281–290 of 435 posts
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
sweats, "what don't I know?", watches hour long video (v. quickly), wipes brow "phew - it's just basic" .
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Know your pain, I know how to use grep/awk/sed/..., now I am "logs investigation" expert too often, ugh..
I'm not sure which is worse. Being that awk/sed guy or being that Git guy.
Step 1: Look in .git/logs/HEAD and roll them back to whatever state they were in before the mess they're in now.
Step 2: Forward them the e-mail you keep handy that lists the only 3–5 commands they should ever use, verbatim, without deviation.
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's less "not wanting to help people" and more "once people know you're 'the Excel person' they come to you for everything to do with Excel". It's very similar to being 'the computer person' in a family/group of friends and everyone coming to you with all their various tech support questions. At a certain point, it starts ruining your productivity since you get taken out of your regular job to do these one time help…
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> 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...
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.
Some of them would use our software to print various reports and then manually enter those printed values in to excel.
Even worse, the software could export to a format excel could process so it wasn't necessary in the first place.
Don't expect to be disrupting banking anytime soon though. Banks are incredibly risk averse, especially when it comes to messing with expensive legacy software that has been working for decades.
At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi-million dollar yearly licenses.
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Does being good at excel mean that one knows the shortcuts of navigation? The video indeed showed that Martin knew his ALT+, CTRL+ etc., but is that what differentiates an excel pro from a newbie? I thought that 'knowing' excel goes much deeper than the navigational shortcuts: solver, array formulas, powerpivot, vba etc. etc. - this is what I'd call more sophisticated excel features. If someone clicks the number form…
In my 25+ years of using Excel, here's what makes a pro: 1. Someone who knows how to use two dimensional TABLE()s and vector functions. 2. Someone who can implement an imperative convergence (such as Newton/Raphson or non-plug-in goal seek) 3. Someone who can audit their dependencies and not shit out dozens of unused vars 4. Someone who knows the limit is 10 sheets and 20MB. :) Visual Basic and shortcuts do not a pro…
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.
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This was my reaction to Flash. It's not a "real" programming environment is what everyone told me. Yea but it was a great authoring tool for non hard-core programmers. I helped a designer write a few simple puzzle games in Flash and it was overall a productive experience. Had I attempted to do that in html/JS I'm not sure it would have gone so smoothly. I haven't tried to write web games in the last 10 years so maybe…
Has anything replaced Flash as a productive way to build animated games?
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
Nice idea, and the monetization pricing seems on point without being excessive. How do you vet the 'experts' for your service? How do I know using your service, that expert will be 'better than me' ?