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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

#251

Post by mr_toad »

samspenc wrote: post #55

I've always wondered: these clunky Excel sheets are used at billion-dollar companies. Why don't they invest in building a sane web application (or similar) that can do all the validation and calculations in a much better looking interface that is suited for the job / application?

The best reason is probably that the person creating the system doesn’t know at the outset exactly how, or even if, what they are building will work.

Excel often gets used for prototyping new models. A new model for allocating overheads - try it in Excel and see what the effects will be. A new forecasting method - get a ballpark estimate of the impact on the bottom line in Excel.

Once the model is in Excel it isn’t cheap or easy to get it out, so it often just stays that way, accumulating technical debt.

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

#252

Post by srazzaque »

The true story of almost every finance/tech project:

Trader: "I've got a problem with my spreadsheet." Tech: "You shouldn't be using Excel for that. Let's make this better." Trader: "OK - how?" Tech: (Proposes solution - involving databases, redundancy, risk management, GUI, streaming prices, booking, etc.) Trader: "Great! So I guess at that point there (points at whiteboard), we can import it back into Excel?" Tech: "Sure." (facepalm).

This said - Python is fast becoming the new crack/Excel for front-office. Thank God for that.

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

#253

Post by rahimnathwani »

mynameishere wrote: post #243
lozaning wrote: post #129

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

He's got a Bloomberg console and he's typing data manually from a PDF into Excel. That's just got to be the incorrect workflow. If not, there is room for huge improvement in financial tools.

There is value in thinking about the numbers as you build a model. Manually typing them in helps.

Just like Zed Shaw's LPTHW tells you to type in the code from the book, and not copy-paste.

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

#254

Post by __blockcipher__ »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #75
ams6110 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I took a stab at R about a year ago and found it utterly confusing.

As a non-programmer (my job is in business intelligence so the most “programming” I do is in sql) I found R really easy to understand and use. Within hours of starting with it I was already doing part of my job in it, especially thanks to Tidyverse libraries. I did once try to learn Java, which I did found incredibly confusing and impossible to do anything useful with.

do you mind if I derail the thread for a little bit?

[if yes] I currently work at a small-medium sized company, and we have one BI guy. Our ops team is ~5 people, and 1-2 of the more junior guys are tasked with doing everything necessary to support the BI guy. which basically means making sure the BI software is installed properly on the container, configured properly, has access to the db, and it comes up properly etc

BI is a critical business function, so it's a pretty high priority, but the process is way less automated and skillfully crafted than the other parts of the system, mainly cause everyone hates it and only barely understands what the BI system (in this case, pentaho) actually does. it's no coincidence that the most junior engineers often end up doing it (with occasional but pretty infrequent help from the seniors when blocked)

what i've been wondering is, what exactly does "a BI guy" need their system to do? I read a bit about ETL systems, but haven't done much research. I assume the job of an ETL system is to pull data from the production database(s), clean it up as necessary, and use that data to calculate whatever business metrics are required? is the software more about making it easy for the BI team to use an interface to craft their queries/dataflow/etc?

basically my motivation is I've mulled over the idea of having the ETL system be written in-house. the benefits being potentially smoother and more native operation and in a way that's more seamless to integrate with monitoring, alerting, automated jobs etc. my guess is that such a project would end up being a waste of time in 98% of cases, especially because you need a usable frontend for the BI guy.

so, if I may, what exactly is business intelligence / what do you do on a day-to-day basis? I'm pretty experienced with traditional finance/investing jobs, eg reading 10-q's, 10-k's, balance sheets etc, and using the data to calculate cash flow, opex, gross margin, and every other metric you could conceivably want. But I'd never heard of "business intelligence" until starting an internship several months ago.

thanks, and no worries if you don't have time to respond / if this is too off-topic.

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

#255

Post by superioritycplx »

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.…

Thanks for posting the video. Please do some research on Martin's story.

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

#257

Post by Klathmon »

LaszloKv wrote: post #239
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.

I can't speak to the product, but I did interview and worked a trial week at knack about a year ago and they are a very bright group of people that are hell-bent on making and maintaining a great product.

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

#258

Post by Insanity »

Nadya wrote: post #133
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

Word of advice - slow down your sliders. I read at an absurdly fast pace and I barely finish the "Our Experts" excerpts before it scrolls. I know, from testing, that I can mouse over them to pause them but that isn't intuitive to people who don't build these sorts of things as their day job. That being said - bookmarked. I've needed this in the past and while I may not need it right now I probably will in the future.

Pretty good advice - the sliders are incredibly fast. (I'm not a fast reader though).

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

#259

Post by busyant »

1000units wrote: post #244
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.…

He's not heartless, but he is very often slandered and misunderstood.

> very often slandered and misunderstood.

You mean the guy who wrote this? Clearly, he's a diamond in the rough /s.

'Then a letter from Mr. Shkreli came to his home, addressed to his wife.

“Your husband has stolen $1.6 million from me,” it read.

“Your pathetic excuse of a husband,” the letter added, “needs to get a real job that does not depend on fraud to succeed.”

“I hope to see you and your four children homeless,” the letter said. “I will do whatever I can to assure this. Your husband’s arrogance is infuriating, and making an enemy out of me is a mistake.”'

-NYTimes, 18 July 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/business/dealbook/former-...

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

#260

Post by Klathmon »

dmos62 wrote: post #184
zaphar wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure which is worse. Being that awk/sed guy or being that Git guy.

Who uses "guys" anymore? Didn't stackoverflow replace that?

SO often can take hours to weeks for a good answer, and that's assuming it doesn't just get closed as a dupe when the other one doesn't answer the question.

A good "guy" (or girl!) is a phone call away and can often solve the problem in minutes.

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