24 ms·

The first rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t tell anyone you’re good at it

286 points by metadat 4y ago

longtimesomaguy 4y ago
Lame advice, I went ahead and helped our c level retrieve lost data via outlook and excel and won a 2 year around the world tour!
metadat 4y ago
https://archive.ph/Mrybd https://archive.ph/Mrybd
- shagie 4y ago
  And free share link - https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-rule-of-microsoft-exceldont-tell-anyone-youre-good-at-it-1538754380?st=sfnot7sjp1svt8d&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-rule-of-microsoft-exc...
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Kind of silly advice. If you are good at something, leverage the skills well and manage your time for pay raises and improved network opportunities. If you don’t think networking matters in the real world, then don’t tell anyone you are good at things. You can say no and be transparent with your time management. People will not get angry about the reality of time being zero sum.
- rjmill 4y ago
  I agree with most of what you're saying, but > People will not get angry about the reality of time being zero sum My personal experience has shown otherwise. If people perceive you as standing between them and doing their job, they're gonna get angry. Of course, people shouldn't equate "not being willing to do their job for them" with "not letting them get their job done." But it happens. That's why it's all the more important to be transparent with management about these things. Otherwise, your manager may not be able to protect you if someone tries to stir up drama after you refuse to do their job for them. (All this is to say, I really agree with your conclusion. I just want to point out that people can and do get snippy about the reality of time being zero sum.)
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    One strategy on this is to lay out post-it notes on your wall (real or digital when screen sharing) to not-so-subtly inform people about the projects you are supporting.
- lixtra 4y ago
  I totally agree with you. But there is also the danger that you end up in a dead end. Let’s say you are a beginner programmer and good with excel. If you are now doing a lot of excel jobs (and your manager agrees that you should do it) then you progress at excel and less at programming. So your buddies might get promoted to senior programmers while you stay the underpaid excel guy. You should make sure that you get extra education to catch-up if people ask you to spend time on dead ends.
  - sumtechguy 4y ago
    Being pegged as the 'xyz guy' for any tech in your group is usually a bad idea. Instead of taking on tasks that should be trivial for someone to do, they shuffle it off to you because you 'know xyz'. I have 3 techs I never speak of to others because of that very reason. They are not necessarily dead end techs. But something others do not want to ever learn while they do 'real work'. I have taken to 'spread the wealth' type tasks for others in the group. I will not necessarily be in the group even next week...
    - mensetmanusman 4y ago
      This is the opposite of what I have seen, but I work in materials tech and not software. If you leverage your position as a point person well, you can find a lot of collaboration opportunities and expand your knowledge-base quite efficiently.
      - Spooky23 4y ago
        A lot of times IT gets positioned as a service entity, inferior to the adults in the room, so the “xyz guy” is more like the janitor specialist for mopping vs. a valued stakeholder. It’s one of those warning signs about an organization. When you’re collaborating with fellow engineers, it’s a completely different dynamic.
      - sumtechguy 4y ago
        This is true too. You can bring some interesting skills to play and be valuable. But you have to watch out for this 'i do not want to learn that tech' going on. They will do everything to not work on that thing, and not learn that tech, and bring your name up every opportunity for when that work needs to be done. It does make you valuable in an odd way. But you can quickly find all you do is the things they do not want to do, and they pad out their resume for whatever new cool tech is coming up.
- blueyes 4y ago
  "Just say no" ignores a lot of power dynamics. And they will get mad if "no" means "I think someone or something else is more important than you." Skill at Excel doesn't always translate well to navigating social and corporate hierarchies well. By showing your Excel skills, you induce demand, often from other team members who are deliberately bad at Excel and who will spend their time on higher-visibility activities and tasks that win them more attention. And you'll be their mule.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    The trick is to say ‘ye’s but have their boss say no because your visible list of priorities is being disrupted (and their boss has talked to your boss). It’s a win-win to get leadership involved because then people who are in charge of your pay start using your name more.
- gwbas1c 4y ago
  > If you are good at something, leverage the skills well and manage your time for pay raises and improved network opportunities. Well, that's if someone wants to be the resident Excel guru. Doing so might not fit into one's goals, or might be misaligned with someone's general job responsibilities. But, more importantly, the implication in the article is that people who are asking for Excel help are looking for handholding; and not everyone wants to handhold as part of their day-to-day job.
azalemeth 4y ago
Also, the sort of formula shown in that article makes my skin crawl. Not because it's hard – it's mostly a set of sums based on conditional lookups with rounding – but because by the time you've written something like that, Excel is almost certainly the wrong paradigm for your data. It's a terrible IDE; making minor changes to that...thing will half as happily pop an error message and junk it as it will do the right thing. Similarly, you can't exactly git excel formulae alone, and the mixing of data and analysis inevitably causes chaos at some point – just look at all of the examples of financial disasters caused by it. I carte-blanch refuse to touch anybody's attempts at doing stats with it (in a medical science context), unless it also comes with R, sas or stata script.. What the article's really trying to say is "Being good at Excel implies you have a logical mind and the ability to see a way through problems. This is something that others lack".
- 2rsf 4y ago
  I fully understand, but what would you recommended to an accountant? a business analyst without technical aptitude? a business owner, again with zero programming aptitude? Excel is intuitive to begin with, it gets ugly fast and almost impossible to debug but for small sets of data it is very easy to explain how to use it and you get results fast.
  - golergka 4y ago
    They could just use Visual Basic right in Excel instead.
    - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      Or they could install Visual Studio and start writing .NET applications. Common, regular users often does not even know that Excel can do formulas and are filling single cells with calculator manually.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        Actually when I went back to desktop Windows development for a while on life sciences, that is exactly what many researchers did after they outgrew VBA, asking IT to get VB.NET on their desktops. No R, no Python, VB.NET it was.
alexb_ 4y ago
Related is not ever, ever, ever telling someone if you've automated your own job away.
- mcculley 4y ago
  What if you want to be promoted?
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    You don't want to be promoted
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Right, not if you're secretly automating your job. You do that so that you can get paid for doing less/zero work. Well maybe that is the same as getting promoted, in some cases. The generalized rule is "If you don't want to do something, don't learn how. If you know how, don't tell anyone."
    - mcculley 4y ago
      Some people want more income than they currently make.
      - brewdad 4y ago
        If you've automated your job, you have time for a side hustle. Especially with WFH. /s
mattw2121 4y ago
I've found it a great return on time spent to show people some basic things (basic to you and me) in excel. It unlocks some of the magic and I've generally found that they continue to learn on their own. The end result is that you end up with more productive people around you and less questions asked.
m_st 4y ago
Fantastic 54 minutes video by a fantastic guy to get started with Excel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
SanjayMehta 4y ago
The real problem with spreadsheets in general is that they can become incredibly opaque. Mysterious constants in formulae, unexpected quick side calculations left over, and poor structure. The only use I have for Excel these days is as a fancy CSV editor: the heavy lifting is best done in Python.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  We could say that for pretty much any programming environment, couldn't we? I feel like HN is often populated by rather skilled and rather disciplined software engineers, and for them almost any language can be a pristine tool and a code base can be beautiful and clean. For someone who may be analytically capable but not a software developer, I feel that Excel can be the correct tool even if it yields some ugly "code bases". The tool you have at hand is often the most expedient tool to use even if not perhaps the absolute best.
  - constantcrying 4y ago
    Excel is much worse than most other programming environments. It inherently hides context, the flow of data and how code relates to one another. It makes it extremely difficult to create software where you can follow the flow of data, moreso than basically and other programming environment. Excel has a specific use case. That use case is not developing complex software, but quick and simple analysis of data. If you try anyways the result will be bad and unmaintainable.
  - maximus-decimus 4y ago
    A fundamental difference is Excel just doesn't work with the tools devs are used to for ensuring code quality. How to you version control Excel sheets? I guess you can technically use git but the diffs will be completely useless. How do you run unit/integration tests on an excel sheet?
    - pjacotg 4y ago
      In my previous job I used a Python library called openpyxl to write a suite of unit tests for some unwieldy spreadsheets that our team owned. The tests were run every time the sheets were updated so we had a form of test driven development when working with the sheets. There was a long running project on the go to retire the spreadsheets and replace them with a proper application but that was a multiyear effort.
fny 4y ago
Rather, tell everyone you're good and start a consultancy. The article is hilarious and well worth the read.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  I've done some Excel wizardry on the side for small businesses. I charge a flat fee and it has always worked out to be somewhere in the range of $500/hr when done. And they all thought they got an amazing deal. You gotta be careful though. If you automate too much, that just frees up more time for the Excel folks to make more spreadsheets.
00deadbeef 4y ago
I keep seeing ads on Instagram for people selling spreadsheets, or courses that teach you how to make these spreadsheets, that are totally unsuitable for Excel. Like how to keep your recipes in Excel. CRM spreadsheet. Etc.
mabbo 4y ago
If you ever get the feeling that you're good at Excel and have some kind of mastery of it, go watch a YouTube video by the infamous 'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkreli. Setting aside that he is a pretty awful human being, his skills at Excel are incredible, and something to behold.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  I did this once, maybe I chose the wrong video, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything special, at least not that it was obvious to me, he also used the mouse a lot.
  - entelechy0 4y ago
simlan 4y ago
Unfortunately oftentimes people do not use the new modern features of Excel. This is often the root of the problem. For example, lookup formulas to do joins is not necessary anymore with power query in the picture. Old habits die hard...
thenerdhead 4y ago
If you ever want to be humbled about excel, go watch joel spolsky or martin shkreli use it on youtube.
cgranier 4y ago
Every new hire gets to watch this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c) then we go through daily Excel tips and tricks until they're comfortable with it. I know Excel is not the right tool for everyone or everything, but the amount of useful work you can get done quickly IF you know a few basic Excel text manipulation functions is crazy. I even have an Excel spreadsheet that helps me solve Wordle.
- cartoonfoxes 4y ago
  >Every new hire In what industry?
  - cgranier 4y ago
    At the time we were doing online video distribution, which went from ingesting content from traditional sources (betacam, film, etc), editing, preparing distribution-ready videos, create metadata, upload to various systems... all the way to social media campaigns, etc. Where/how does Excel knowledge factor into this? Well, we managed a lot of data, mostly (but not only) CSV files. It's very useful to learn a few text manipulation functions in Excel when creating CSV files with sequential and or repetitive content (think TV episodes, etc). Or creating several flavors of CSV for each platform. Yes, a database backend with smart exporting functions might work well, but sometimes fast beats perfect, especially for one-off jobs. Uploading thousands of videos into YouTube was much quicker with one or two CSV files. By learning some basic Excel, everyone was able to minimize errors and maximize output. What else could we do with Excel? We could export XML files of our video edits from Premiere/FinalCut Pro, run them through a script into Excel and immediately get a report showing all the editing errors that still needed fixing (we had to edit the videos in a very particular way). This alone saved sooooo much time. Interestingly enough, we were also able to identify individual editors by the mistakes they made (it seems each one had a particular quirk). I also ran the entire digitizing project in an Excel file, complete with burn charts and velocity calculations. Over the years, I've received calls from every one of my employees, now on with their lives in other jobs, and one thing they're always grateful for are the Excel lessons. And once you learn the logic behind building Excel functions and spreadsheets it opens your mind to other uses or more programming skills. It's much easier to teach someone the power of a few choice Excel functions than to teach them Python from scratch. Plus you can see their eyes light up immediately. Fun times.
breck 4y ago
I think we are about to see a huge wave of innovation in spreadsheets. Coolest new one I've seen so far is 6gunz: https://pldb.com/languages/6gunz.html https://pldb.com/languages/6gunz.html
- morsch 4y ago
  The demo video is neat, but has there been any progress in the past four years or is this project abandoned? I can't even find any published code.
vxNsr 4y ago
The irony here is all the people have been identified by their full name, occupation and location, if any of their colleagues reads the WSJ they’ve (the wsj) raised their (the excel maven’s) profile significantly.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Excel (or LibreOffice Calc) is best suited for bottom-level data entry and not much else. It's just so much easier to use Python and pandas when it comes to managing large numbers of spreadsheet files, merging files or extracting data, transferring the data into a relational database like sqlite, and running various analysis on the data. Well-commented Python scripts are far easier to comprehend than opaque cell formula entries. The level of knowledge required isn't that prohibitive; nobody using Python in this manner needs to be a computer guru who understands Python C extensions, etc. Pandas is pretty straightforward, and interfaces easily with Numpy for data analysis. It doesn't even have to be Python, R provides similar functionality (but those do seem to the most common and easiest-to-use high-level data analysis languages). This is such common knowledge that the absence of any mention of it from this WSJ article is itself peculiar, and makes one wonder if this is some coordinated marketing exercise on behalf of Microsoft.
- bluedino 4y ago
  Now share that with the accounting department and rest of the company who needs those spreadsheets. Everyone has Excel, not everyone has a Python/etc environment setup.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    Good thing installing python is easier than installing excel then!
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  I've tried to use R. Its quirkyness makes Excel look like a gold-medal winner for well designed consistency.
  - madcaptenor 4y ago
    I'm a heavy R user, and I admit that it's what happens when you let statisticians design a programming language.
scrapcode 4y ago
I worked for a government agency for just shy of a decade that was extremely behind the times as far as technology goes. My official capacities were never directly tech related, but I quickly excelled to the top as the "go-to" SME for anything technical almost solely because of my ability to automate the ridiculous amount of monotonous repetitive paperwork through Excel. I would have never used Excel and macros as the tool to automate the things that I did, but these systems were completely locked down without the ability to install anything or use many online services. I eventually started building more complex tools in Access, and improved or was able to do away with many processes that took many man-hours previously. Without the system constraints I never would've had a practical reason to do such a deep dive on Excel and Access to learn ways of accomplishing things that I usually did through programming. In the grand scheme of things, those basic "computer applications" skills have been a huge asset to my career and eventually allowed me to break into some more advanced tech related positions with other agencies off of those accomplishments alone. Sure, there were some annoying requests from people to fix some old spreadsheets they had limping around, but in my situation it was completely worth it.
- smm11 4y ago
  I was briefly at a place that was also decades behind. Our role was to massage data from a few dozen sources and make sure it fit into the square peg. This was dependent on five people, and the process ran 24-7. Until I automated the whole mess one weekend. Checkpoint emails, files all landed where they needed to be, only I had it via secure channels. I didn't last.
  - scrapcode 4y ago
    I was in a union and learned to keep a lot of automation to myself, as they'd really get in a fuss about that sort of thing.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  One might wonder if it would not be better as a whole if there were a government agency that every government employee, no matter if county, state or federal, could petition to modernize a process without charge for the requestor and their department. The resulting code and documentation would then become part of a public library, that both other departments and the private sector could use. Ideally the process would be developed as part of a common SaaS framework to make re-use simpler and to develop a common software stack shared across government.
wexomania 4y ago
Every time I try do do anything even slightly complicated in excel I get super frustrated and pissed of because of localized function names. Makes it impossible to do any sort of debugging or googeling for help. So I always end up writing small (and sometimes not so small) programs instead.
nix23 4y ago
Same with developing drivers and sendmail config ;)
Xeamek 4y ago
Reminds me of: https://youtu.be/1SNxaJlicEU https://youtu.be/1SNxaJlicEU
tluyben2 4y ago
I find a better rule that people should follow to not tell anyone if you are bad at it while your job is ‘doing excel’. Or tell you are good at it when you don’t even understand the basics. The number of excel sheets I have seen which contain hardly any formulas and errors trivially prevented with basic experts made by people who get paid big money to work with excel is cringing. Taking many hours to do things that take minutes even if you know some basics. And then when something changes, say, hourly rate, manually redo everything. I have not seen this once or twice but at least 100x from 100 different people who are supposed to know better. I don’t claim to be good at it but come on. I have too many anecdotes from both big and small companies that abused Excel in every way possible and every way is considered extremely bad practice. (Off-topic maybe) The other way as well; creating documents with 100s of sheets so complex they can be seen as a small neural net almost and then, because no one really understands it anymore, just connect it up to a webservice via OLE with ASP.NET and there we go. So… many… times…
dnissley 4y ago
This is also the first rule of front end / mobile development (if you're a full-stack dev)
bluedino 4y ago
And with products that offer connectors for Excel, like Celigo, you can run every business process imaginable in Excel. Perfect for the accountant/controller who wants to micromanage the entire company.
boringg 4y ago
Excel is the king of financial models - nothing else compares and that is going to be exceptionally difficult to mount a competitive product against it. For everything else -- and for next level of data manipulations (ie some technical ability) go straight to python (pandas specifically) - or i guess one of those excel + database companies.
- MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
  Google Sheets managed to find an interesting niche by offering a) good spreadsheets in the browser and b) live multiplayer. But even that hasn't completely replaced Excel. It has kind of surprised me that Excel doesn't seem to have copied the multiplayer aspects of Google Sheets (or if it has, it doesn't seem to have taken off). I've worked for several companies that use Google Workspace for most things, but they still have Office subscriptions for most users so they can use Excel in addition to Sheets.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    > It has kind of surprised me that Excel doesn't seem to have copied the multiplayer aspects of Google Sheets (or if it has, it doesn't seem to have taken off). It did and it has. All documents stored in Microsoft cloud can be edited by multiple people at once including excel spreadsheets and now that most company documents live in Teams, it’s very common to edit them at the same time.
    - MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
      Ah, I've never worked anywhere that uses Teams. In recent years, it's been mostly Slack and Google, with Microsoft products mainly used if you need the full power of Excel or if you need to exchange files with other organizations by email.
syntaxing 4y ago
I wish MS would fix VBA. It would make excel so much better. I had to make a couple macros and it was one of the most painful code I have ever written.
- wayne 4y ago
  Deployment becomes more annoying and the APIs aren't as intuitive, but all the Excel/Office VBA APIs are accessible via COM so you can use any language that works with COM (e.g. Python): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/excel-com-add-ins-and-automation-add-ins-91f5ff06-0c9c-b98e-06e9-3657964eec72 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/excel-com-add-ins-... It's especially easy to access via any .NET language. I've written a few plugins in C#: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/troubleshoot/office-developer/automate-excel-from-visual-c https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/t...
- QuarterReptile 4y ago
  Honestly, I thought it had good discoverability when I used to use it a lot, and the syntaxes is just another syntax.. The problem came when they moved all the documentation to cloud, so you could get hopelessly stuck when you were trying to make something work and didn't have internet access.
karencarits 4y ago
What we need is easier ways to create simple, cross-platform, stand-alone applications. RInno (https://ficonsulting.github.io/RInno/ https://ficonsulting.github.io/RInno/) seems like a nice option (local R shiny app + electron) but I guess the files will be huge and platform-dependent TiddlyWiki (https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/) is another good example; I can make something great, just send it by mail and know the recipient can open and use it.
deleted 4y ago
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bmitc 4y ago
This is in general true. If people figure out that you're good at something, especially if it's something they don't want to do, then you'll be inundated with tasks involving that something. This can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how much you enjoy that something.
- rahimnathwani 4y ago
  > If people figure out that you're good at something I think it's more "if people figure out you'll do their work for them". There's a different between (a) helping a colleague with advice/pointers and occasional hands-on help, and (b) independently completing core parts of someone else's job. This reminds me of this scene from Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, as described in https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/218729/Chang_umn_0130E_22010.pdf https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/218729/Ch...: Similarly, in Harold and Kumar, the scene opens with Harold (John Cho) working at his desk and packing up getting ready to leave. It cuts to a scene with Harold’s co-workers, two white men, one of whom, Billy, is bogged down with work and can’t leave the office at five p.m. One suggests giving the work to someone else, and the scene cuts back to Billy’s giving Harold a stack of papers and telling him, “I need you to update those models for me.” Harold responds, suggesting Billy was the one who was supposed to finish the work, but Billy lies and says he has to take care of other clients and doesn’t have time to get the work done. After a long pause, Harold calmly agrees and says, “Yeah, no problem.” As Billy exits the office, his co-worker states, “I’m telling you, those Asian guys love crunching numbers. You probably just made his weekend.”
- ilyt 4y ago
  Oh, even if you enjoy it *in general( people will try to dump the most unenjoyable part of it on you. I feel like only people that I want to know that I'm good at something is prospective employer/recruiter, and whoever will give me promotion at work.
praptak 4y ago
When I had to integrate a system at a customer site there was one service which was so slow and crappy that we joked it had been written in Excel. Later we found out this was actually the case. At first somebody manually tracked stuff in a sheet. Then somebody added scripts for business logic. Another layer of scripts for policy enforcement. Then some other department requested automation, so it got a SOAP API hacked on top of this (COM underneath? I think that's how you access Excel from other apps?). I wonder how many other Excel sheets are secretly workhorses for big services.
- yetihehe 4y ago
  In my naive junior days I've reimplemented some excel sheets in php/mysql/javascript (plain js, without any frameworks) but it essentially worked and behaved exactly like those sheets. It took about 10min to recalculate all of the data (essentially summarizing all sheets from 600 car dealerships through 4 sheet levels plus some light analytics, should take max 5s with proper programming) and used 8gb of memory (biggest server for a webdev) but it worked. So if someone joked that it was excel underneath - it was half of excel implemented in php because we could not get actual excel to work properly with php COM.
- MarkMarine 4y ago
  Something like this is how I got my start programming. I was gobsmacked at how fragile it was, started looking for ways to harden/improve it, and went down the rabbit hole.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  > COM underneath? I think that's how you access Excel from other apps? I've seen it manually implemented, but the easiest way IS typically via the COM interfaces.
- LaserDiscMan 4y ago
  In the earlier days of my career, I was tasked with automating a large daily accounting task. Essentially, a team of accountants was copying and pasting values outputted by the company ERP system into a spreadsheet. The ERP used an in-house database, and without intense reverse engineering it was only accessible via the internal programming language. Whilst the language did allow for File IO there was no real way to access the ERP without opening the GUI, so I wrote a dreadful little VBA script which invoked a logon for a dedicated user as a background session on a company server. When this user logged on, another little batch file opened the ERP GUI, opening the GUI triggered an action in the internal ERP language which checked to see if the username matched the special user. If so, the ERP began a vast series of complex calculations, spitting out the results to a series of files which were then read back by the VBA and populated the spreadsheet. The batch file on the background session would automatically log the session off after a pre-set time. Whilst this was all going on, the user in the spreadsheet was presented with a progress bar. If memory serves, I even had some primitive locking mechanism to prevent multiple people running this process at the same time. I think it ranks as the most hilarious (from a technical perspective) piece of work I've ever done. To my surprise, the solution was quite robust, and was being used on a daily basis by the CFO and other accountants. Even more surprising is that it carried on working for years, even long after I'd departed the company. Thinking back to that still makes me smile :)
scarmig 4y ago
A good use of Excel particular to users here: dynamic programming. E.g. set up the base cases on the first row and column, and then experiment with the recursive case in the first empty cell, filling out the rest of the table. Recently did this to solve a particular Brownian bridge. Given a deck of 52 cards, whenever you draw a red, you get $1, and whenever you draw a black, you lose $1. You can stop drawing cards whenever you like. What's the expected value of this game with a full deck? (solution: something like $2.61, don't have the exact number off the top of my head)
- deleted 4y ago
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- Balgair 4y ago
  You can use the Solver GUI to do it in one column maybe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c (48 min)
- arrow7000 4y ago
  Why wouldn't it just be $0 on average?
  - scarmig 4y ago
    Hint: a suboptimal but positive EV strategy: You flip the first card. If it's red (50%), you immediately stop and take your winnings (+$1). If it's black (50%), you draw down the entire deck ($26 - $26 = $0). That gives you a guaranteed EV of $0.50/play. Alternatively, consider the case where you have a deck of 1 red and 1 black.
CivBase 4y ago
IMO, the first rule of Excel should be: never let it become part of any official processes. I love Excel for what it can do. I hate Excel for what people do with it. It's a true jack-of-all-trades application that often gets used when a more purpose-designed application would be a better fit. My department is constantly hampered by scaling issues because someone used Excel instead of a simple script, database, or a more automation-friendly file type. And most of my department is comprised of software engineers, so there isn't usually a good reason for those things to be consider inaccessible. Judging by the comments so far, it looks like we're not a lone.
tmaly 4y ago
I would like to see some formatting on that formula on the article. I have some people on the business side that are good with Excel, but I usually have to work some magic in Python for them when the row count gets +250k. I know the row limit is 1M, but when you get beyond 250k your Excel really starts to drag.
tssva 4y ago
More importantly never tell anyone you are good at Microsoft Project.
bradgessler 4y ago
Same rule applies to Microsoft Access.
tragomaskhalos 4y ago
My wife had a horrific time in her old job trying to wrangle a completely nightmarish budgeting spreadsheet that even I as a tech person could barely unravel. She now works in an office where Excel is a glorified list tool, with the occasional SUM formula for the real power users. I'm undecided as to which of these extremes is the greater tragedy, nor if there is some Zen or discipline that can be imparted to regular office folks to enable them to reliably get the best out of Excel.
ww520 4y ago
So this is the work version of the "the computer kid" at home.
wiseleo 4y ago
I enjoy helping people with Excel. There's a lot of money to be made with it. :)
deleted 4y ago
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hot_gril 4y ago
Sounds more like, don't do other people's work for free. There's nothing wrong with being good with a useful tool. I tend to become the go-to guy for some system I hate, then I write scripts that people use instead of going to me, and at some point I become the guy who fixes that system for good. Then I apply that experience to fixing other systems, then eventually I start off a big new system in a way that avoids future problems that nobody else can foresee.
rongopo 4y ago
Whenever someone tell me they are so good at excell, usually next I realize they are not really intelligent, e.g. because they are not aware of its limitations.

286 points by metadat 4y ago

Lame advice, I went ahead and helped our c level retrieve lost data via outlook and excel and won a 2 year around the world tour!

metadat 4y ago

https://archive.ph/Mrybd https://archive.ph/Mrybd

shagie 4y ago
And free share link - https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-rule-of-microsoft-exceldont-tell-anyone-youre-good-at-it-1538754380?st=sfnot7sjp1svt8d&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-rule-of-microsoft-exc...

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Kind of silly advice. If you are good at something, leverage the skills well and manage your time for pay raises and improved network opportunities. If you don’t think networking matters in the real world, then don’t tell anyone you are good at things. You can say no and be transparent with your time management. People will not get angry about the reality of time being zero sum.

rjmill 4y ago
I agree with most of what you're saying, but > People will not get angry about the reality of time being zero sum My personal experience has shown otherwise. If people perceive you as standing between them and doing their job, they're gonna get angry. Of course, people shouldn't equate "not being willing to do their job for them" with "not letting them get their job done." But it happens. That's why it's all the more important to be transparent with management about these things. Otherwise, your manager may not be able to protect you if someone tries to stir up drama after you refuse to do their job for them. (All this is to say, I really agree with your conclusion. I just want to point out that people can and do get snippy about the reality of time being zero sum.)
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  One strategy on this is to lay out post-it notes on your wall (real or digital when screen sharing) to not-so-subtly inform people about the projects you are supporting.
lixtra 4y ago
I totally agree with you. But there is also the danger that you end up in a dead end. Let’s say you are a beginner programmer and good with excel. If you are now doing a lot of excel jobs (and your manager agrees that you should do it) then you progress at excel and less at programming. So your buddies might get promoted to senior programmers while you stay the underpaid excel guy. You should make sure that you get extra education to catch-up if people ask you to spend time on dead ends.
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  Being pegged as the 'xyz guy' for any tech in your group is usually a bad idea. Instead of taking on tasks that should be trivial for someone to do, they shuffle it off to you because you 'know xyz'. I have 3 techs I never speak of to others because of that very reason. They are not necessarily dead end techs. But something others do not want to ever learn while they do 'real work'. I have taken to 'spread the wealth' type tasks for others in the group. I will not necessarily be in the group even next week...
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    This is the opposite of what I have seen, but I work in materials tech and not software. If you leverage your position as a point person well, you can find a lot of collaboration opportunities and expand your knowledge-base quite efficiently.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      A lot of times IT gets positioned as a service entity, inferior to the adults in the room, so the “xyz guy” is more like the janitor specialist for mopping vs. a valued stakeholder. It’s one of those warning signs about an organization. When you’re collaborating with fellow engineers, it’s a completely different dynamic.
    - sumtechguy 4y ago
      This is true too. You can bring some interesting skills to play and be valuable. But you have to watch out for this 'i do not want to learn that tech' going on. They will do everything to not work on that thing, and not learn that tech, and bring your name up every opportunity for when that work needs to be done. It does make you valuable in an odd way. But you can quickly find all you do is the things they do not want to do, and they pad out their resume for whatever new cool tech is coming up.
blueyes 4y ago
"Just say no" ignores a lot of power dynamics. And they will get mad if "no" means "I think someone or something else is more important than you." Skill at Excel doesn't always translate well to navigating social and corporate hierarchies well. By showing your Excel skills, you induce demand, often from other team members who are deliberately bad at Excel and who will spend their time on higher-visibility activities and tasks that win them more attention. And you'll be their mule.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  The trick is to say ‘ye’s but have their boss say no because your visible list of priorities is being disrupted (and their boss has talked to your boss). It’s a win-win to get leadership involved because then people who are in charge of your pay start using your name more.
gwbas1c 4y ago
> If you are good at something, leverage the skills well and manage your time for pay raises and improved network opportunities. Well, that's if someone wants to be the resident Excel guru. Doing so might not fit into one's goals, or might be misaligned with someone's general job responsibilities. But, more importantly, the implication in the article is that people who are asking for Excel help are looking for handholding; and not everyone wants to handhold as part of their day-to-day job.

azalemeth 4y ago

Also, the sort of formula shown in that article makes my skin crawl. Not because it's hard – it's mostly a set of sums based on conditional lookups with rounding – but because by the time you've written something like that, Excel is almost certainly the wrong paradigm for your data. It's a terrible IDE; making minor changes to that...thing will half as happily pop an error message and junk it as it will do the right thing. Similarly, you can't exactly git excel formulae alone, and the mixing of data and analysis inevitably causes chaos at some point – just look at all of the examples of financial disasters caused by it. I carte-blanch refuse to touch anybody's attempts at doing stats with it (in a medical science context), unless it also comes with R, sas or stata script.. What the article's really trying to say is "Being good at Excel implies you have a logical mind and the ability to see a way through problems. This is something that others lack".

2rsf 4y ago
I fully understand, but what would you recommended to an accountant? a business analyst without technical aptitude? a business owner, again with zero programming aptitude? Excel is intuitive to begin with, it gets ugly fast and almost impossible to debug but for small sets of data it is very easy to explain how to use it and you get results fast.
- golergka 4y ago
  They could just use Visual Basic right in Excel instead.
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    Or they could install Visual Studio and start writing .NET applications. Common, regular users often does not even know that Excel can do formulas and are filling single cells with calculator manually.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Actually when I went back to desktop Windows development for a while on life sciences, that is exactly what many researchers did after they outgrew VBA, asking IT to get VB.NET on their desktops. No R, no Python, VB.NET it was.

alexb_ 4y ago

Related is not ever, ever, ever telling someone if you've automated your own job away.

mcculley 4y ago
What if you want to be promoted?
- Invictus0 4y ago
  You don't want to be promoted
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Right, not if you're secretly automating your job. You do that so that you can get paid for doing less/zero work. Well maybe that is the same as getting promoted, in some cases. The generalized rule is "If you don't want to do something, don't learn how. If you know how, don't tell anyone."
  - mcculley 4y ago
    Some people want more income than they currently make.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      If you've automated your job, you have time for a side hustle. Especially with WFH. /s

mattw2121 4y ago

I've found it a great return on time spent to show people some basic things (basic to you and me) in excel. It unlocks some of the magic and I've generally found that they continue to learn on their own. The end result is that you end up with more productive people around you and less questions asked.

m_st 4y ago

Fantastic 54 minutes video by a fantastic guy to get started with Excel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

SanjayMehta 4y ago

The real problem with spreadsheets in general is that they can become incredibly opaque. Mysterious constants in formulae, unexpected quick side calculations left over, and poor structure. The only use I have for Excel these days is as a fancy CSV editor: the heavy lifting is best done in Python.

BirAdam 4y ago
We could say that for pretty much any programming environment, couldn't we? I feel like HN is often populated by rather skilled and rather disciplined software engineers, and for them almost any language can be a pristine tool and a code base can be beautiful and clean. For someone who may be analytically capable but not a software developer, I feel that Excel can be the correct tool even if it yields some ugly "code bases". The tool you have at hand is often the most expedient tool to use even if not perhaps the absolute best.
- constantcrying 4y ago
  Excel is much worse than most other programming environments. It inherently hides context, the flow of data and how code relates to one another. It makes it extremely difficult to create software where you can follow the flow of data, moreso than basically and other programming environment. Excel has a specific use case. That use case is not developing complex software, but quick and simple analysis of data. If you try anyways the result will be bad and unmaintainable.
- maximus-decimus 4y ago
  A fundamental difference is Excel just doesn't work with the tools devs are used to for ensuring code quality. How to you version control Excel sheets? I guess you can technically use git but the diffs will be completely useless. How do you run unit/integration tests on an excel sheet?
  - pjacotg 4y ago
    In my previous job I used a Python library called openpyxl to write a suite of unit tests for some unwieldy spreadsheets that our team owned. The tests were run every time the sheets were updated so we had a form of test driven development when working with the sheets. There was a long running project on the go to retire the spreadsheets and replace them with a proper application but that was a multiyear effort.

fny 4y ago

Rather, tell everyone you're good and start a consultancy. The article is hilarious and well worth the read.

Kon-Peki 4y ago
I've done some Excel wizardry on the side for small businesses. I charge a flat fee and it has always worked out to be somewhere in the range of $500/hr when done. And they all thought they got an amazing deal. You gotta be careful though. If you automate too much, that just frees up more time for the Excel folks to make more spreadsheets.

00deadbeef 4y ago

I keep seeing ads on Instagram for people selling spreadsheets, or courses that teach you how to make these spreadsheets, that are totally unsuitable for Excel. Like how to keep your recipes in Excel. CRM spreadsheet. Etc.

mabbo 4y ago

If you ever get the feeling that you're good at Excel and have some kind of mastery of it, go watch a YouTube video by the infamous 'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkreli. Setting aside that he is a pretty awful human being, his skills at Excel are incredible, and something to behold.

vxNsr 4y ago
I did this once, maybe I chose the wrong video, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything special, at least not that it was obvious to me, he also used the mouse a lot.
- entelechy0 4y ago

simlan 4y ago

Unfortunately oftentimes people do not use the new modern features of Excel. This is often the root of the problem. For example, lookup formulas to do joins is not necessary anymore with power query in the picture. Old habits die hard...

thenerdhead 4y ago

If you ever want to be humbled about excel, go watch joel spolsky or martin shkreli use it on youtube.

cgranier 4y ago

Every new hire gets to watch this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c) then we go through daily Excel tips and tricks until they're comfortable with it. I know Excel is not the right tool for everyone or everything, but the amount of useful work you can get done quickly IF you know a few basic Excel text manipulation functions is crazy. I even have an Excel spreadsheet that helps me solve Wordle.

cartoonfoxes 4y ago
>Every new hire In what industry?
- cgranier 4y ago
  At the time we were doing online video distribution, which went from ingesting content from traditional sources (betacam, film, etc), editing, preparing distribution-ready videos, create metadata, upload to various systems... all the way to social media campaigns, etc. Where/how does Excel knowledge factor into this? Well, we managed a lot of data, mostly (but not only) CSV files. It's very useful to learn a few text manipulation functions in Excel when creating CSV files with sequential and or repetitive content (think TV episodes, etc). Or creating several flavors of CSV for each platform. Yes, a database backend with smart exporting functions might work well, but sometimes fast beats perfect, especially for one-off jobs. Uploading thousands of videos into YouTube was much quicker with one or two CSV files. By learning some basic Excel, everyone was able to minimize errors and maximize output. What else could we do with Excel? We could export XML files of our video edits from Premiere/FinalCut Pro, run them through a script into Excel and immediately get a report showing all the editing errors that still needed fixing (we had to edit the videos in a very particular way). This alone saved sooooo much time. Interestingly enough, we were also able to identify individual editors by the mistakes they made (it seems each one had a particular quirk). I also ran the entire digitizing project in an Excel file, complete with burn charts and velocity calculations. Over the years, I've received calls from every one of my employees, now on with their lives in other jobs, and one thing they're always grateful for are the Excel lessons. And once you learn the logic behind building Excel functions and spreadsheets it opens your mind to other uses or more programming skills. It's much easier to teach someone the power of a few choice Excel functions than to teach them Python from scratch. Plus you can see their eyes light up immediately. Fun times.

breck 4y ago

I think we are about to see a huge wave of innovation in spreadsheets. Coolest new one I've seen so far is 6gunz: https://pldb.com/languages/6gunz.html https://pldb.com/languages/6gunz.html

morsch 4y ago
The demo video is neat, but has there been any progress in the past four years or is this project abandoned? I can't even find any published code.

vxNsr 4y ago

The irony here is all the people have been identified by their full name, occupation and location, if any of their colleagues reads the WSJ they’ve (the wsj) raised their (the excel maven’s) profile significantly.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Excel (or LibreOffice Calc) is best suited for bottom-level data entry and not much else. It's just so much easier to use Python and pandas when it comes to managing large numbers of spreadsheet files, merging files or extracting data, transferring the data into a relational database like sqlite, and running various analysis on the data. Well-commented Python scripts are far easier to comprehend than opaque cell formula entries. The level of knowledge required isn't that prohibitive; nobody using Python in this manner needs to be a computer guru who understands Python C extensions, etc. Pandas is pretty straightforward, and interfaces easily with Numpy for data analysis. It doesn't even have to be Python, R provides similar functionality (but those do seem to the most common and easiest-to-use high-level data analysis languages). This is such common knowledge that the absence of any mention of it from this WSJ article is itself peculiar, and makes one wonder if this is some coordinated marketing exercise on behalf of Microsoft.

bluedino 4y ago
Now share that with the accounting department and rest of the company who needs those spreadsheets. Everyone has Excel, not everyone has a Python/etc environment setup.
- bombolo 4y ago
  Good thing installing python is easier than installing excel then!
SoftTalker 4y ago
I've tried to use R. Its quirkyness makes Excel look like a gold-medal winner for well designed consistency.
- madcaptenor 4y ago
  I'm a heavy R user, and I admit that it's what happens when you let statisticians design a programming language.

scrapcode 4y ago

I worked for a government agency for just shy of a decade that was extremely behind the times as far as technology goes. My official capacities were never directly tech related, but I quickly excelled to the top as the "go-to" SME for anything technical almost solely because of my ability to automate the ridiculous amount of monotonous repetitive paperwork through Excel. I would have never used Excel and macros as the tool to automate the things that I did, but these systems were completely locked down without the ability to install anything or use many online services. I eventually started building more complex tools in Access, and improved or was able to do away with many processes that took many man-hours previously. Without the system constraints I never would've had a practical reason to do such a deep dive on Excel and Access to learn ways of accomplishing things that I usually did through programming. In the grand scheme of things, those basic "computer applications" skills have been a huge asset to my career and eventually allowed me to break into some more advanced tech related positions with other agencies off of those accomplishments alone. Sure, there were some annoying requests from people to fix some old spreadsheets they had limping around, but in my situation it was completely worth it.

smm11 4y ago
I was briefly at a place that was also decades behind. Our role was to massage data from a few dozen sources and make sure it fit into the square peg. This was dependent on five people, and the process ran 24-7. Until I automated the whole mess one weekend. Checkpoint emails, files all landed where they needed to be, only I had it via secure channels. I didn't last.
- scrapcode 4y ago
  I was in a union and learned to keep a lot of automation to myself, as they'd really get in a fuss about that sort of thing.
mschuster91 4y ago
One might wonder if it would not be better as a whole if there were a government agency that every government employee, no matter if county, state or federal, could petition to modernize a process without charge for the requestor and their department. The resulting code and documentation would then become part of a public library, that both other departments and the private sector could use. Ideally the process would be developed as part of a common SaaS framework to make re-use simpler and to develop a common software stack shared across government.

wexomania 4y ago

Every time I try do do anything even slightly complicated in excel I get super frustrated and pissed of because of localized function names. Makes it impossible to do any sort of debugging or googeling for help. So I always end up writing small (and sometimes not so small) programs instead.

nix23 4y ago

Same with developing drivers and sendmail config ;)

Xeamek 4y ago

Reminds me of: https://youtu.be/1SNxaJlicEU https://youtu.be/1SNxaJlicEU

tluyben2 4y ago

I find a better rule that people should follow to not tell anyone if you are bad at it while your job is ‘doing excel’. Or tell you are good at it when you don’t even understand the basics. The number of excel sheets I have seen which contain hardly any formulas and errors trivially prevented with basic experts made by people who get paid big money to work with excel is cringing. Taking many hours to do things that take minutes even if you know some basics. And then when something changes, say, hourly rate, manually redo everything. I have not seen this once or twice but at least 100x from 100 different people who are supposed to know better. I don’t claim to be good at it but come on. I have too many anecdotes from both big and small companies that abused Excel in every way possible and every way is considered extremely bad practice. (Off-topic maybe) The other way as well; creating documents with 100s of sheets so complex they can be seen as a small neural net almost and then, because no one really understands it anymore, just connect it up to a webservice via OLE with ASP.NET and there we go. So… many… times…

dnissley 4y ago

This is also the first rule of front end / mobile development (if you're a full-stack dev)

bluedino 4y ago

And with products that offer connectors for Excel, like Celigo, you can run every business process imaginable in Excel. Perfect for the accountant/controller who wants to micromanage the entire company.

boringg 4y ago

Excel is the king of financial models - nothing else compares and that is going to be exceptionally difficult to mount a competitive product against it. For everything else -- and for next level of data manipulations (ie some technical ability) go straight to python (pandas specifically) - or i guess one of those excel + database companies.

MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
Google Sheets managed to find an interesting niche by offering a) good spreadsheets in the browser and b) live multiplayer. But even that hasn't completely replaced Excel. It has kind of surprised me that Excel doesn't seem to have copied the multiplayer aspects of Google Sheets (or if it has, it doesn't seem to have taken off). I've worked for several companies that use Google Workspace for most things, but they still have Office subscriptions for most users so they can use Excel in addition to Sheets.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  > It has kind of surprised me that Excel doesn't seem to have copied the multiplayer aspects of Google Sheets (or if it has, it doesn't seem to have taken off). It did and it has. All documents stored in Microsoft cloud can be edited by multiple people at once including excel spreadsheets and now that most company documents live in Teams, it’s very common to edit them at the same time.
  - MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
    Ah, I've never worked anywhere that uses Teams. In recent years, it's been mostly Slack and Google, with Microsoft products mainly used if you need the full power of Excel or if you need to exchange files with other organizations by email.

syntaxing 4y ago

I wish MS would fix VBA. It would make excel so much better. I had to make a couple macros and it was one of the most painful code I have ever written.

wayne 4y ago
Deployment becomes more annoying and the APIs aren't as intuitive, but all the Excel/Office VBA APIs are accessible via COM so you can use any language that works with COM (e.g. Python): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/excel-com-add-ins-and-automation-add-ins-91f5ff06-0c9c-b98e-06e9-3657964eec72 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/excel-com-add-ins-... It's especially easy to access via any .NET language. I've written a few plugins in C#: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/troubleshoot/office-developer/automate-excel-from-visual-c https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/t...
QuarterReptile 4y ago
Honestly, I thought it had good discoverability when I used to use it a lot, and the syntaxes is just another syntax.. The problem came when they moved all the documentation to cloud, so you could get hopelessly stuck when you were trying to make something work and didn't have internet access.

karencarits 4y ago

What we need is easier ways to create simple, cross-platform, stand-alone applications. RInno (https://ficonsulting.github.io/RInno/ https://ficonsulting.github.io/RInno/) seems like a nice option (local R shiny app + electron) but I guess the files will be huge and platform-dependent TiddlyWiki (https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/) is another good example; I can make something great, just send it by mail and know the recipient can open and use it.

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bmitc 4y ago

This is in general true. If people figure out that you're good at something, especially if it's something they don't want to do, then you'll be inundated with tasks involving that something. This can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how much you enjoy that something.

rahimnathwani 4y ago
> If people figure out that you're good at something I think it's more "if people figure out you'll do their work for them". There's a different between (a) helping a colleague with advice/pointers and occasional hands-on help, and (b) independently completing core parts of someone else's job. This reminds me of this scene from Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, as described in https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/218729/Chang_umn_0130E_22010.pdf https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/218729/Ch...: Similarly, in Harold and Kumar, the scene opens with Harold (John Cho) working at his desk and packing up getting ready to leave. It cuts to a scene with Harold’s co-workers, two white men, one of whom, Billy, is bogged down with work and can’t leave the office at five p.m. One suggests giving the work to someone else, and the scene cuts back to Billy’s giving Harold a stack of papers and telling him, “I need you to update those models for me.” Harold responds, suggesting Billy was the one who was supposed to finish the work, but Billy lies and says he has to take care of other clients and doesn’t have time to get the work done. After a long pause, Harold calmly agrees and says, “Yeah, no problem.” As Billy exits the office, his co-worker states, “I’m telling you, those Asian guys love crunching numbers. You probably just made his weekend.”
ilyt 4y ago
Oh, even if you enjoy it *in general( people will try to dump the most unenjoyable part of it on you. I feel like only people that I want to know that I'm good at something is prospective employer/recruiter, and whoever will give me promotion at work.

praptak 4y ago

When I had to integrate a system at a customer site there was one service which was so slow and crappy that we joked it had been written in Excel. Later we found out this was actually the case. At first somebody manually tracked stuff in a sheet. Then somebody added scripts for business logic. Another layer of scripts for policy enforcement. Then some other department requested automation, so it got a SOAP API hacked on top of this (COM underneath? I think that's how you access Excel from other apps?). I wonder how many other Excel sheets are secretly workhorses for big services.

yetihehe 4y ago
In my naive junior days I've reimplemented some excel sheets in php/mysql/javascript (plain js, without any frameworks) but it essentially worked and behaved exactly like those sheets. It took about 10min to recalculate all of the data (essentially summarizing all sheets from 600 car dealerships through 4 sheet levels plus some light analytics, should take max 5s with proper programming) and used 8gb of memory (biggest server for a webdev) but it worked. So if someone joked that it was excel underneath - it was half of excel implemented in php because we could not get actual excel to work properly with php COM.
MarkMarine 4y ago
Something like this is how I got my start programming. I was gobsmacked at how fragile it was, started looking for ways to harden/improve it, and went down the rabbit hole.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
> COM underneath? I think that's how you access Excel from other apps? I've seen it manually implemented, but the easiest way IS typically via the COM interfaces.
LaserDiscMan 4y ago
In the earlier days of my career, I was tasked with automating a large daily accounting task. Essentially, a team of accountants was copying and pasting values outputted by the company ERP system into a spreadsheet. The ERP used an in-house database, and without intense reverse engineering it was only accessible via the internal programming language. Whilst the language did allow for File IO there was no real way to access the ERP without opening the GUI, so I wrote a dreadful little VBA script which invoked a logon for a dedicated user as a background session on a company server. When this user logged on, another little batch file opened the ERP GUI, opening the GUI triggered an action in the internal ERP language which checked to see if the username matched the special user. If so, the ERP began a vast series of complex calculations, spitting out the results to a series of files which were then read back by the VBA and populated the spreadsheet. The batch file on the background session would automatically log the session off after a pre-set time. Whilst this was all going on, the user in the spreadsheet was presented with a progress bar. If memory serves, I even had some primitive locking mechanism to prevent multiple people running this process at the same time. I think it ranks as the most hilarious (from a technical perspective) piece of work I've ever done. To my surprise, the solution was quite robust, and was being used on a daily basis by the CFO and other accountants. Even more surprising is that it carried on working for years, even long after I'd departed the company. Thinking back to that still makes me smile :)

scarmig 4y ago

A good use of Excel particular to users here: dynamic programming. E.g. set up the base cases on the first row and column, and then experiment with the recursive case in the first empty cell, filling out the rest of the table. Recently did this to solve a particular Brownian bridge. Given a deck of 52 cards, whenever you draw a red, you get $1, and whenever you draw a black, you lose $1. You can stop drawing cards whenever you like. What's the expected value of this game with a full deck? (solution: something like $2.61, don't have the exact number off the top of my head)

deleted 4y ago
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Balgair 4y ago
You can use the Solver GUI to do it in one column maybe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c (48 min)
arrow7000 4y ago
Why wouldn't it just be $0 on average?
- scarmig 4y ago
  Hint: a suboptimal but positive EV strategy: You flip the first card. If it's red (50%), you immediately stop and take your winnings (+$1). If it's black (50%), you draw down the entire deck ($26 - $26 = $0). That gives you a guaranteed EV of $0.50/play. Alternatively, consider the case where you have a deck of 1 red and 1 black.

CivBase 4y ago

IMO, the first rule of Excel should be: never let it become part of any official processes. I love Excel for what it can do. I hate Excel for what people do with it. It's a true jack-of-all-trades application that often gets used when a more purpose-designed application would be a better fit. My department is constantly hampered by scaling issues because someone used Excel instead of a simple script, database, or a more automation-friendly file type. And most of my department is comprised of software engineers, so there isn't usually a good reason for those things to be consider inaccessible. Judging by the comments so far, it looks like we're not a lone.

tmaly 4y ago

I would like to see some formatting on that formula on the article. I have some people on the business side that are good with Excel, but I usually have to work some magic in Python for them when the row count gets +250k. I know the row limit is 1M, but when you get beyond 250k your Excel really starts to drag.

tssva 4y ago

More importantly never tell anyone you are good at Microsoft Project.

bradgessler 4y ago

Same rule applies to Microsoft Access.

tragomaskhalos 4y ago

My wife had a horrific time in her old job trying to wrangle a completely nightmarish budgeting spreadsheet that even I as a tech person could barely unravel. She now works in an office where Excel is a glorified list tool, with the occasional SUM formula for the real power users. I'm undecided as to which of these extremes is the greater tragedy, nor if there is some Zen or discipline that can be imparted to regular office folks to enable them to reliably get the best out of Excel.

ww520 4y ago

So this is the work version of the "the computer kid" at home.

wiseleo 4y ago

I enjoy helping people with Excel. There's a lot of money to be made with it. :)

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hot_gril 4y ago

Sounds more like, don't do other people's work for free. There's nothing wrong with being good with a useful tool. I tend to become the go-to guy for some system I hate, then I write scripts that people use instead of going to me, and at some point I become the guy who fixes that system for good. Then I apply that experience to fixing other systems, then eventually I start off a big new system in a way that avoids future problems that nobody else can foresee.

rongopo 4y ago

Whenever someone tell me they are so good at excell, usually next I realize they are not really intelligent, e.g. because they are not aware of its limitations.