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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

#291

Post by kinleyd »

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.…

One powerful use of Excel is through Apache POI. Replace VB with the language of your choice, run all your logic and tests in that language, and spit out a spreadsheet at the end of it, all neatly formatted for your end users.

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

#292

Post by paultopia »

As someone who finds himself called upon to operate in a lot of situations where Microsoft products are called for---I do wish the unix philosophy would have taken hold in business software.

Excel genuinely is very hard to use. As is Word, as is Photoshop/Illustrator, etc. Personally, I find those problems substantially more difficult than ordinary programming. Because you have a substantial fraction of the horsepower of an ordinary programming language, but hidden behind a forest of menus and semi-incomprehensible icons and weird terminology and poor documentation.

At least with word processing we have the capacity to strip it down to something resembling the unix philosophy, thanks to toolchains like markdown + pandoc. But for spreadsheets, what is there that's lighter than excel?

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

#293

Post by sk5t »

zer00eyz wrote: post #210
codazoda wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Analytics team at my company does this. ETL's we call them (Export, Transform, Load). Some of us are app devs and some are data analysts; there's cross-over. We do other things too, but moving data between systems is a big part of it. As for job titles; Software Engineer (or Developer) of Analytics, Data Analyst, Data Scientist, or something along those lines. Probably varies by company.

I have a story that may amuse you. Recently I worked on a contract doing some data ingestion that the resident team didn't want to deal with. They had been provided a JSON api to get what should have been a batch file. The owner/api creator said "this is good enough we won't accommodate you." So much for sensible data transmission and batch processing. Because I have had to deal with these sorts of things before I ha…

What do you mean by "batch file"? Surely not a .bat.

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

#294

Post by [deleted] »

gowld wrote: post #180
foobarrio wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

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

#295

Post by sk5t »

dragonshed wrote: post #16

I suck at excel, but confession: i know how to make Installer programs and I don't tell anyone anything about them, EVER. I learned how to make MSIs packages and NSIS installers about 15 years ago and it didn't stop until I completely redacted the info and experience and changed jobs.

Yeesh. It took about one day of poking about, maybe a decade ago, to realize that Windows installers are a one-way ticket to crazytown.

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

#296

Post by sk5t »

maxxxxx wrote: post #80
izacus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, the problem is that you also get all the blame as well. Once you "fix" a computer, everything that will break will suddenly be your fault.

Very true. I once installed a printer driver in a friend's company. I got blamed for missing files by several employees during the following weeks.

I've heard that auto mechanics know these as "Ever since you..." stories.

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

#298

Post by kevinpet »

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.

Filemaker was great for this. Around 2000, you could get an amazing level of productivity for building small custom relatively complicated apps without writing any real code.

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

#299

Post by atr_gz »

ac29 wrote: post #124
octo6 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mentioned this elsewhere but we created a startup that does exactly this [1]. We charge a lot less than $20 though! Happy to answer any questions [1] https://www.excelchat.co

How is the pricing sustainable at $20/hour or $30/month "unlimited"? Do you just employ overseas where labor is cheap? Or are you counting on people paying $20 for questions that only take a minute or two to answer?

From their website, it says they pay experts from $2-$10 an hour.

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

#300

Post by intended »

pq0ak2nnd wrote: post #200
Bishonen88 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Someone who knows the limit is 10 sheets and 20MB. :)

Hahaha. Isn’t that the truth.

It’s come to a point that there is only one true workflow for actual business excel work.

1) Back up your source data and then never touch it.

2) Clean source data, make sure you use tables.

3) As soon as possible, separate data from calculation.

All work, will probably be used more than once. So there is never really anything like “scratch work”. So when you open excel make it a point for it to be readable.

I’ve taken To ensuring calculated fields are at the end of the table. With a column header indicating that this is not native to the original data set.

Document your weird steps.

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