People say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Where are the easy adhoc reports? Where are the forms? I guess if you're on Windows you can use Microsoft Access, but that's the only accesible tool I know of that doesn't require a team of programmers or an enterprise license for some Oracle/SAP type monstrosity.
The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
151–160 of 435 posts
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. You, sir, have not been the victim of help vampires. > A lot of people struggle to find answers specifically because of this lack of community around using Excel as a tool I am unaware of this lack of information. Perhaps I am not doing the really, really, really exotic stuff but every question I have ever had on Excel has been answerable via Goog…
The ability to compose queries and sift through google results and find the answer to a question in a timely manner is a skill in and of itself that not everyone has.
You never learn if you just depend on others.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#153There is a paywall sadly. I myself have stopped using excel for the last 3 years. My company runs on GSuite, and I love how there can be one source of truth updated in real-time for 1 document. For the better and the worst, some of our internal processes are Google sheets centric now. I believe the next generation of business will be "fighting" google sheets intrusion in operation processes. Some processes are fine i…
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#154Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#155If we're sharing awesome excel videos, You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky has to be among the best I've ever seen. Joel, being on the team that made excel, has an incredible amount of excel knowledge. The video is meant to be in the same vein as the You Suck at Photoshop videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
You get a perceived performance boost when you get a keyboard with a sonorous click.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#156The widespread use of the Excel grid layout may explain why people seem to have a high tolerance for improperly-sized UIs.
Personally it drives me crazy to see things truncated all over the place, peppered with useless empty cells, for no reason other than “somebody shoehorned this sparse data into a grid and never looked back”. It’s like people just don’t see how much time they’re wasting constantly doing a mental reconstruction of their poorly-described data because they can’t SEE most of it.
We really need better tools.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get people who have trouble with Pivot tables. Literally drag and drop things until you get what you need.
If you're doing a simple Pivot, sure. But here are the things I run into constantly. 1. When I group by days (i.e. group by 7 day chunks), why does Excel refuse to sort chronologically? 2. How do I make my Grand Total column add up all the subtotals when those subtotals are averages of the underlying records? (It will only do an overall average) 3. Why can't I collapse just this row without collapsing the counterpart…
Are there actual answers to these questions, or are they all "tough luck. now that you have an expert's confirmation that it's impossible, stop trying and go on with your life" ?
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#158People say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Where are the easy adhoc reports? Where are the forms? I guess if you're on Windows you can use Microsoft Access, but that's the only accesible tool I know of that doesn't require a team of programmers or an enterprise license for some Oracle/SAP type monstrosity.
I read a thing a few months back about some Western game developers collaborating with Japanese counterparts for the first time, and their biggest surprise was that a whole lot of game data is stored in an Excel file during development. If you want to change an enemy's stats or a physics parameter, you don't dig through config files with a text editor, you just pull up the spreadsheet. Reportedly it made a lot of tweak-test-repeat work much quicker.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#159I've always said that if I ever do one thing with my child, I'll make sure they understand how to use VLOOKUP in excel. If I do that, I'm pretty sure they'll be set for life. Every office I've worked in those that can perform VLOOKUP's correctly become the Wizards of the office.
> Every office I've worked in those that can perform VLOOKUP's correctly become the Wizards of the office
Some of them don't use the power wisely, though, and create poor clunky databases spread over dozens of sheets.
It would be nice if MS added more Access like data integration as an adjunct to spreadsheets. The current ODBC functionality is clunky at best and doesn't work well for shared documents.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#160People say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Where are the easy adhoc reports? Where are the forms? I guess if you're on Windows you can use Microsoft Access, but that's the only accesible tool I know of that doesn't require a team of programmers or an enterprise license for some Oracle/SAP type monstrosity.
Obligatory Comment: "Excel as a Database" by Rory Blyth, circa early 2000's. "As a developer, you've probably, at some unfortunate point in your life (possibly several points, actually), been handed an Excel file that has been crammed full of 'data' by someone in marketing and told to 'do something with it.' " http://wyorock.com/excelasadatabase.htm
As a developer, what should I do if I actually want to do that? Because I get a lot of satisfaction out of massaging messy wads of data into a clean, uniform, accessible form. Is there a job title or something I should look for?