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The Microsoft Excel superstars throw down in Vegas
- sokolova46 2y agoThis was really cool to see, I imagine it was a lot of hard work to develop
- Terr_ 2y agoThat makes me think of these two great parody videos from ~5 years back, of Excel using e-sport tropes, introduced but a (fictional) livestreaming competitor nicknamed Makro. "Microsoft Excel stream highlights" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY "XLOOKUP" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI
- LocutusOfBorges 2y agoHyped for Ballmercon 2024!
- Yhippa 2y ago...is that a real thing?
- dreadlordbone 2y agoit can be
- robingchan 2y agoa fellow sheethead
- schnable 2y agoand I thought these were just jokes!
- maliker 2y agoThey were, at the time.
- fragmede 2y ago> hereThere is one inescapably weird thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets are not fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful, very interesting, very important, but they are for work. My nerdy friends have a saying. If you don't have a spreadsheet, are you even having fun? Of course, their idea of fun is to min/max whatever game is at hand in order to win as best they can, which sometimes sucks the joy out of it for the rest of the players but it's all also fun to see how broken some game mechanics are.
- golergka 2y agoPlaying against professionals at the top of their game is rarely fun for amateurs in any kind of sport. You just lose, quickly, and don't even understand what's going on. (Not applicable to semi-professionals, they can at least figure out what's happening and learn).
- LegitShady 2y agoIf you enjoy problem solving and you're good at Excel often spreadsheets can be fun. It's not necessarily playing a game but about the satisfaction of logically laying out data, transformations and calculations in a way that solves a problem. That's not fun for everyone but it is fun for some people. The same way coding challenges and learn 2 code gamified websites are fun for some people. [Insert Dilbert "the knack" show segment]
- TeMPOraL 2y agoThis. Spreadsheets can be fun as means to solving an interesting problem; they have several things going on for them: - Focused, incremental, working-memory friendly; - Very fast feedback loop; it's a dopamine pumping 2D REPL; - Free of all the devops bullshit, which infected all the "proper" programming tools to the degree it's getting hard to do a local "Hello World" without having to swim through it; - Because of the derision it gets from "normie tech folks", doing something large in it gives you just the right amount of "hold my beer and watch this" bragging rights (in some ways, this is similar to demoscene on legacy platforms like Amiga).
- wiseleo 2y ago
- verticalscaler 2y agoSo there's this weird playlist about Excel by Martin Shkreli of all people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI_riscmviI&list=PLJsVF3gZDcuTxcdH5FmQRTd6MiJ29X_OQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI_riscmviI&list=PLJsVF3gZDc... It keeps popping up as he is apparently quick and knows the ins and outs. But I've never bothered to go through it as it is seven years old at this point and focused on finance. Can anybody recommend something similar but up to date with the new goodies so a fella could be competitive at this? I'm talking more keyboard shortcuts and advanced features (many of them overlap). The latest versions of Excel sort of open it up anew. puts on headband and cracks knuckles
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoShkreli had quite a following back in the day.. there was a video archive and a few of his padawans got quite rich
- filoleg 2y agoIt helped that those streams of his were nothing what a normal person from the outside would expect from him. So the audience for his financial analysis streams self-selected kinda nicely. TLDR on those streams: it was Shkreli just opening excel spreadsheets and going super deep on analysis of corporate financials, in the most plain unemotional way possible. He even did fun exercises to show his viewers how he works things: the audience would vote for a random public company ticker that Shkreli never analyzed betore, and he would just spend the next few hours populating his excel spreadsheet from scratch and trying to make some conclusions. With the preference for picking companies that he actually knows absolutely nothing about in terms of their finances. Literally just gathering all relevant publicly available information and analyzing it, with lots of hard numbers and excel magic involved. No joking, no non-sequiters, no guests, just lazer-focused on financial analysis. Not going to lie, it blew my mind when i was first trying to follow along at the time. If you aren’t into that type of a thing, i imagine it would be extremely boring to watch, as it was nothing like his “more known” livestreams focused on trolling and ragebaiting. It was just cold “thinking outloud and populating spreadsheets” type of content. The viewership numbers reflected that too, with the financial analysis streams having magnitudes less views (with most people not even knowing they existed, despite being posted on the same channel as his more popular and controversial streams).
- mc_maurer 2y ago"the world’s most important piece of software" "there’s simply no more powerful piece of software on the planet for turning a mess of numbers into answers and sense" I never want to be one to downplay Excel's ubiquity and importance, but these statements seem a tad... hypberbolic.
- hgyjnbdet 2y agoI genuinely would like to hear about a more important piece of software for businesses. Or more used. In those respects I'd have to agree with each of those statements.
- mc_maurer 2y agoI think "for businesses" is probably the caveat here. It feels like a trope to mention it at this point, but I think the world would suffer greater consequences if, say, the Linux kernel broke. I'd also argue that Excel isn't really the most "powerful" per se, but the most accessible and convenient for sure.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoIt is for sure the most widely utilized functional coding environment on the planet.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoSAP or Salesforce is often the critical piece of software in many an organization. My current assignment (I don't work with SAP though, thankfully) is an energy company with ~3 million customers, each and everyone's data is managed in SAP along energy usage, billing/invoicing, the works. Small army of people managing and maintaining it, too.
- victorbjorklund 2y agoFirst statement maybe yes. Hard to find any software used in so many places with so much money / importance etc. Second statement hard no. It is a good balance of ease of use, familarity and power but for sure not even close to being the most powerful tool to crunch numbers on scale.
- LegitShady 2y agoI find the page style annoying. It does not facilitate reading.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lelandfe 2y agoAgreed: .cell * { color: black !important; } .cell:not(.lede) { background-color: white !important; background-image: none !important; height: auto !important; border: 0 !important; }
- unsupp0rted 2y agoAnd the font family
- blahyawnblah 2y agoYeah, my eyes couldn't take that for very long
- razster 2y agoClosed it as soon as I saw that green. Just a bad design.
- mandibeet 2y agoIt helped me to wake up a little
- apocalyptic0n3 2y agoSwitching to black on white makes it easier (there's an option in the corner). In general, though, I like the thought and effort that went into it. The Verge does these sorts of one-time article layouts semi-frequently and I tend to appreciate how they augment the reading.
- nashashmi 2y agoI wish I had one of these competitive folks in my office next to me teaching me new tricks. I used to do this for others. And it was fun and I was popular in Uni and work.
- tamad 2y agoIf anyone's interested, here are some example cases published by the Financial Modeling World Cup: https://fmworldcup.com/product-category/case-studies/excel-esports-cases/ https://fmworldcup.com/product-category/case-studies/excel-e... Most are behind a paywall, unfortunately.
- canadianwriter 2y agoLooks like this one is free: https://fmworldcup.com/product/the-forecasting-power-excelerate-summit-2024/ https://fmworldcup.com/product/the-forecasting-power-exceler... The video alone lays out how these things work, very interesting. My brain started solutioning right away. Lots of fun.
- julianeon 2y agoI would like to see this esport succeed, because I think the numerical skills they're showing off are very commercially useful, and getting more people interested in them would benefit us all.
- JCM9 2y agoThese things are impressive. It is funny that sometimes to do crazy Excel acrobatics to solve what would be a few lines of code in Python or other approaches.
- listenallyall 2y agoStep 1. Open Excel Step 2. Start building your model. Or... Step 1. Open VSCode or PyCharm Step 2. Front-end... hmmm, web? Electron? Qt? Jupyter? Step 3. venv Step 4. pip Step 5. SqlAlchemy? Psycopg? Raw SQL? Import CSV? Step 6. "Where we gonna host this? Local? Cloud? Serverless? Do we need Docker? K8s?" Step 7. git init Step 8. "Hey, do any of you know what these mean on the specs? IRR? COGS? NPV? I studied CompSci, not this lame finance bullshit" Step 9. Call up Fred from Accounting for some help. Step 10. Fred starts with Step 1, above.
- hatthew 2y agoIf we're building straw men I'll contribute Step 1. Open Colab. Step 2. Start building your model.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoStep 3. Ponder the necessity of having a computer more powerful than a potato when you're going to do the work in the cloud anyway, while you wait for the Internet connection to come back. Step 4. Build your model. Step 5. Take a break to watch silly cat videos. Step 6. Lose your model, and all models you previously made, as Google banned your account, and all associated accounts, for the crime of using emojis in a YouTube comment.
- wildzzz 2y agoOpen notepad++, start writing your code, run it in a terminal.
- hiccuphippo 2y agoMy one excel trick is to copy the data to the clipboard then use xclip/pbpaste, pipe it to sort, uniq, sed, etc then back to xclip/pbcopy and paste back to excel.
- unsupp0rted 2y agoEver tried to normalize/parse a list of dates in Excel? It takes a formula a mile long, and I’ve never gotten it to work quite right. E.g. 01/15/2024 1/15/2024 1/15/24 01/03/2024 1/3/2024 1/3/24 Unless you write something in VBscript or whatever Excel uses now, it’s a nightmare.
- HaZeust 2y agoI just do it in Google Sheets with Apps Scripts and then move on from there. function dateFix() { var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getSheetByName("Sheet1"); var dateRange = sheet.getRange("A:A"); var dateValues = dateRange.getValues(); for (var i = 0; i < dateValues.length; i++) { if (dateValues[i][0]) { var fixedDate = fixDate(dateValues[i][0]); if (fixedDate) { sheet.getRange(i + 1, 2).setValue(fixedDate); } } } } function fixDate(dateString) { var datePattern = /^(\d{1,2})\/(\d{1,2})\/(\d{2}|\d{4})$/; var match = dateString.match(datePattern); if (!match) { return null; } var month = match[1].padStart(2, '0'); var day = match[2].padStart(2, '0'); var year = match[3]; if (year.length === 2) { year = '20' + year; } return month + '/' + day + '/' + year; }
- unsupp0rted 2y agoThis is what I'm saying. It takes a dozen LoC to do what Excel is theoretically built to do: format a column of dates "as date".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hot_gril 2y agoDoes DATEVALUE not solve this?
- unsupp0rted 2y agoNope. DATEVALUE fumbles this badly. It's precisely for parsing dates but on a column with 1-digit vs. 2-digit days/months and 2-digit vs. 4-digit years (all in d/m/y format, mind you), it fails in one instance or the other.
- chungy 2y agoI like spreadsheets to get things done quick 'n dirty, but I feel like the threshold to where a spreadsheet becomes painful and the problem is better solved with a database (SQLite would do) and custom application is remarkably low.
- iamsam123 2y agoFair, and the number of people that use Excel and understand this sentiment is also remarkably low.
- bluedino 2y agoOh the ERP world...you get some stubborn user that refuses to learn the reporting language or SQL, and instead wants to load data dumps into Excel. Requires about ten times the hardware to do the same thing.
- tivert 2y agoExcept that there's no real path for non-technical people to learn and do that, but there is on for them to become Excel power users and solve their problems with that tool.
- mandibeet 2y agoYou’re absolutely right. Excel’s accessibility is an ideal tool for non-technical users
- mcdonje 2y agoFor some use cases. If someone is using a spreadsheet as a form app, then sure. But spreadsheets are one of the best tools for analysis work.
- beau_g 2y agoI agonize over this decision a lot. I normally figure the tipping point is about 8 hours of me looking into the data, or planning to revisit it 3 or more times in the future. Whichever way I choose, I normally later decide I made the wrong choice.
- 2y ago
- JCM9 2y agoSpreadsheets have this strange productivity curve where for quick and dirty stuff it’s very fast but go deeper and the spreadsheet turns into this unmanageable mess that greatly reduces productivity long term (vs say using code to do the analysis in a repeatable way). The business world is full of the later. For example, some bonkers monstrosity of a spreadsheet that Bob from finance built 5 years ago. Bob is no longer with the company and said spreadsheet is the only way the TPS reports get done each month so the whole company is held together by this thing nobody really understands.
- n_plus_1_acc 2y agoExactly. Because Excel sheets have no tests or code review
- 7thaccount 2y agoAlthough this may be true, I'm not sure if it always matters. I mean sure, there are some high profile Excel failures that resulted in some big monetary losses, but the same has happened to hundreds of codebases written in a more traditional language that may have also had code review. Also, Excel CAN be reviewed as well. It's all just logic at the end of the day. This argument usually comes from some IT group that takes like 2 years to do something for the users that get so frustrated that they do it themselves. Since the users are maintaining it, they're constantly reviewing it and are the ones with the most functional knowledge. An alternative IT group has to go to this same group anyway.
- personalityson 2y agoWhat is the alternative?
- enjoyyourlife 2y agoAny programming language
- svara 2y ago
- mandibeet 2y agoLove Excel. When I was little was really into exploring its features.
- bbayles 2y agoI had a coworker who could really Go Fast in Excel, and by watching him, learned enough tricks to be able to impress onlookers by flying through computations with keyboard shortcuts. From my perspective, it's gotten harder to use spreadsheet programs efficiently with each new version - the keyboard shortcuts collide more, and everything moving to Office 365 / Google Docs / etc. has made the available tools less powerful.
- surfingdino 2y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg will turn you into a more proficient user of Excel. However, make sure you know the limits of Excel... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
- copperx 2y agoI was expecting a different video :( I had watched that one and it's too basic.
- derkades 2y ago> However, make sure you know the limits of Excel... > > https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988 It's not fair to blame Excel for this, the real issue was using a very outdated file format from before Office 2007
- eps 2y ago> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg That's "You Suck at Excel" talk by Joel Spolsky.
- emeril 2y agoso true - I held on to Excel 2003 until 2018 at which point it really just didn't work anymore on Win10 As someone various colleagues have urged to compete at modeloff years ago, it's really just something one would do if they enjoy it, anyone smart/experienced enough to do modeloff/etc. would also know it's not a good value proposition in terms of winnings/expected value/etc. Also, anyone who writes a formula like "=SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””)" is a bit suspect imo from chatgpt: Here's a practical example to illustrate: Assume cell C3 contains the string "A:B:c". Removing colons results in "ABc". Converting to lowercase results in "abc". Extracting ASCII codes of "a", "b", and "c" gives 97, 98, and 99, respectively. Summing these values gives 97 + 98 + 99 = 294. So, the formula SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””)))))) for the string "A:B:c" results in 294.
- queuebert 2y ago> Four decades later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Excel “the best consumer product we ever created.” He doesn’t just see it as an enterprise tool. It’s for everything. Nadella said he simply can’t imagine a world without Excel. “People couldn’t make sense of numbers before, and now everyone can.” So the best thing they ever did was make a clone of Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc? Sounds about right.
- pilsetnieks 2y agoYou're just trying to be contrarian for imaginary internet points. Satya is right about this one.
- bbarn 2y agoPeople also seem to forget spreadsheets as a concept pre-date computing.
- queuebert 2y agoI'm not trying to be anything. He's demonstrably incorrect. It's just talking points, and I'm calling it out. Microsoft has only ever forced standardization of aggressively mediocre software. In every case, be it OS, spreadsheets, or word processing, there has been a much better competitor who lost out due to market forces, not quality.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoI wanted to make some counter-snark like "I'm pretty sure VisiCalc didn't have mouse support" but I wanted to fact check myself and found a delightful write-up comparing VisiCalc 18 years ahead of Excel, so I will take your side, MS takes credit for someone else's invention as usual, but inventing is only the first step to delivering product. >> "To change a cell, you move the cursor to it with the arrow keys (the original design used a mouse, but the PCs of that day did not have a mouse) and then type the new value" http://www.bricklin.com/firstspreadsheetquestion.htm http://www.bricklin.com/firstspreadsheetquestion.htm
- o239j45o2j 2y ago[flagged]
- nocman 2y agoThanks to reader mode I can read this article. When I opened the link the first time I just closed it immediately. I know they were trying to be "cool", but that was just horrible.
- chewmieser 2y agoIt was pretty bad but they did include a color switcher in the top-right so you can go to white/black.
- copperx 2y agoIt's pretty nostalgic stuff. It reminds me of Wired magazine articles.
- bpicolo 2y agoI liked it. It's ok for some of the internet to be for fun.
- ojbyrne 2y agoI found “teaching each other how to use the MOD function” kind of jarring. I guess it’s the journalist thing where anything involving even simple arithmetic is super challenging.
- emeril 2y agoyeah, that was completely out of left field as compared with =SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””) which, while convoluted and a terrible formula/method to use when sharing spreadsheets with others, is far more nuanced
- alberth 2y agoI’m interested in how they got the CSS to have the text stay within the background grid.
- monarchwadia 2y agoHaven't inspected the DOM (am on phone) but I'm guessing each cell is an individual div, and each section is a multicolumn flex layout.
- heavenlyblue 2y agoI find Google Sheets shortcuts absolutely amazing: you don't need to know any but a single one: the invocation of the omni search box. That gives full-text search into any command you cpuld give to the editor. It's amazing.