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Excel World Championship Finals

174 points by Silasdev 5y ago

jackhalford 5y ago
made me think of this [1] parody. 1: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY
bmsleight_ 5y ago
Disappointed having watch the earlier rounds there were not much in terms of tips. Just heavy use of index, left$ and if statements.
- OzCrimson 5y ago
  One thing that's good to see is how Excel can be applied. I was a host when the challenges were: 1. Roulette 2. Biathlon And, no. It's not heavy on tips. The rounds are timed and each of the contestants have their own methods. It was interesting to see some people use formulas and some people use conditional formatting for the same solution.
- martini333 5y ago
  It's a competition. Not a tutorial.
- aaron695 5y ago
  I don't think watching Magnus Carlsen helps with tips in chess either? Or watching tennis pros. It might help define the journey you have to go on to get to the upper echelon. You now seem to think 'index, left$ and if' seems to be what matters, that's something. It will be interesting to see where Deepmind takes something like this.
booleanbetrayal 5y ago
Wait ... this is a real thing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
- sokoloff 5y ago
  “Top Sheethead” is going to have me giggling on and off all day.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  Upload date: 28 March, which is suspiciously close to... Really well-made though :D
- obnauticus 5y ago
  God I love krazam. I think what makes it better is the hint of amazon hell he adds into all his videos (I believe he works there).
  - thefunnyman 5y ago
    Pretty sure he does. The offices in “The Hustle” looks exactly like an Amazon building.
- wsinks 5y ago
  I just want to validate that I thought Krazam was based on total fiction. I'm stunned to see a 2k person livestream about this today in the best way!
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Finally! Emoji macros are a reality! Do we all remember the dark days of the Before?
Flankk 5y ago
Cell Shock are heading into the finals with an 8-point lead in macro chaining but they face fierce opposition from the Miami Sheet with their blazing 460 shortcut APM. Five competitors have been caught doping but let's hope the others will recover from their repetitive strain injuries from last season.
michaelyuan2012 5y ago
Excel is good for business office using. hope this Cement Trailer For Sale is helpful for logistic company. https://www.dreamtruegroup.com/cement-trailer-for-sale/ https://www.dreamtruegroup.com/cement-trailer-for-sale/
CactusOnFire 5y ago
Am I an asshole for just thinking that at this scale of complexity, it's just easier to build things using a web-app framework?
- agumonkey 5y ago
  brainfuck existence should hint at what humans enjoy :)
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    To explain the competition? Sure. To explain why people build highly complex excel applications to get work done? That's more about industry standards, learning curve, portability, need for rapid modification of requirements by users... I've certainly done a lot of work over the years eliminating the need to use Excel docs that require manual maintenance, but mainly for things where a) the underlying data structures don't change much and b) if they do change, the end user doesn't need to be the one to do it on the fly. (mostly this entails tapping into the underlying data sources-- or first building the tools to do so-- and then automating the transformations, analysis, and presentation using some combination of r/python along with a SQL database & BI platform.) I work with finance folks too though, and what they do with excel is generally not a candidate for this process.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      Ah well it's a million dollar question. These people were trained in excel I assume, it's cultural and then you also have this weird pivot point like C where excel has reactive semantics, data table, ad-hoc input / modeling .. it's a massive reactive data notebook on steroid that requires next to no fiddling to get working. Now as you point, things are changing.. R/julia/numpy/notebooks, reactive web frameworks.. can all suck some use case from excel. I believe that future clearly lies in the middle. Microsoft should be wise to implement some presentation/component feature to match the web.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
webdoodle 5y ago
Excel still is used heavily in government. I wrote a VBA macro for an Excel spreadsheet that would take a payroll flat text file, import it into SQL Server using OLE DB, do some data clean up, sort and then export to separate sheets in a different spreadsheet by employee name. Before I wrote this macro (which took a couple days), the payroll department of this government organization had dedicated an entire 40 hour per week person to doing this manually. They had been doing that job for years!
- funstuff007 5y ago
  Yes, I've long said don't fear the robot revolution, fear the VBA revolution.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Excel still is used heavily in government. Are you implying that there is somewhere it's not used heavily?
  - ourlordcaffeine 5y ago
    The place I work at pretty much did away with it for all analysis and statistics
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      What industry? When? Is it common in your industry? What replaced it?
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  When I sometimes interfaced with people in the government, it was astounding how often a higher-up told me they had a "database" that turned out to be an Excel spreadsheet maintained by some GS-8
kingcharles 5y ago
Obligatory Ian Malcolm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3j9muCo4o0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3j9muCo4o0
INTPenis 5y ago
Seeing these Excel pros compete reminds me of when I found an old server inventory system at work. Someone had in Excel+Visio+VBS made a system where you could see a top-down map of our DCs, and server cabinets. Each cabinet had an alert light indicating if there were any alerts on any server in that cabinet (fetched from Xymon), you could click each cabinet to get a front view of all servers, with graphics of server fronts reflecting the vendor and model of the server. The person who made this had quit a long time ago, no one was quite sure of who it was. And of course things had slowly started to break down, like API connections, alerts, it wasn't up to date, but wow. It blew my mind.
- watersb 5y ago
  IIRC, Visio Pro had some network crawling routines for just this sort of system map. I had an app for this on my Macintosh(AppleTalk!)network, by a great bunch of folks at a company named Neon. (I believe that was the name of the company, or maybe the app.) Basic reporting was a GUI front end for SNMP queries. It had a great packet sniffer, too. We had a senior network manager who ran all of the Ethernet cable, and maintained all of that infrastructure. A really sharp fellow, really knew cabling and networking, routing topologies etc. At one point, he was trying to sort out a problem in network authorization that had been escalated to him from application support team, because it seemed to occur on a particular network segment. He had a lunchbox PC with some dedicated network hardware and an application, a turnkey system from somewhere, cost ten thousand bucks. He was working the problem, capturing the packets... I was able to use my damn Macintosh setup to identify the authorization packets in like five minutes. We all went with Windows NT soon after that. It has fantastic monitoring capabilities, and I bought Visio before they were re-absorbed back into Microsoft. Network maps were fun to set up with a bit of Visual Basic. I was a horrible, horrible programmer, but I loved network administration.
ineedasername 5y ago
TIL you actually can enable circular references in Excel. Though I struggle to see the practical usefulness except for a few edge cases.
- jkaptur 5y ago
  How else would you implement Newton’s method? ;)
  - dsizzle 5y ago
    I'm reminded of solving Laplace's equation in Excel. It makes some cool animations too https://www.av8n.com/physics/laplace.htm https://www.av8n.com/physics/laplace.htm
- sl8r 5y ago
  Interestingly, they’re actually used all the time in LBO models. Because the default is to sweep all FCF to pay down debt, but then the interest expense is dependent on FCF, which depends on the interest expense… Sort of a trivial example b/c you could solve it by being more granular with time periods, but in practice people just use the circular ref.
  - DwnVoteHoneyPot 5y ago
    I've also seen it basterdize into running a loop for a monte carlo sim instead of using a VBA macro. Genius and stupid all at the same time.
SMAAART 5y ago
I found my people!
wiseleo 5y ago
If you like using Excel as an app development platform, take a look at https://youtube.com/c/ExcelForFreelancers https://youtube.com/c/ExcelForFreelancers He makes apps that look nothing like Excel using custom shapes.

174 points by Silasdev 5y ago

made me think of this [1] parody. 1: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY

Disappointed having watch the earlier rounds there were not much in terms of tips. Just heavy use of index, left$ and if statements.

OzCrimson 5y ago
One thing that's good to see is how Excel can be applied. I was a host when the challenges were: 1. Roulette 2. Biathlon And, no. It's not heavy on tips. The rounds are timed and each of the contestants have their own methods. It was interesting to see some people use formulas and some people use conditional formatting for the same solution.
martini333 5y ago
It's a competition. Not a tutorial.
aaron695 5y ago
I don't think watching Magnus Carlsen helps with tips in chess either? Or watching tennis pros. It might help define the journey you have to go on to get to the upper echelon. You now seem to think 'index, left$ and if' seems to be what matters, that's something. It will be interesting to see where Deepmind takes something like this.

booleanbetrayal 5y ago

Wait ... this is a real thing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY

sokoloff 5y ago
“Top Sheethead” is going to have me giggling on and off all day.
vanderZwan 5y ago
Upload date: 28 March, which is suspiciously close to... Really well-made though :D
obnauticus 5y ago
God I love krazam. I think what makes it better is the hint of amazon hell he adds into all his videos (I believe he works there).
- thefunnyman 5y ago
  Pretty sure he does. The offices in “The Hustle” looks exactly like an Amazon building.
wsinks 5y ago
I just want to validate that I thought Krazam was based on total fiction. I'm stunned to see a 2k person livestream about this today in the best way!
kingcharles 5y ago
Finally! Emoji macros are a reality! Do we all remember the dark days of the Before?

Flankk 5y ago

Cell Shock are heading into the finals with an 8-point lead in macro chaining but they face fierce opposition from the Miami Sheet with their blazing 460 shortcut APM. Five competitors have been caught doping but let's hope the others will recover from their repetitive strain injuries from last season.

michaelyuan2012 5y ago

Excel is good for business office using. hope this Cement Trailer For Sale is helpful for logistic company. https://www.dreamtruegroup.com/cement-trailer-for-sale/ https://www.dreamtruegroup.com/cement-trailer-for-sale/

CactusOnFire 5y ago

Am I an asshole for just thinking that at this scale of complexity, it's just easier to build things using a web-app framework?

agumonkey 5y ago
brainfuck existence should hint at what humans enjoy :)
- ineedasername 5y ago
  To explain the competition? Sure. To explain why people build highly complex excel applications to get work done? That's more about industry standards, learning curve, portability, need for rapid modification of requirements by users... I've certainly done a lot of work over the years eliminating the need to use Excel docs that require manual maintenance, but mainly for things where a) the underlying data structures don't change much and b) if they do change, the end user doesn't need to be the one to do it on the fly. (mostly this entails tapping into the underlying data sources-- or first building the tools to do so-- and then automating the transformations, analysis, and presentation using some combination of r/python along with a SQL database & BI platform.) I work with finance folks too though, and what they do with excel is generally not a candidate for this process.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Ah well it's a million dollar question. These people were trained in excel I assume, it's cultural and then you also have this weird pivot point like C where excel has reactive semantics, data table, ad-hoc input / modeling .. it's a massive reactive data notebook on steroid that requires next to no fiddling to get working. Now as you point, things are changing.. R/julia/numpy/notebooks, reactive web frameworks.. can all suck some use case from excel. I believe that future clearly lies in the middle. Microsoft should be wise to implement some presentation/component feature to match the web.
    - ineedasername 5y ago

webdoodle 5y ago

Excel still is used heavily in government. I wrote a VBA macro for an Excel spreadsheet that would take a payroll flat text file, import it into SQL Server using OLE DB, do some data clean up, sort and then export to separate sheets in a different spreadsheet by employee name. Before I wrote this macro (which took a couple days), the payroll department of this government organization had dedicated an entire 40 hour per week person to doing this manually. They had been doing that job for years!

funstuff007 5y ago
Yes, I've long said don't fear the robot revolution, fear the VBA revolution.
wolverine876 5y ago
> Excel still is used heavily in government. Are you implying that there is somewhere it's not used heavily?
- ourlordcaffeine 5y ago
  The place I work at pretty much did away with it for all analysis and statistics
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    What industry? When? Is it common in your industry? What replaced it?
Rebelgecko 5y ago
When I sometimes interfaced with people in the government, it was astounding how often a higher-up told me they had a "database" that turned out to be an Excel spreadsheet maintained by some GS-8

kingcharles 5y ago

Obligatory Ian Malcolm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3j9muCo4o0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3j9muCo4o0

INTPenis 5y ago

Seeing these Excel pros compete reminds me of when I found an old server inventory system at work. Someone had in Excel+Visio+VBS made a system where you could see a top-down map of our DCs, and server cabinets. Each cabinet had an alert light indicating if there were any alerts on any server in that cabinet (fetched from Xymon), you could click each cabinet to get a front view of all servers, with graphics of server fronts reflecting the vendor and model of the server. The person who made this had quit a long time ago, no one was quite sure of who it was. And of course things had slowly started to break down, like API connections, alerts, it wasn't up to date, but wow. It blew my mind.

watersb 5y ago
IIRC, Visio Pro had some network crawling routines for just this sort of system map. I had an app for this on my Macintosh(AppleTalk!)network, by a great bunch of folks at a company named Neon. (I believe that was the name of the company, or maybe the app.) Basic reporting was a GUI front end for SNMP queries. It had a great packet sniffer, too. We had a senior network manager who ran all of the Ethernet cable, and maintained all of that infrastructure. A really sharp fellow, really knew cabling and networking, routing topologies etc. At one point, he was trying to sort out a problem in network authorization that had been escalated to him from application support team, because it seemed to occur on a particular network segment. He had a lunchbox PC with some dedicated network hardware and an application, a turnkey system from somewhere, cost ten thousand bucks. He was working the problem, capturing the packets... I was able to use my damn Macintosh setup to identify the authorization packets in like five minutes. We all went with Windows NT soon after that. It has fantastic monitoring capabilities, and I bought Visio before they were re-absorbed back into Microsoft. Network maps were fun to set up with a bit of Visual Basic. I was a horrible, horrible programmer, but I loved network administration.

ineedasername 5y ago

TIL you actually can enable circular references in Excel. Though I struggle to see the practical usefulness except for a few edge cases.

jkaptur 5y ago
How else would you implement Newton’s method? ;)
- dsizzle 5y ago
  I'm reminded of solving Laplace's equation in Excel. It makes some cool animations too https://www.av8n.com/physics/laplace.htm https://www.av8n.com/physics/laplace.htm
sl8r 5y ago
Interestingly, they’re actually used all the time in LBO models. Because the default is to sweep all FCF to pay down debt, but then the interest expense is dependent on FCF, which depends on the interest expense… Sort of a trivial example b/c you could solve it by being more granular with time periods, but in practice people just use the circular ref.
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 5y ago
  I've also seen it basterdize into running a loop for a monte carlo sim instead of using a VBA macro. Genius and stupid all at the same time.

SMAAART 5y ago

I found my people!

wiseleo 5y ago

If you like using Excel as an app development platform, take a look at https://youtube.com/c/ExcelForFreelancers https://youtube.com/c/ExcelForFreelancers He makes apps that look nothing like Excel using custom shapes.