11 ms·

You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]

219 points by kristianp 3y ago

activiation 3y ago
I'm good at excel but I still can't get a job
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
  If you could make an excel table with basic formulae in the 90's you would have qualified for finance companies.
  - activiation 3y ago
    I'd rather use SQL though
    - bshipp 3y ago
      I enjoy using SQL but the idea of using it instead of Excel to visually explore and manipulate data makes me wince. I can do without Word or PowerPoint but Excel, despite all its data handling warts, remains an exceptionally powerful tool for quick one-off data explorations. I prefer combining SQL with Excel by generating a query that gets most of what I want inside the database and then importing it into excel's powerquery to further explore the individual vectors.
      - magicalhippo 3y ago
        > I prefer combining SQL with Excel For so many one-off data importing jobs I just end up generating SQL in Excel after using the text import wizard to get the data into Excel. It's kinda stupid but it just works so well most of the time. If I sense I might do it again I tend to script it in something more proper tho.
    - analog31 3y ago
      One thing about Excel is that people don't see it as "programming," so they might consider it to be a job skill even if you're not marketing yourself as a programmer per se.
    - RajT88 3y ago
      They have a SQL connector in excel now. And many more connectors.
      - RedShift1 3y ago
        Now? SQL connectors have been part of Excel since at least Office 97...
    - LegitShady 3y ago
      I have multiple excel spreadsheets that query a database for data using a SQL query I wrote, that then displays excel based reports/dashboards. You can also grab data from a bunch of other sources - sharepoint, etc. Then you can just update from excel and everything is in the right format for non programming people to use. The thing about excel is that for large orgs its probably on every computer and almost everyone sort of knows how to use the basics of it. that gives it value. The real value would be if there was some way I could get excel on a random machine without any privileges to refresh the data itself on a schedule.
    - Waterluvian 3y ago
      “I’m good at excel but I still can’t get a job.” “I’d rather use SQL though” There’s something profoundly concise here in these sentences.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    You really wouldn't, finance companies have always wanted college degrees. You could however get a job at a dotcom if you could write basic HTML.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Since Joel Spolsky is now famous for a lot of different things (his "Joel on Software" blog, Fogbugz, Trello, and Stack Overflow), also important to point out that he was also a product manager on Excel in the 90s.
- sa46 3y ago
  His BillG story is a really fun read: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
  - sevengraff 3y ago
    That is a super good story, thanks for the link
  - andyjohnson0 3y ago
    That was a good read. Thanks. > He Read The Whole Thing! [OMG SQUEEE!] The style and tone reminded me of Douglas Coupland's book Microserfs.
jbm 3y ago
I'm sure I will not be the only one to remember the early Youtube classic "You suck at Photoshop". I assume it was inspired by this? https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtjme5if5dJWtSoUUhXMiVvpOHNO5fGBw https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtjme5if5dJWtSoUUhXMiVvpO...
- layman51 3y ago
  I think Joel was inspired by this series. One of the videos on that playlist you shared appears in this Trello board[1] that Joel was referring to during the talk. [1]: https://trello.com/b/HGITnpih/you-suck-at-excel https://trello.com/b/HGITnpih/you-suck-at-excel
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  That series just killed me. The garbage bag one had me in hysterics. And the ending twist was fun given how people were so convinced the voice was him.
- g0xA52A2A 3y ago
  Wow that's a blast from the past! I'd totally forgetten about it, thanks for the link I'm goung to have to rewatch it for some laughs whilst I feel old.
layman51 3y ago
I adore this video. I wish there was a version of a talk like this but for Google Sheets, or at least comparison of Excel and Google Sheets features as of 2023. I saw an article[1] that tries to replicate the cool automatic data-table features of Excel in Google Sheets but it seems easier to just use Excel. [1]: https://spreadsheet.dev/how-to-make-a-table-in-google-sheets https://spreadsheet.dev/how-to-make-a-table-in-google-sheets
- XzAeRosho 3y ago
  The only thing that Google Sheets has in their favor, is their JavaScript API to interact with the sheets. But even that is fairly slow compared to any scripting done in Excel.
  - ryanjshaw 3y ago
    Excel Online has Typescript-based [1] automation with Office Scripts [2]. There's even an online VS Code-based editor in development [3]. You can run these scripts non-interactively in Power Automate and integrate with pretty much anything, it's all pretty powerful. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop/typescript-restrictions https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overview/excel https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overvie... [3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop/vscode-for-scripts https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop...
jbigelow76 3y ago
Every time this comes up on HN I end up watching a decent amount of the video, if someone were to ask you "what does 'evergreen' content mean?" pointing them at this video would be a great example.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
https://archive.org/details/youtube-0nbkaYsR94c https://archive.org/details/youtube-0nbkaYsR94c
avgcorrection 3y ago
Joel Spolsky submissions demand a year in parentheses.
- s1mon 3y ago
  [2015] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545 https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/641349916804026368?lang=en https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/641349916804026368?lang=e...
twobitshifter 3y ago
I thought myself an excel expert but the double click in a pivot table was new to me.
schaefer 3y ago
Is there a go-to book (or other resource) for people that have essentially never touched excel?
shanusmagnus 3y ago
I've gotten a long way in life never using Excel except to type things in cells for my idiot former company which used it as a word processor, which made me hate it with all my heart. And yet I assume, based on the slavish devotion to it by others, that it is actually great if you know how to use it effectively. Aside from this video, where can I learn the foundations as quickly as possible so that I can do cool things with it?
- grigri907 3y ago
  Not sure about learning from scratch, but ExcelJet.net is consistently the cleanest, clearest resource I've found to date.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  I used to work in the securities division of Goldman. Traders are generally amazing at excel and one way to completely lose their respect is to suck at excel. I've more than once seen a trader look on in horror as a programmer fumbles around in some excel model the trader has asked for help with. At one point I had to turn some genuinely insane excel models (think 10mins to load the sheet, 10-15mins to recalc) into code (my version of that model ticked >1000x per second and had more functionality than the original), so I learned to get good at excel and learned the kinds of things people who are amazing with it are able to do and how powerful it is. So with that here's one super easy tip and one foundation pathway for long-term learning. The super-easy tip is to learn some basic shortcuts[1] so you can move quickly and get shit done without constantly reaching for the mouse. In particular, learn the "Ctrl - arrow" shortcut (move to the end of the contiguous data in the direction of the arrow), the "Ctrl + Home" shortcut (Move to the start/top left corner of the spreadsheet) and realise that when you're holding down shift this means you can select regions of data for cut and paste or other operations really quickly. Also learn: 1) If you're using a mac you'll need to turn off some of the exposé features or rebind them if you want decent excel keyboard shortcuts. Small price to pay imo but your opinion may differ of course. 2) If you're using anything other than an archeological version of excel you're going to have to come to terms with that stupid ribbon thing. Luckily from a keyboard shortcut pov the ribbon means you have one simple set of shortcuts to learn to access any icon on the ribbon from your keyboard so learn it. On PC just press "Alt" and your ribbon will light up with all the keyboard shortcuts for everything from the ribbon on Mac I can't remember how you do this thing and a quick scan doesn't reveal. My chops are a little rusty because I only ever really used excel seriously on windows. OK now you won't be painfully hobbling about the app one row or column at a time and reaching for the mouse the whole time, the long-term learning. Understanding the power of excel comes down to realising you are editing a model of a graph computation, then learning and understanding a few key features which are really powerful, and will hint at other directions to explore to learn more. I'll give you some examples, but these really are the tip of an incredibly huge iceberg. 1) Autofiltering Put yourself in a sheet where you have column headings at the top and one contiguous block of data in rows and columns beneath. Go ctrl-home to move to the top left of your data, then go shift-ctrl-end (or shift-ctrl-right and shift-ctrl-down) to go to the end of your data. All your rows and columns should now be selected. Now click on the "AutoFilter"[2] icon or if you've been paying attention to 1, use "Alt" to choose the icon of a hopper thing on your ribbon. It says "filter" next to it and the link below has a picture. This allows you to sort and filter your data in very flexible ways with a UI that's very intuitive for non-technical users. I often point UX folks at this feature when they (inevitably) come up with a pale shadow of this capability. 2) Pivot tables With your data still selected, go to "Insert" on your ribbon and go "Pivot table", select "new worksheet". OK here you have a thing that basically does a select ... group by on your data with various aggregations, sorting, filtering and a bunch of related functionality all in a pretty simple wrapper. Play around and get familiar with this. You can do amazing things really quickly with pivot tables. Yes I know you can do all this and more in pandas but your mba colleague can do this with excel in seconds and they can't write a line of code. You may be getting a sense of why people consider excel powerful. 3) Vlookup, hlookup, sumif, countif and friends OK that was the entry-level drug, now go find out about vlookup, and sumif. These are simple functions that look data up in a table. Typically vlookup takes a sorted table on some reference sheet, looks up some key in the leftmost column and gives you back the value of some cell in that row. Realise this adds higher-order dependencies to the graph of your computation. People use this to do amazing shit with vlookup. Sumif is a simpler lookup. It takes a table and a predicate and sums up values matching that predicate. It is often used to look up single values where the table isn't sorted but you know you only have one of each key. 4) Index, Indirect and Address We've gone too far to stop now. If you're writing a sheet that uses these you already know you are a bad person and don't care. these are the `eval()` of excel, allowing you to construct arbitrary references to cells or arbitrary functions as strings, dereference and evaluate them. You can then compose these into other functions. More details of this depravity can be found here[3]. It always makes my day if I am making a sheet that requires any of these functions. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/keyboard-shortcuts-in-excel-1798d9d5-842a-42b8-9c99-9b7213f0040f https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/keyboard-shortcut... [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-autofilter-to-filter-your-data-7d87d63e-ebd0-424b-8106-e2ab61133d92 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-autofilter-to... [3] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lookup-and-reference-functions-reference-8aa21a3a-b56a-4055-8257-3ec89df2b23e https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lookup-and-refere...
binkHN 3y ago
The title should contain the year 2016 to reflect when this video was created.
ekianjo 3y ago
And its good because Excel is a horrible tool. Much better spend your time learning a language aimed at data analysis.
- rrjjww 3y ago
  I’m convinced that the people who constantly parrot this online are just terrible at excel.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    I am terrible at Excel because I find it a complete waste of time to get good at it. And its tied to Windows, yet another abomination of nature.
- Vaslo 3y ago
  There is a reason for Excels dominance. CFOs and executives down to junior analysts can quickly do tasks same day that would take weeks to build using overly complex programming languages. This is just more empire building by “I’m Smarter than all you dumb people, why can’t you think like me” programmers. I don’t need c++ or Python to build a net present value analysis that I could show the CFO. I can build it in excel in an afternoon, and I can hand it to the least technical salesperson, and he can make changes in my model and see the results instantly then send it back to me. And then my boss can. And then someone in marketing can. And the bonus is I don’t get a bunch of useless errors that no one understands like “Stack Overflow Error” or “Cannot process because of error 1994505 super duper data transformation canooter value fluctuation.” The worst error I get is that it crashes and I lose 10 mins of work. Face it - Excel is a phenomenal achievement and it burns arrogant programmers like you because we can do all this and completely shut you out. That’s why it’s a “horrible tool” lol.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    It is better said that the "spreadsheet" concept is a phenomenal achievement (and it is true that currently Excel is the best spreadsheet program). Already Lotus 1-2-3 for MS-DOS, more than 30 years ago, matched or exceeded almost all features provided today by MS Excel (and it had an optimized keyboard-based user interface that enabled experienced users to perform most tasks faster than in modern spreadsheet programs like Excel or LibreOffice Calc). Excel has just provided the same features, with nothing original of any importance, but only with trivial improvements enabled later by better computers. The fact that Excel has succeeded to replace Lotus 1-2-3 has not been caused by any technical superiority but by the integration in MS Office and by the fact that Microsoft has cheated, by ensuring that nobody else could keep up with the changes in the public Windows API and with the undocumented parts of the API.
tranchms 3y ago
I live in Excel. This video was basic. I was hoping for more sophisticated instruction. But from reading the comments, it’s clear I need to learn a data analysis language. What would you recommend? Python?
- pjmlp 3y ago
  What about PowerBI stuff, lambda and M language? I would also be that guy and recommend SQL.
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    PowerBI also has the ability to do some custom R widgets I think, although I’ve never played with that in particular.
- two_handfuls 3y ago
  I think Python and Julia are popular for this purpose, Python much more so. You will probably want to use one of the “notebook” environments that make your Python easier to use interactively and display graphs and the like. Jupiter is the one I know but there are others too.
- lathiat 3y ago
  R is another area worth looking at.
- akkad33 3y ago
  In terms of popularity I'd say Python>R>Julia R might be closest in syntax to how excel works, especially with the ifelse functions. R also has dplyr, which is unmatched in how it makes data manipulation easy and streamlined
thinkpad13 3y ago
martin shkereli excel videos also good, but he delete the videos and channels I think
- tnecniv 3y ago
  That’s a shame. As scummy as he is those videos were excellent. Just how fast he was able to get data into excel and do things with it seemed like magic.
- paulhart 3y ago
  Available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJsVF3gZDcuTxcdH5FmQRTd6MiJ29X_OQ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJsVF3gZDcuTxcdH5FmQR...
  - thinkpad13 3y ago
    thanks for that, looking at it, it reminds me of roaring kitty's or deep fucking values's
dang 3y ago
Related: You Suck at Excel (2015) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847372 - Dec 2019 (77 comments) You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky (2015) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545 - Sept 2016 (420 comments)
d--b 3y ago
I wonder if the fact that I am a lot better with Excel than the guy in the video explains why nobody talks to me at dinner parties…
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kragen 3y ago
does anyone have an archived copy of martin shkreli's excel videos i mean i know he disrespected the wu-tang clan, and that's just not cool, but i also want to learn his spreadsheet techniques
- refurb 3y ago
  What he did is pretty typical in Investment Banking. When you're a new hire, they basically take away your mouse and force you to learn all the keyboard shortcuts.
  - unixhero 3y ago
    He built very solid models financially integrating companies, doing acquistitions without blinking an eye.
    - Jenk 3y ago
      The same Martin Shkreli as Martin "chased failed investment debt by buying patents for cheap (but life-dependent) drugs and hiking the prices by several orders of magnitude, but still failed to recover and was eventually prosecuted, and convicted, by the FBI for running this Ponzi Scheme" Shkreli?
      - unixhero 3y ago
        Yes the same brilliant Excel modeller, and criminally convicted pharma-bro
      - kragen 3y ago
        yes and also he disrespected the wu-tang clan https://www.spin.com/2017/08/martin-shkreli-jury-selection-transcript-wu-tang-clan/ https://www.spin.com/2017/08/martin-shkreli-jury-selection-t... it shouldn't need to be said, but i don't approve of him as a person, i just want to learn his spreadsheet skills
- paulhart 3y ago
schappim 3y ago
Joel seems like a nice guy. We sold chiphacker.com to him which became https://electronics.stackexchange.com https://electronics.stackexchange.com .
pie314isi 3y ago
If excel is the right tool for the job, you're doing the wrong job.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
Just spent a few hours searching for a way to display 3d plots in excel, got frustrated and bought Matlab. Probably missed something hidden in thick UI forest.
cm2187 3y ago
This is excel 101. And with some bits of that are questionable. Range names are nice until you need to duplicate a tab, then you end up with a combination of local and global range names, where it isn't clear which is which. And god forbid you want to move a tab to another workbook, particularly if that workbook already has range names. He does an INDEX/MATCH without specifying the match type to exact, which forces him to sort the lookup table. Specifying the match type should be muscle memory. And after 20 years of ignoring their users, the excel team finally introduced an xlookup fonction that does that. They also introduced other functions that are useful (and long overdue): SORT, UNIQUE, TEXTJOIN (somehow TEXTSPLIT only came several years later, I guess it was a hard computer science problem) There are still functions that would be nice to have in Excel. An interpolate function that could take an X value, an X range and Y range, and an interpolation method (linear, polynomial, cubic splines, etc) and interpolate the value.
- bshipp 3y ago
  Excellent post. I'd also argue that the Excel team would do the data analysis world a huge favor by eliminating the "General" datatype interpolation guesswork Excel does when pasting data or opening a CSV file. I'm convinced more data files have been ruined by uninformed users opening a CSV in Excel and then saving it, than any other method.
kriro 3y ago
I still don't understand who at Microsoft decided that it was a good idea to have "localized programming". If you use a non-English version of Excel you cannot use "if" but rather have to use whatever the word for if is in that language (for example "wenn" in German). If you think you really need that localization why can't both versions work or why can't you force English (the CAD software Rhino does this with an underscore for example). Yeah sure you can change language but it's such a kludge. Causes so much confusion in international settings, makes searching for stuff non-trivial etc. etc. I'm really grateful I never had to work with Excel in any job. My excel skills section of my CV reads "basic, would rather not use it". The closest I came was importing Excel files. I do however respect people who can use it well and I've seen people be really efficient in excel.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  > If you use a non-English version of Excel you cannot use "if" but rather have to use whatever the word for if is in that language (for example "wenn" in German) bloody hell, they seriously do that?
  - zyberzero 3y ago
    Yes. And the keyboard bindings are also localized, so in Excel in Swedish on would press CTRL-F to make the text bold (F is for "fetstil") and to find one would press CTRL-B, logically for "sök". (for unaware users, those are exchanged between Excel in English and in Swedish. In english CTRL-F for find, CTRL-B for bold. )
    - fho 3y ago
      Or (as I just had the pleasure to find out) CTRL-SHIFT-F on my new work machine : - \
  - Lockal 3y ago
    Not just that, it also requires "native" decimal separator. For example, if you installed English Excel on system with Russian calendar/numbers/currency, the formula can look like: =COUNTIF(B2:B6;">1,5") (syntax error otherwise). English Excel in English environment: =COUNTIF(B2:B6;">1.5") Russian Excel in Russian environment: =СЧЁТЕСЛИ(B2:B6;">1,5") What will happen when you enter 1.5 into English Excel? Everyone knows it is 01.май. What happens if you enter 100.5? It is a string, Excel on this machine expects different separator.
kawsper 3y ago
The way I keep my Excel skills up to scratch is by staying updated with the Pro Excel scene. One method I employ is watching Krazam as he goes through the release notes. You can find his videos at: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY
- specproc 3y ago
  Whudup sheetheads! Still can't believe that Chinese localisation BS.
tycho-newman 3y ago
[flagged]
remix2000 3y ago
For Excel tricks, I highly recommend EasySheets on TikTok[0]. Some really useful stuff there. [0] https://www.tiktok.com/@easy_sheets https://www.tiktok.com/@easy_sheets
- ryzvonusef 3y ago
  Also on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@easy_sheets/shorts https://www.youtube.com/@easy_sheets/shorts
benrutter 3y ago
I'm a data engineer and have previously worked on projects in a large and long running company where some important operational metric is calculated using lots and lots of spreadsheets tied together by a combination of formulas and macros. Sooner or,ore likely, later, they would stop being possible to maintain and run and my team would get called in to rebuild the business logic in a (non excel and code instead) data pipeline. The resulting pipelines were always very simple, but the process of working through complex spreadsheets was always a special layer of Dante's hell that he didn't even dare writing about. These weren't created because people sucked at excel (those people made very simple spreadsheets with a few calculated columns in) - they where made by people who where very skilled but didn't spot that they should stop. All those bad spreadsheets cost hundreds of person hours to maintain, and ended up being finacially and emotionally expensive to untangle. Analysts of the world: please ignore this video and continue sucking at excel.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  The problem is, that you always start with a table just like in video, with 12 rows and simple functions.... coding everything for 12 rows is overkill. Then you just add two more rows and one column. And 6 more rows and two more columns. And just two more formulas. And then you need just one minor thing, that can be done with a macro in five minutes. Yes, companies such as Apple need specialized software to handle stuff, and there are solutions to handle this (eg. SAP, no matter how pain in the ass SAP is). But expecting Apple to use SAP when it was just the two Steves in a garage is stupid... and upgrading to SAP (or whatever other solution) is a thing you do, once the excell spreadsheet gets to an unmaintainable mess and not a second earlier.
YLYvYkHeB2NRNT 3y ago
Martin Shkreli will show you how bad you really suck at excel

219 points by kristianp 3y ago

activiation 3y ago

I'm good at excel but I still can't get a job

tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
If you could make an excel table with basic formulae in the 90's you would have qualified for finance companies.
- activiation 3y ago
  I'd rather use SQL though
  - bshipp 3y ago
    I enjoy using SQL but the idea of using it instead of Excel to visually explore and manipulate data makes me wince. I can do without Word or PowerPoint but Excel, despite all its data handling warts, remains an exceptionally powerful tool for quick one-off data explorations. I prefer combining SQL with Excel by generating a query that gets most of what I want inside the database and then importing it into excel's powerquery to further explore the individual vectors.
    - magicalhippo 3y ago
      > I prefer combining SQL with Excel For so many one-off data importing jobs I just end up generating SQL in Excel after using the text import wizard to get the data into Excel. It's kinda stupid but it just works so well most of the time. If I sense I might do it again I tend to script it in something more proper tho.
  - analog31 3y ago
    One thing about Excel is that people don't see it as "programming," so they might consider it to be a job skill even if you're not marketing yourself as a programmer per se.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    They have a SQL connector in excel now. And many more connectors.
    - RedShift1 3y ago
      Now? SQL connectors have been part of Excel since at least Office 97...
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    I have multiple excel spreadsheets that query a database for data using a SQL query I wrote, that then displays excel based reports/dashboards. You can also grab data from a bunch of other sources - sharepoint, etc. Then you can just update from excel and everything is in the right format for non programming people to use. The thing about excel is that for large orgs its probably on every computer and almost everyone sort of knows how to use the basics of it. that gives it value. The real value would be if there was some way I could get excel on a random machine without any privileges to refresh the data itself on a schedule.
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    “I’m good at excel but I still can’t get a job.” “I’d rather use SQL though” There’s something profoundly concise here in these sentences.
- rchaud 3y ago
  You really wouldn't, finance companies have always wanted college degrees. You could however get a job at a dotcom if you could write basic HTML.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Since Joel Spolsky is now famous for a lot of different things (his "Joel on Software" blog, Fogbugz, Trello, and Stack Overflow), also important to point out that he was also a product manager on Excel in the 90s.

sa46 3y ago
His BillG story is a really fun read: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
- sevengraff 3y ago
  That is a super good story, thanks for the link
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  That was a good read. Thanks. > He Read The Whole Thing! [OMG SQUEEE!] The style and tone reminded me of Douglas Coupland's book Microserfs.

jbm 3y ago

I'm sure I will not be the only one to remember the early Youtube classic "You suck at Photoshop". I assume it was inspired by this? https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtjme5if5dJWtSoUUhXMiVvpOHNO5fGBw https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtjme5if5dJWtSoUUhXMiVvpO...

layman51 3y ago
I think Joel was inspired by this series. One of the videos on that playlist you shared appears in this Trello board[1] that Joel was referring to during the talk. [1]: https://trello.com/b/HGITnpih/you-suck-at-excel https://trello.com/b/HGITnpih/you-suck-at-excel
Waterluvian 3y ago
That series just killed me. The garbage bag one had me in hysterics. And the ending twist was fun given how people were so convinced the voice was him.
g0xA52A2A 3y ago
Wow that's a blast from the past! I'd totally forgetten about it, thanks for the link I'm goung to have to rewatch it for some laughs whilst I feel old.

layman51 3y ago

I adore this video. I wish there was a version of a talk like this but for Google Sheets, or at least comparison of Excel and Google Sheets features as of 2023. I saw an article[1] that tries to replicate the cool automatic data-table features of Excel in Google Sheets but it seems easier to just use Excel. [1]: https://spreadsheet.dev/how-to-make-a-table-in-google-sheets https://spreadsheet.dev/how-to-make-a-table-in-google-sheets

XzAeRosho 3y ago
The only thing that Google Sheets has in their favor, is their JavaScript API to interact with the sheets. But even that is fairly slow compared to any scripting done in Excel.
- ryanjshaw 3y ago
  Excel Online has Typescript-based [1] automation with Office Scripts [2]. There's even an online VS Code-based editor in development [3]. You can run these scripts non-interactively in Power Automate and integrate with pretty much anything, it's all pretty powerful. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop/typescript-restrictions https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overview/excel https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overvie... [3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop/vscode-for-scripts https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop...

jbigelow76 3y ago

Every time this comes up on HN I end up watching a decent amount of the video, if someone were to ask you "what does 'evergreen' content mean?" pointing them at this video would be a great example.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

https://archive.org/details/youtube-0nbkaYsR94c https://archive.org/details/youtube-0nbkaYsR94c

avgcorrection 3y ago

Joel Spolsky submissions demand a year in parentheses.

s1mon 3y ago
[2015] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545 https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/641349916804026368?lang=en https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/641349916804026368?lang=e...

twobitshifter 3y ago

I thought myself an excel expert but the double click in a pivot table was new to me.

schaefer 3y ago

Is there a go-to book (or other resource) for people that have essentially never touched excel?

shanusmagnus 3y ago

I've gotten a long way in life never using Excel except to type things in cells for my idiot former company which used it as a word processor, which made me hate it with all my heart. And yet I assume, based on the slavish devotion to it by others, that it is actually great if you know how to use it effectively. Aside from this video, where can I learn the foundations as quickly as possible so that I can do cool things with it?

grigri907 3y ago
Not sure about learning from scratch, but ExcelJet.net is consistently the cleanest, clearest resource I've found to date.
seanhunter 3y ago
I used to work in the securities division of Goldman. Traders are generally amazing at excel and one way to completely lose their respect is to suck at excel. I've more than once seen a trader look on in horror as a programmer fumbles around in some excel model the trader has asked for help with. At one point I had to turn some genuinely insane excel models (think 10mins to load the sheet, 10-15mins to recalc) into code (my version of that model ticked >1000x per second and had more functionality than the original), so I learned to get good at excel and learned the kinds of things people who are amazing with it are able to do and how powerful it is. So with that here's one super easy tip and one foundation pathway for long-term learning. The super-easy tip is to learn some basic shortcuts[1] so you can move quickly and get shit done without constantly reaching for the mouse. In particular, learn the "Ctrl - arrow" shortcut (move to the end of the contiguous data in the direction of the arrow), the "Ctrl + Home" shortcut (Move to the start/top left corner of the spreadsheet) and realise that when you're holding down shift this means you can select regions of data for cut and paste or other operations really quickly. Also learn: 1) If you're using a mac you'll need to turn off some of the exposé features or rebind them if you want decent excel keyboard shortcuts. Small price to pay imo but your opinion may differ of course. 2) If you're using anything other than an archeological version of excel you're going to have to come to terms with that stupid ribbon thing. Luckily from a keyboard shortcut pov the ribbon means you have one simple set of shortcuts to learn to access any icon on the ribbon from your keyboard so learn it. On PC just press "Alt" and your ribbon will light up with all the keyboard shortcuts for everything from the ribbon on Mac I can't remember how you do this thing and a quick scan doesn't reveal. My chops are a little rusty because I only ever really used excel seriously on windows. OK now you won't be painfully hobbling about the app one row or column at a time and reaching for the mouse the whole time, the long-term learning. Understanding the power of excel comes down to realising you are editing a model of a graph computation, then learning and understanding a few key features which are really powerful, and will hint at other directions to explore to learn more. I'll give you some examples, but these really are the tip of an incredibly huge iceberg. 1) Autofiltering Put yourself in a sheet where you have column headings at the top and one contiguous block of data in rows and columns beneath. Go ctrl-home to move to the top left of your data, then go shift-ctrl-end (or shift-ctrl-right and shift-ctrl-down) to go to the end of your data. All your rows and columns should now be selected. Now click on the "AutoFilter"[2] icon or if you've been paying attention to 1, use "Alt" to choose the icon of a hopper thing on your ribbon. It says "filter" next to it and the link below has a picture. This allows you to sort and filter your data in very flexible ways with a UI that's very intuitive for non-technical users. I often point UX folks at this feature when they (inevitably) come up with a pale shadow of this capability. 2) Pivot tables With your data still selected, go to "Insert" on your ribbon and go "Pivot table", select "new worksheet". OK here you have a thing that basically does a select ... group by on your data with various aggregations, sorting, filtering and a bunch of related functionality all in a pretty simple wrapper. Play around and get familiar with this. You can do amazing things really quickly with pivot tables. Yes I know you can do all this and more in pandas but your mba colleague can do this with excel in seconds and they can't write a line of code. You may be getting a sense of why people consider excel powerful. 3) Vlookup, hlookup, sumif, countif and friends OK that was the entry-level drug, now go find out about vlookup, and sumif. These are simple functions that look data up in a table. Typically vlookup takes a sorted table on some reference sheet, looks up some key in the leftmost column and gives you back the value of some cell in that row. Realise this adds higher-order dependencies to the graph of your computation. People use this to do amazing shit with vlookup. Sumif is a simpler lookup. It takes a table and a predicate and sums up values matching that predicate. It is often used to look up single values where the table isn't sorted but you know you only have one of each key. 4) Index, Indirect and Address We've gone too far to stop now. If you're writing a sheet that uses these you already know you are a bad person and don't care. these are the `eval()` of excel, allowing you to construct arbitrary references to cells or arbitrary functions as strings, dereference and evaluate them. You can then compose these into other functions. More details of this depravity can be found here[3]. It always makes my day if I am making a sheet that requires any of these functions. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/keyboard-shortcuts-in-excel-1798d9d5-842a-42b8-9c99-9b7213f0040f https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/keyboard-shortcut... [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-autofilter-to-filter-your-data-7d87d63e-ebd0-424b-8106-e2ab61133d92 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-autofilter-to... [3] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lookup-and-reference-functions-reference-8aa21a3a-b56a-4055-8257-3ec89df2b23e https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lookup-and-refere...

binkHN 3y ago

The title should contain the year 2016 to reflect when this video was created.

ekianjo 3y ago

And its good because Excel is a horrible tool. Much better spend your time learning a language aimed at data analysis.

rrjjww 3y ago
I’m convinced that the people who constantly parrot this online are just terrible at excel.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  I am terrible at Excel because I find it a complete waste of time to get good at it. And its tied to Windows, yet another abomination of nature.
Vaslo 3y ago
There is a reason for Excels dominance. CFOs and executives down to junior analysts can quickly do tasks same day that would take weeks to build using overly complex programming languages. This is just more empire building by “I’m Smarter than all you dumb people, why can’t you think like me” programmers. I don’t need c++ or Python to build a net present value analysis that I could show the CFO. I can build it in excel in an afternoon, and I can hand it to the least technical salesperson, and he can make changes in my model and see the results instantly then send it back to me. And then my boss can. And then someone in marketing can. And the bonus is I don’t get a bunch of useless errors that no one understands like “Stack Overflow Error” or “Cannot process because of error 1994505 super duper data transformation canooter value fluctuation.” The worst error I get is that it crashes and I lose 10 mins of work. Face it - Excel is a phenomenal achievement and it burns arrogant programmers like you because we can do all this and completely shut you out. That’s why it’s a “horrible tool” lol.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  It is better said that the "spreadsheet" concept is a phenomenal achievement (and it is true that currently Excel is the best spreadsheet program). Already Lotus 1-2-3 for MS-DOS, more than 30 years ago, matched or exceeded almost all features provided today by MS Excel (and it had an optimized keyboard-based user interface that enabled experienced users to perform most tasks faster than in modern spreadsheet programs like Excel or LibreOffice Calc). Excel has just provided the same features, with nothing original of any importance, but only with trivial improvements enabled later by better computers. The fact that Excel has succeeded to replace Lotus 1-2-3 has not been caused by any technical superiority but by the integration in MS Office and by the fact that Microsoft has cheated, by ensuring that nobody else could keep up with the changes in the public Windows API and with the undocumented parts of the API.

tranchms 3y ago

I live in Excel. This video was basic. I was hoping for more sophisticated instruction. But from reading the comments, it’s clear I need to learn a data analysis language. What would you recommend? Python?

pjmlp 3y ago
What about PowerBI stuff, lambda and M language? I would also be that guy and recommend SQL.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  PowerBI also has the ability to do some custom R widgets I think, although I’ve never played with that in particular.
two_handfuls 3y ago
I think Python and Julia are popular for this purpose, Python much more so. You will probably want to use one of the “notebook” environments that make your Python easier to use interactively and display graphs and the like. Jupiter is the one I know but there are others too.
lathiat 3y ago
R is another area worth looking at.
akkad33 3y ago
In terms of popularity I'd say Python>R>Julia R might be closest in syntax to how excel works, especially with the ifelse functions. R also has dplyr, which is unmatched in how it makes data manipulation easy and streamlined

thinkpad13 3y ago

martin shkereli excel videos also good, but he delete the videos and channels I think

tnecniv 3y ago
That’s a shame. As scummy as he is those videos were excellent. Just how fast he was able to get data into excel and do things with it seemed like magic.
paulhart 3y ago
Available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJsVF3gZDcuTxcdH5FmQRTd6MiJ29X_OQ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJsVF3gZDcuTxcdH5FmQR...
- thinkpad13 3y ago
  thanks for that, looking at it, it reminds me of roaring kitty's or deep fucking values's

dang 3y ago

Related: You Suck at Excel (2015) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847372 - Dec 2019 (77 comments) You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky (2015) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545 - Sept 2016 (420 comments)

d--b 3y ago

I wonder if the fact that I am a lot better with Excel than the guy in the video explains why nobody talks to me at dinner parties…

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

kragen 3y ago

does anyone have an archived copy of martin shkreli's excel videos i mean i know he disrespected the wu-tang clan, and that's just not cool, but i also want to learn his spreadsheet techniques

refurb 3y ago
What he did is pretty typical in Investment Banking. When you're a new hire, they basically take away your mouse and force you to learn all the keyboard shortcuts.
- unixhero 3y ago
  He built very solid models financially integrating companies, doing acquistitions without blinking an eye.
  - Jenk 3y ago
    The same Martin Shkreli as Martin "chased failed investment debt by buying patents for cheap (but life-dependent) drugs and hiking the prices by several orders of magnitude, but still failed to recover and was eventually prosecuted, and convicted, by the FBI for running this Ponzi Scheme" Shkreli?
    - unixhero 3y ago
      Yes the same brilliant Excel modeller, and criminally convicted pharma-bro
    - kragen 3y ago
      yes and also he disrespected the wu-tang clan https://www.spin.com/2017/08/martin-shkreli-jury-selection-transcript-wu-tang-clan/ https://www.spin.com/2017/08/martin-shkreli-jury-selection-t... it shouldn't need to be said, but i don't approve of him as a person, i just want to learn his spreadsheet skills
paulhart 3y ago

schappim 3y ago

Joel seems like a nice guy. We sold chiphacker.com to him which became https://electronics.stackexchange.com https://electronics.stackexchange.com .

pie314isi 3y ago

If excel is the right tool for the job, you're doing the wrong job.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

Just spent a few hours searching for a way to display 3d plots in excel, got frustrated and bought Matlab. Probably missed something hidden in thick UI forest.

cm2187 3y ago

This is excel 101. And with some bits of that are questionable. Range names are nice until you need to duplicate a tab, then you end up with a combination of local and global range names, where it isn't clear which is which. And god forbid you want to move a tab to another workbook, particularly if that workbook already has range names. He does an INDEX/MATCH without specifying the match type to exact, which forces him to sort the lookup table. Specifying the match type should be muscle memory. And after 20 years of ignoring their users, the excel team finally introduced an xlookup fonction that does that. They also introduced other functions that are useful (and long overdue): SORT, UNIQUE, TEXTJOIN (somehow TEXTSPLIT only came several years later, I guess it was a hard computer science problem) There are still functions that would be nice to have in Excel. An interpolate function that could take an X value, an X range and Y range, and an interpolation method (linear, polynomial, cubic splines, etc) and interpolate the value.

bshipp 3y ago
Excellent post. I'd also argue that the Excel team would do the data analysis world a huge favor by eliminating the "General" datatype interpolation guesswork Excel does when pasting data or opening a CSV file. I'm convinced more data files have been ruined by uninformed users opening a CSV in Excel and then saving it, than any other method.

kriro 3y ago

I still don't understand who at Microsoft decided that it was a good idea to have "localized programming". If you use a non-English version of Excel you cannot use "if" but rather have to use whatever the word for if is in that language (for example "wenn" in German). If you think you really need that localization why can't both versions work or why can't you force English (the CAD software Rhino does this with an underscore for example). Yeah sure you can change language but it's such a kludge. Causes so much confusion in international settings, makes searching for stuff non-trivial etc. etc. I'm really grateful I never had to work with Excel in any job. My excel skills section of my CV reads "basic, would rather not use it". The closest I came was importing Excel files. I do however respect people who can use it well and I've seen people be really efficient in excel.

_a_a_a_ 3y ago
> If you use a non-English version of Excel you cannot use "if" but rather have to use whatever the word for if is in that language (for example "wenn" in German) bloody hell, they seriously do that?
- zyberzero 3y ago
  Yes. And the keyboard bindings are also localized, so in Excel in Swedish on would press CTRL-F to make the text bold (F is for "fetstil") and to find one would press CTRL-B, logically for "sök". (for unaware users, those are exchanged between Excel in English and in Swedish. In english CTRL-F for find, CTRL-B for bold. )
  - fho 3y ago
    Or (as I just had the pleasure to find out) CTRL-SHIFT-F on my new work machine : - \
- Lockal 3y ago
  Not just that, it also requires "native" decimal separator. For example, if you installed English Excel on system with Russian calendar/numbers/currency, the formula can look like: =COUNTIF(B2:B6;">1,5") (syntax error otherwise). English Excel in English environment: =COUNTIF(B2:B6;">1.5") Russian Excel in Russian environment: =СЧЁТЕСЛИ(B2:B6;">1,5") What will happen when you enter 1.5 into English Excel? Everyone knows it is 01.май. What happens if you enter 100.5? It is a string, Excel on this machine expects different separator.

kawsper 3y ago

The way I keep my Excel skills up to scratch is by staying updated with the Pro Excel scene. One method I employ is watching Krazam as he goes through the release notes. You can find his videos at: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY

specproc 3y ago
Whudup sheetheads! Still can't believe that Chinese localisation BS.

tycho-newman 3y ago

[flagged]

remix2000 3y ago

For Excel tricks, I highly recommend EasySheets on TikTok[0]. Some really useful stuff there. [0] https://www.tiktok.com/@easy_sheets https://www.tiktok.com/@easy_sheets

ryzvonusef 3y ago
Also on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@easy_sheets/shorts https://www.youtube.com/@easy_sheets/shorts

benrutter 3y ago

I'm a data engineer and have previously worked on projects in a large and long running company where some important operational metric is calculated using lots and lots of spreadsheets tied together by a combination of formulas and macros. Sooner or,ore likely, later, they would stop being possible to maintain and run and my team would get called in to rebuild the business logic in a (non excel and code instead) data pipeline. The resulting pipelines were always very simple, but the process of working through complex spreadsheets was always a special layer of Dante's hell that he didn't even dare writing about. These weren't created because people sucked at excel (those people made very simple spreadsheets with a few calculated columns in) - they where made by people who where very skilled but didn't spot that they should stop. All those bad spreadsheets cost hundreds of person hours to maintain, and ended up being finacially and emotionally expensive to untangle. Analysts of the world: please ignore this video and continue sucking at excel.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
The problem is, that you always start with a table just like in video, with 12 rows and simple functions.... coding everything for 12 rows is overkill. Then you just add two more rows and one column. And 6 more rows and two more columns. And just two more formulas. And then you need just one minor thing, that can be done with a macro in five minutes. Yes, companies such as Apple need specialized software to handle stuff, and there are solutions to handle this (eg. SAP, no matter how pain in the ass SAP is). But expecting Apple to use SAP when it was just the two Steves in a garage is stupid... and upgrading to SAP (or whatever other solution) is a thing you do, once the excell spreadsheet gets to an unmaintainable mess and not a second earlier.

YLYvYkHeB2NRNT 3y ago

Martin Shkreli will show you how bad you really suck at excel