3 ms·

This goes back to my old quip of the easiest way to increase GDP to 5% would be to force everyone to learn how to actually use Excel. HT "You Suck at Excel" - J

This goes back to my old quip of the easiest way to increase GDP to 5% would be to force everyone to learn how to actually use Excel. HT "You Suck at Excel" - JS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

gkfasdfasdf 7y ago
Perhaps it should become a part of public middle school curriculum?
- Wistar 7y ago
  ... along with how to write a good search query
  - mattnewton 7y ago
    Funny enough, I had a class on this in grade school, taught by the school librarian. It included quoting, AND, NOT and OR style stuff you could use in library search systems and it is pretty much all irrelevant now, but it was cool at the time and I wonder if it helped to be exposed to that kind of boolean logic early.
    - Wistar 7y ago
      I was thinking more about the thought process for how to come up with the right words to begin with and for refinements to make to yield better results rather than the boolean operators although I think they are good for the young minds, too.
    - beamatronic 7y ago
      Same, this was common in the late 70s and early 80s. Sure, you were on a mainframe terminal or a PC with a cd-rom, but the search principles are the same.
  - nothrabannosir 7y ago
    Funny you should mention this; we learned this in high school, 2 decades ago now. Quotes and OR and all. The task was to find some info on the teacher. It was in "computer science" class. Good fun. I got an F.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ClikeX 7y ago
  Excel class was actually party of my junior high/high school (Netherlands). As well some programming in VB and PHP.
btown 7y ago
I can imagine though, that there's a real chance that the "fear" of people having their jobs automated would cause them to cut back on spending, perhaps causing an immediate recession!
wpietri 7y ago
Agreed! But the trouble for me with Excel is that it has an incredibly low ceiling. There are so many people out there doing what is essentially app development but with terrible tools. Tools that give them the wrong habits and mental models for working at scale. I would love to see the spreadsheet reinvented to be a) collaboration-oriented, and b) a good on-ramp to ever-growing programming skills. So that when Bob in the next department over makes that crucial internal spreadsheet, you can safely and usefully interact with it from your crucial internal spreadsheet. Basically, to make every spreadsheet a potential microservice. I've spent some years failing to figure out how to make that work. So if anybody manages, please let me know.
- monch1962 7y ago
  If you haven't used it, Google Sheets is worth looking at closely. It's good for collaboration (within the boundaries of a "normal" spreadsheet interface), and has a lot of options for integrating with external systems
  - wpietri 7y ago
    I have used it, and it's definitely a step in the right direction. But it lacks a lot for me, in that the meaning of the system somebody builds is implicit and contingent. E.g., in an OO language, I can be very clear about what a MailingAddress is. I can say what makes it well-formed. I can give rules about how it can be changed, and what happens when it does change. But in a spreadsheet, that concept is mostly implicit. A human can look at it and say, "Oh, the mailing address is columns C-G, starting at row 2 and down to just before the first blank line." Until somebody edits the spreadsheet and inserts a phone number column, anyhow. That means a Google Sheet can't really serve as a reliable microservice that knows about all the customer addresses, letting one's colleague's sheets read and update things. Sheet authors have all the necessary domain knowledge, but not enough of the technical knowledge, so at some point they have to bring in a professional programmer to re-express the domain knowledge in a language inaccessible to the people who formerly had control over their data and business processes.
  - reportgunner 7y ago

gkfasdfasdf 7y ago

Perhaps it should become a part of public middle school curriculum?

Wistar 7y ago
... along with how to write a good search query
- mattnewton 7y ago
  Funny enough, I had a class on this in grade school, taught by the school librarian. It included quoting, AND, NOT and OR style stuff you could use in library search systems and it is pretty much all irrelevant now, but it was cool at the time and I wonder if it helped to be exposed to that kind of boolean logic early.
  - Wistar 7y ago
    I was thinking more about the thought process for how to come up with the right words to begin with and for refinements to make to yield better results rather than the boolean operators although I think they are good for the young minds, too.
  - beamatronic 7y ago
    Same, this was common in the late 70s and early 80s. Sure, you were on a mainframe terminal or a PC with a cd-rom, but the search principles are the same.
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  Funny you should mention this; we learned this in high school, 2 decades ago now. Quotes and OR and all. The task was to find some info on the teacher. It was in "computer science" class. Good fun. I got an F.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ClikeX 7y ago
Excel class was actually party of my junior high/high school (Netherlands). As well some programming in VB and PHP.

btown 7y ago

I can imagine though, that there's a real chance that the "fear" of people having their jobs automated would cause them to cut back on spending, perhaps causing an immediate recession!

wpietri 7y ago

Agreed! But the trouble for me with Excel is that it has an incredibly low ceiling. There are so many people out there doing what is essentially app development but with terrible tools. Tools that give them the wrong habits and mental models for working at scale. I would love to see the spreadsheet reinvented to be a) collaboration-oriented, and b) a good on-ramp to ever-growing programming skills. So that when Bob in the next department over makes that crucial internal spreadsheet, you can safely and usefully interact with it from your crucial internal spreadsheet. Basically, to make every spreadsheet a potential microservice. I've spent some years failing to figure out how to make that work. So if anybody manages, please let me know.

monch1962 7y ago
If you haven't used it, Google Sheets is worth looking at closely. It's good for collaboration (within the boundaries of a "normal" spreadsheet interface), and has a lot of options for integrating with external systems
- wpietri 7y ago
  I have used it, and it's definitely a step in the right direction. But it lacks a lot for me, in that the meaning of the system somebody builds is implicit and contingent. E.g., in an OO language, I can be very clear about what a MailingAddress is. I can say what makes it well-formed. I can give rules about how it can be changed, and what happens when it does change. But in a spreadsheet, that concept is mostly implicit. A human can look at it and say, "Oh, the mailing address is columns C-G, starting at row 2 and down to just before the first blank line." Until somebody edits the spreadsheet and inserts a phone number column, anyhow. That means a Google Sheet can't really serve as a reliable microservice that knows about all the customer addresses, letting one's colleague's sheets read and update things. Sheet authors have all the necessary domain knowledge, but not enough of the technical knowledge, so at some point they have to bring in a professional programmer to re-express the domain knowledge in a language inaccessible to the people who formerly had control over their data and business processes.
- reportgunner 7y ago