Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 435 posts

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

#231

Post by ryanmonroe »

guelo wrote: post #72

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.

Not having a good data entry gui is the biggest benefit of not-excel in my experience. 90% of the time your data has a real source that's not "Jim's head" and you should find a way to impute the data from that source directly, avoiding the ever-present inaccuracies that come from human-imputed data.

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

#232

Post by TabTwo »

pq0ak2nnd wrote: post #219
tomnipotent wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4. Someone who knows the limit is 10 sheets and 20MB Excel can now deal with many gigs of data thanks to PowerPivot and the addition of an in-memory database.

FTFY: "Excel THINKS IT CAN DEAL with many gigs of data thanks to PowerPivot and the addition of an in-memory database." It's so cute when I hit ctrl-downarrow on a blank sheet and Excel sends me to row 1,048,576. Wishful thinking because if I ever filled 1M cells with functions, well... lololololol... time to use JMP...

Cisco Global Pricelist, there are still not enough lines in .xlsx to cover all their products

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

#233

Post by interlocutor »

guelo wrote: post #72

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.

You can use a real database and have Excel like UI, plus data entry, with good reporting tools, here's one: http://pebblereports.com/

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

#234

Post by MisterOctober »

thenipper wrote: post #217
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What the other child poster said. This is 90% of my job. It’s really fun a lot of the time and absolutely brutal the rest of it. Be prepared for things like writing code that checks the color or text styling of cells etc. people encode data in whacky ways

Seriously. I frequently get handed spreadsheets with integers typed as strings... people using strings for things that, heaven's sake, should undoubtedly be booleans... Getting the thing into usable condition takes up more time and energy than the actual analysis they desire

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

#235

Post by tomnipotent »

TabTwo wrote: post #232
pq0ak2nnd wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTFY: "Excel THINKS IT CAN DEAL with many gigs of data thanks to PowerPivot and the addition of an in-memory database." It's so cute when I hit ctrl-downarrow on a blank sheet and Excel sends me to row 1,048,576. Wishful thinking because if I ever filled 1M cells with functions, well... lololololol... time to use JMP...

Cisco Global Pricelist, there are still not enough lines in .xlsx to cover all their products

If you're putting the data in Excel's new data model, this is no longer a problem. I regularly have files with tens of millions of rows of data which pivot tables can work against with sub-second aggregations across multiple columns.

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

#236

Post by philwelch »

pmiller2 wrote: post #190
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 twe…

I don’t understand how editing a number in an excel file is any easier than editing a number in a text file. What was it that made the difference?

Aside from the UI advantages others mentioned, another possible benefit is that, with the right formulas set up, you can instantly eyeball the combined effect changing one factor has on every other factor that’s derived from it. I don’t know how important that normally is, but I play a lot of Paradox games, and those games are almost entirely governed by numbers that have combinatoric effects on gameplay.

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

#237

Post by MisterOctober »

guelo wrote: post #72

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.

There is iron in these words. I love using SQL and hate using Excel, but when it comes to common statistical calculations such as standard deviation or a Pearson function, or if you want to generate a graph and can't [or don't want to] use a tool such as Tableau or Crystal, Excel really is easier [or, at minimum, quicker] for generating output sometimes.

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

#238

Post by JetSpiegel »

brianberns wrote: post #229
mohammedbin wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance firms send a clear message- fuck with us and we completely ruin you. And before anybody downvotes me- please inform yourself- not a single person had to pay a penny more than what they had to pay before the price increase, except the insurance firms.

You realize that insurance companies pass their costs to their customers, right?

I thought the point of insurance companies was that the customers wouldn't pay the full cost.

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

#239

Post by LaszloKv »

guelo wrote: post #72

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.

I wondered the same thing for a while. Just this week I came across https://www.knack.com/. It looks pretty good so far but I haven't really explored it yet to see how well it works out.

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

#240

Post by paulryanrogers »

clairity wrote: post #178

the best i've seen is a woman who did corporate financial planning and analysis. i could ask a question and she would have a pivot table spit out the answer as i finished the question. i consider myself a good* (but not great) excel user, but she was amazing! * having done complex financial modeling incorporating monte carlo simulation for predictive what-if analysis

How did she handle the precision problem?
Post reply on HN