoI'm an expert at Excel but I switched to Google Sheets years ago and haven't looked back. Version control is probably the biggest improvement; but also ability to insert SQL queries, `arrayformula`, the list goes on.
- franzwong 8y agoI also have a non-IT friend who worked in a local bank. He mainly produced different kinds of report for analysis. His main tool was Excel and he was very good at it. He told me the reason why he became good at it is, in enterprise, IT resource is grouped into a single department instead of spreading across every department. Acquiring IT resource is difficult and slow. It is faster to just use excel instead of proper tool to generate the reports. Finally he acquired the skill.
- paultopia 8y agoAs someone who finds himself called upon to operate in a lot of situations where Microsoft products are called for---I do wish the unix philosophy would have taken hold in business software. Excel genuinely is very hard to use. As is Word, as is Photoshop/Illustrator, etc. Personally, I find those problems substantially more difficult than ordinary programming. Because you have a substantial fraction of the horsepower of an ordinary programming language, but hidden behind a forest of menus and semi-incomprehensible icons and weird terminology and poor documentation. At least with word processing we have the capacity to strip it down to something resembling the unix philosophy, thanks to toolchains like markdown + pandoc. But for spreadsheets, what is there that's lighter than excel?
- kristianp 8y agoThat should be the first rule of SharePoint too. Yuck.
- rhelmer 8y agoAs bad (and deserved) as their reputation is for helping well-meaning users to create a big mess, spreadsheet software provides an incredibly intuitive UI to put in front of users that have the domain knowledge but not necessarily direct software engineering knowledge. I've been thinking about this for years, ever since I first read "A Small Matter of Programming" by Bonnie Nardi: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming where she explored the history of end-user programming systems, and concludes that spreadsheet and CAD software are the only examples that have had widespread and undeniable success. ASMOP was published in 1993 and I think it is still just as relevant today. Just as it's possible to write a terribly-architected and designed program in any language, I suspect that with the right engineering effort and insight, modern software engineering practices could bring the complexity under control. We shouldn't expect to just take spreadsheets and stick them into production, just as you wouldn't take a hastily-written prototype written in any programming language and do the same.
- scroot 8y agoEnd user "programming" systems are precisely what personal computing was supposed to be about. Aside from spreadsheets and maybe a couple of other things (hangers-on from the business world), that line of inquiry and use has been abandoned. It's worth the development community's time to ask why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s. Let's remember just how popular Hypercard was and what it meant for personal computing. It did not die because people weren't using it. It was allowed to wither on the vine because it never made business sense. And that's tragic.
- zbentley 8y ago> why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s. Because we do more with computers (adding complexity to programming as a task) and the amount of money and people involved have both increased (making that complexity hard or impossible to reduce).
- 8y ago
- Lordarminius 8y agoPaywall.
- lukeylunchbox 8y agoWhy do people share WSJ?
- neurotech1 8y agonon-paywall: http://archive.is/HkCDe http://archive.is/HkCDe
- ThePhysicist 8y agoYou can say what you want about Excel, but it succeeded at something where countless other software failed: Providing a smooth transition between manual data entry and programming and putting it in an interface that's easy to understand while powerful enough to accomplish many interesting tasks. On a side note, one could say that Tensorflow is a (very) distinct Excel relative, as it also builds up a declarative description of your computation in form of a graph and then figures out how to compute that graph in an efficient manner. Excel is (in my understanding) doing something very similar by analyzing the dataflow between individual cells to compute or update values. So maybe if we add support for backpropagation into Excel it could make a fantastic deep learning tool :D
- ultrabenos 8y agoThe first rule of Excel is to expect immense frustration. Named ranges and tables can't be used as conditional formatting targets, Excel just converts them to absolute cell references right before your eyes. Even if you use INDIRECT. Most formula errors result in #N/A, a generic error which never has anything remotely useful in the Excel help articles. You have to waste time searching keyword by keyword until you accidentally get the right combination to display relevant SO or obscure forum links from over 3 years ago.
- m3kw9 8y agoWhat does this remind you of in general life? Don’t tell people you have lots of money!
- fellellor 8y agoWhat this tells me is that companies need excel expertise and they need it badly, but are rarely willing to pay for it. This tells experts, that advertising their skills in this area is not going to result in rewards, rather it will cost them their time sorting messed up data. Is this a valid interpretation? Also, since half the thread is Shkrekreli, I predict this will be featured in this week's n-gate.
- advertising 8y agoI learned this one with typing in high school. Being the only person who could type proficiently, I was barraged by friends to type out their papers for them. After awhile I just charged people to do it. The next school I went to I made sure not to tell anyone.
- princeb 8y agoA lot of people here talking about pivot tables and vlookups. There’s so much more to be good at in excel other than BI! Vba, udfs, volatile functions and dependency chain optimisation, com interop, windows libraries, vsto, etc. You can build an absolutely massive application out of excel. And people will appreciate it being fully compatible with their own sheets.