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The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

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Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#101

Post by octo6 »

severine wrote: post #98
octo6 wrote: post #63

Shameless plug - we actually founded a service [1] that provides Excel experts on-demand, within 30 to 60 seconds. So if you're tired of being the "Excel expert" at work feel free to pass them on to us. Also happy to answer any questions. Tidbit: Most popular questions tend to be formulas, vlookups, conditional formatting, pivots. [1] https://www.excelchat.co

Is it english only?

yes, currently all English. But the expert opens a shared sheet that you work together in, so you can collaborate in Google sheet or Excel. Hope that makes up for English only

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#102

Post by toyg »

incadenza wrote: post #99
OskarS wrote: post #86

You know who's awesome at Excel? Martin Shkreli. You know, the Wall Street asshole who's in jail now? A while back, someone told me "hey, dude, there are these videos on YouTube where Martin Shkreli uses Excel, and they're fucking magic. It's like the first time you watched someone who's really good at Vim. " It's true: [0]. Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag, he's fucking awesome at using Excel.…

To think he could have chalked up the price hikes to an Excel formatting error! I think we all would have related. Real missed opportunity.

But maybe he’s so good, nobody would have believed he made an error.

Or maybe he did make an error, but didn’t want to admit it to avoid damaging his “l33t excel skillz” rep. That would be the stuff of legend.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#103

Post by joering2 »

OskarS wrote: post #86

You know who's awesome at Excel? Martin Shkreli. You know, the Wall Street asshole who's in jail now? A while back, someone told me "hey, dude, there are these videos on YouTube where Martin Shkreli uses Excel, and they're fucking magic. It's like the first time you watched someone who's really good at Vim. " It's true: [0]. Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag, he's fucking awesome at using Excel.…

Since we are in douchebags ratings, it is fair to point Heather Bresch which is much bigger heartless bitch than Shkreli. If there were justice in USA, she would be behind bars!

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/09/21/mylan-ceo-he...

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#104

Post by grigjd3 »

css wrote: post #5

I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort. Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software…

It isn't about being helpful or not, but about letting yourself be abused or not. Often times, the only difference between myself with a technology and the person asking me for help is that I am willing to read the documentation while the other isn't. Often, the person seeking my help doesn't even realize they are abusing me but still, if I point out that they can read the documentation as well as I can, I get a look of disgust. There is countless sources of documentation, howtos, and useful tricks in both document and video form on Excel available for free on the internet. People just refuse to use that, even when I point them to it. More over, if I hold firm and say you can read this yourself, the person often will just ignore me and try to find someone else to do their work for them.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#105

Post by npmaile »

imhoguy wrote: post #53
dragonshed wrote: post #16

I suck at excel, but confession: i know how to make Installer programs and I don't tell anyone anything about them, EVER. I learned how to make MSIs packages and NSIS installers about 15 years ago and it didn't stop until I completely redacted the info and experience and changed jobs.

Know your pain, I know how to use grep/awk/sed/..., now I am "logs investigation" expert too often, ugh..

I feel like grep/awk/sed (actually just perl) should be taught in High School just due to how often I find myself using them in day to day life. Maybe not even the entire programs/languages, but just regular expressions.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#106

Post by weliketocode »

This article seems like it was written 10 years ago.

BI, Technical Account Managers, Sales Engineers, and Finance People should all have a decent excel grasp at minimum.

Is it that common for there to be desperate needs for minimal competence in organizations?

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#107

Post by alecco »

OskarS wrote: post #86

You know who's awesome at Excel? Martin Shkreli. You know, the Wall Street asshole who's in jail now? A while back, someone told me "hey, dude, there are these videos on YouTube where Martin Shkreli uses Excel, and they're fucking magic. It's like the first time you watched someone who's really good at Vim. " It's true: [0]. Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag, he's fucking awesome at using Excel.…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw#t=1h1m

He is fast typing but I've seen spreadsheet jockeys do a lot more work much faster. They know all the shortcuts. They know all the obscure functions.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#108

Post by csours »

kelvin0 wrote: post #34

There should be a gameified excel online course. You've got challenges which you must overcome by learning ever increasing advanced excel concepts. This would have people more 'engaged' at learning the concepts instead of trying to find the 'excel person' and dump their woes onto them. Excel is great product (I hate it) but so often misused and abused by technically challenged individuals.

Heck, this could be an excel workbook itself!

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#109

Post by csours »

pge wrote: post #71
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #51

Excel would be fine if people didn't keep creating spreadsheets with it.

it’s even worse when they use it as a database...

And even worse when you make full featured applications with it...

But the absolute worst is when people turn excel based apps into a grid on a webpage.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#110

Post by wyoung2 »

pge wrote: post #71
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #51

Excel would be fine if people didn't keep creating spreadsheets with it.

it’s even worse when they use it as a database...

What's the alternative?

Microsoft leaves Access out of many of its Office license plans, so it's an extra cost add-on to most people, hence uninteresting.

Filemaker is very nice, but even more costly in most cases.

I've never used Base in LibreOffice, but I also don't see people sharing their Base files, from which I infer that it isn't very popular. (Could be my myopia, though.)

Even if LibreOffice Base is gaining users much more rapidly than I think it is, they're missing the cloud component for offline and mobile users, which acts as a brake on adoption, given Office365 and Google Sheets pushing people to stick with spreadsheets when they want to share tabular data across sites and to mobile users.

Collabora Online is moving LibreOffice into the cloud, but they haven't done anything with Base, as far as I can see.

Apple's iWork web apps are very nice, and they have native clients on many of the platforms I care about, but there's no GUI database component at all.

Without a free, cloud-capable, normal-person focused GUI/web database system, I don't see Excel-as-database going away.

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