7 ms·

If 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

If 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 ago
You get a perceived performance boost when you get a keyboard with a sonorous click.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Ya, 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 ago
sweats, "what don't I know?", watches hour long video (v. quickly), wipes brow "phew - it's just basic".
- lewisinc 8y ago
  You mean we had access to Basic in Excel for all this time? I'm really behind the curve!
  - riazrizvi 8y ago
    not Access to Basic, just Basic
    - drKarl 8y ago
      I see what you did there :D
- havetocharge 8y ago
  Yes, the only thing I learned is that Spolsky is kind of an ass.
kbenson 8y ago
And here's the HN discussion from when the Spolsky video was posted[1], with the Shkreli link as the top comment. Over 400 comments. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545
- simik 8y ago
  Huh, I knew I saw this Spolsky vs Shkreli Excel mastery comparison. Thought it was just a dejavu, or something.
lph 8y ago
20 minutes in: the dawning horror that, yes, I'm watching a video about Excel for fun
- kkarakk 8y ago
  using excel isn't not fun, it's just that the mental complexity of excel is offloaded to the user. the user keeps track of the various computations and transformations. anything more than a quick check on some data exponentially taxes the brain leading to an ever increasing dislike of the software being handed someone else's excel sheet is an infuriating experience because they're also handing you whatever convoluted mental model they used
  - db48x 8y ago
    I would say that they're _not_ handing you their mental model. Instead using their spreadsheet forces you to come up with a mental model which is congruent to theirs.
    - killjoywashere 8y ago
      On ships they sound the tanks daily (water, oil, fuel) and use the depths to calculate the volumes. There are dozens of tanks. Part of my job was then to use that data to figure out the change in the ship's draft from day to day. Which could be done two ways: drawing lines on Xerox copies of an odd set of nomograms, or brute calculation. I found the nomograms fraught with opportunities for error. Luckily the oil king responsible for the soundings kept them in Excel. So I wrote a sheet that took his data and did all the brute force calculations. So when he printed the daily soundings, instead of handing them to me, the draft report just printed out as the next page. It was more accurate and saved me 1-2 hours a day. And looked nice and crisp coming off the laser printer. Everyone thought I was a magician. The guy who took over for me had a nervous breakdown.
  - aaavl2821 8y ago
    In investment banking, one of the first things you are taught is excel formatting and how to write readable excel. How to write clear and concise comments, what color different cell types should be (black for formulas, blue for inputs, green for links to other cells, red for weird formulas), how to structure large files (when to make a new tab vs keeping a monolithic file), when to break up a formula into multiple cells so it is easier to understand, even that you need to hit "ctrl home" before you save so that the next person to open the file starts at the right place (the group that trained me called it "turning off the lights before you leave a room") So if someone is good at exce you can easily understand what they're doing and why they did it
mynameishere 8y ago
He's got a Bloomberg console and he's typing data manually from a PDF into Excel. That's just got to be the incorrect workflow. If not, there is room for huge improvement in financial tools.
- rahimnathwani 8y ago
  There is value in thinking about the numbers as you build a model. Manually typing them in helps. Just like Zed Shaw's LPTHW tells you to type in the code from the book, and not copy-paste.
- imron 8y ago
  I used to work for a financial services company. Their main product was a 30 year old cobol program used by many large banks. Some of them would use our software to print various reports and then manually enter those printed values in to excel. Even worse, the software could export to a format excel could process so it wasn't necessary in the first place. Don't expect to be disrupting banking anytime soon though. Banks are incredibly risk averse, especially when it comes to messing with expensive legacy software that has been working for decades. At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi-million dollar yearly licenses.
  - badpun 8y ago
    > At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi-million dollar yearly licenses. A bank I've worked at had a project to replace lots of bank's legacy (Mainframes and Cobol) with Java on Linux. The project's budget was over 1 billion dollars and it was estimated to take 5 years.
    - imron 8y ago
      The company I worked for tried to rewrite everything in Java twice. Both attempts cost millions, both were abandoned. The lessons (and pain) from the first attempt were ignored because not enough of the upper management were still around, and the only people who remembered the pain were the rank and file, who were ignored by the new upper management types looking to leave their mark on the product.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
It is interesting to see how many of the things that could not be done in Google sheets when that video was made are now available.
unixhero 8y ago
Yew. But Sckirelli's are better.

lucidguppy 8y ago

You get a perceived performance boost when you get a keyboard with a sonorous click.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jjeaff 8y ago
Ya, 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 ago

sweats, "what don't I know?", watches hour long video (v. quickly), wipes brow "phew - it's just basic".

lewisinc 8y ago
You mean we had access to Basic in Excel for all this time? I'm really behind the curve!
- riazrizvi 8y ago
  not Access to Basic, just Basic
  - drKarl 8y ago
    I see what you did there :D
havetocharge 8y ago
Yes, the only thing I learned is that Spolsky is kind of an ass.

kbenson 8y ago

And here's the HN discussion from when the Spolsky video was posted[1], with the Shkreli link as the top comment. Over 400 comments. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545

simik 8y ago
Huh, I knew I saw this Spolsky vs Shkreli Excel mastery comparison. Thought it was just a dejavu, or something.

lph 8y ago

20 minutes in: the dawning horror that, yes, I'm watching a video about Excel for fun

kkarakk 8y ago
using excel isn't not fun, it's just that the mental complexity of excel is offloaded to the user. the user keeps track of the various computations and transformations. anything more than a quick check on some data exponentially taxes the brain leading to an ever increasing dislike of the software being handed someone else's excel sheet is an infuriating experience because they're also handing you whatever convoluted mental model they used
- db48x 8y ago
  I would say that they're _not_ handing you their mental model. Instead using their spreadsheet forces you to come up with a mental model which is congruent to theirs.
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    On ships they sound the tanks daily (water, oil, fuel) and use the depths to calculate the volumes. There are dozens of tanks. Part of my job was then to use that data to figure out the change in the ship's draft from day to day. Which could be done two ways: drawing lines on Xerox copies of an odd set of nomograms, or brute calculation. I found the nomograms fraught with opportunities for error. Luckily the oil king responsible for the soundings kept them in Excel. So I wrote a sheet that took his data and did all the brute force calculations. So when he printed the daily soundings, instead of handing them to me, the draft report just printed out as the next page. It was more accurate and saved me 1-2 hours a day. And looked nice and crisp coming off the laser printer. Everyone thought I was a magician. The guy who took over for me had a nervous breakdown.
- aaavl2821 8y ago
  In investment banking, one of the first things you are taught is excel formatting and how to write readable excel. How to write clear and concise comments, what color different cell types should be (black for formulas, blue for inputs, green for links to other cells, red for weird formulas), how to structure large files (when to make a new tab vs keeping a monolithic file), when to break up a formula into multiple cells so it is easier to understand, even that you need to hit "ctrl home" before you save so that the next person to open the file starts at the right place (the group that trained me called it "turning off the lights before you leave a room") So if someone is good at exce you can easily understand what they're doing and why they did it

mynameishere 8y ago

He's got a Bloomberg console and he's typing data manually from a PDF into Excel. That's just got to be the incorrect workflow. If not, there is room for huge improvement in financial tools.

rahimnathwani 8y ago
There is value in thinking about the numbers as you build a model. Manually typing them in helps. Just like Zed Shaw's LPTHW tells you to type in the code from the book, and not copy-paste.
imron 8y ago
I used to work for a financial services company. Their main product was a 30 year old cobol program used by many large banks. Some of them would use our software to print various reports and then manually enter those printed values in to excel. Even worse, the software could export to a format excel could process so it wasn't necessary in the first place. Don't expect to be disrupting banking anytime soon though. Banks are incredibly risk averse, especially when it comes to messing with expensive legacy software that has been working for decades. At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi-million dollar yearly licenses.
- badpun 8y ago
  > At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi-million dollar yearly licenses. A bank I've worked at had a project to replace lots of bank's legacy (Mainframes and Cobol) with Java on Linux. The project's budget was over 1 billion dollars and it was estimated to take 5 years.
  - imron 8y ago
    The company I worked for tried to rewrite everything in Java twice. Both attempts cost millions, both were abandoned. The lessons (and pain) from the first attempt were ignored because not enough of the upper management were still around, and the only people who remembered the pain were the rank and file, who were ignored by the new upper management types looking to leave their mark on the product.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

It is interesting to see how many of the things that could not be done in Google sheets when that video was made are now available.

unixhero 8y ago

Yew. But Sckirelli's are better.