241–250 of 435 posts
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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.
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It is sad to me how effective the smear campaign against Shkreli was.
There was no campaign. Nobody met in a smoke filled room and decided they were going to ruin the guy's life. What actuallu happened was the guy was a douchebag, and people called him out for it. HN is the only place I find people defending that guy. I suspect it's because this forum is full of douchebags who identify with him.
If 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 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.…
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.
> People say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Any visual DB client? > Where are the easy adhoc reports? Isn't that just queries? Then throw it into a view to "save". > Where are the forms? No idea what you're looking for here, but this sounds a lot like your first question.
Forms are data entry views that save to the backing tables. Nowadays the most well-known forms are probably https://docs.google.com/forms/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is sad to me how effective the smear campaign against Shkreli was.
There was no campaign. Nobody met in a smoke filled room and decided they were going to ruin the guy's life. What actuallu happened was the guy was a douchebag, and people called him out for it. HN is the only place I find people defending that guy. I suspect it's because this forum is full of douchebags who identify with him.
Here's a fun question for you as an HN'er: what was the name of Shkreli's pharmaceutical company?
I'm "the excel guy" for a lab of about 100 people, and it is indeed a challenge sometimes. Mostly I just yell at them and tell them to stop using excel sheets as makeshift databases. Then I yell at them some more and make them switch from formulas (which, being written in reverse Polish, are terrible to debug) over to macros. Then I yell at them for recording macros instead of writing them themselves. Then I just do…
> I just yell at them and tell them to stop using excel sheets as makeshift databases. What do you recommend to them as an alternative for makeshift databases? There could be a nice product opportunity for a lightweight database web app that is like Microsoft Access or a spreadsheet without formulas. Airtable probably fits that bill, but even it might be more complicated than many people need.
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.
That's where the "Power" suite enters the picture (Power Query, Power Pivot, etc.). Great way for non-technical people to get database data into Excel for reporting/analysis. I've trained plenty of people with only basic Excel skills to use it. The best part (for them) is that it's like a macro, so you can rerun it with new data any time.
You can even use those to pull an existing SSRS report directly into Excel.
Google Sheets > Excel