301–310 of 435 posts
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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.
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 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…
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
But man are they fun to use once you get the hang of them.
Hmmm. This helps me realize one of the many things excel-should-be-replaced by code proponents miss.
There will be far more excel masters over time, than language masters. Simply because excel remains stable, and is not prone to flavor of the year issues.
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So, there is such a thing as a free lunch?
The funny thing is you're being glib, but Markowitz literally is quoted as saying diversification is the closest thing there is in finance to a free lunch.
I have a joke I tell about Excel: Excel is amazing, because it's the wrong tool for everything! Which is really impressive, since there aren't many tools you can do everything with! I realize it's not a very funny joke, but I do think it's true.
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Probably table representation. It's relatively hard to implement something similar using text format. You can have row for every unit in the game with columns corresponding to various characteristics. It looks very natural in Excel, but it would require quite a lot of formatting and errors with text file. Also Excel could have formulas which might be useful somewhere and supporting formulas in config file is another…
Then use a real database. You probably have a SQLite dependency anyway, so take advantage of it. Or don't, since SCMs are much better at diffing plain text than either. > Also Excel could have formulas which might be useful somewhere and supporting formulas in config file is another level of complexity and almost certainly it'll be worse than Excel. You'll have an easier time reimplementing Excel's formula system tha…
I'm not sure you understood what the parent was saying? This seems like a non sequitur.
In a spreadsheet, derived values can be updated instantly. Say you want to upgrade a bandit from leather armor to chainmail (6 or so equipment items changed), and then verify that his total defense and modified movement speed are still within reasonable ranges for the part of the game where he appears. With a text file, you've got some arithmetic to do. With a spreadsheet, it's there at a glance.
Or say your enemies are missing too much, and you want to give them +10% accuracy across the board, for all of 50+ enemies. In a text file, that's a lot of cursoring around. In a database, you could knock together a query to do it, but that still might take a couple of minutes, depending. In a spreadsheet, I could do it in 15 seconds. (And if I screw it up, a couple of Ctrl-Zs puts everything back where it started. That's not so easy in a database.)
And, y'know, a lot of programmers really underestimate the value of good formatting. A database can spit out nice columnar tables easily, but a spreadsheet can do things like put borders between stat clusters related to different categories; automatically color-code data so you can see at a glance what the highest and lowest values in a given column are, or spot out-of-range derived values; add alternate-row shading to make it easier to scan across a long row; and on and on. That is useful. It lets you find and correlate the data you want faster with fewer errors. Not everything has to be viewed in flat text.
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It is sad to me how effective the smear campaign against Shkreli was.
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.
Here’s vanity fair, with their profile on him.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/martin-shkreli-pharm...
He went to jail for securities fraud. If he is as smart as he and others say he is, then his culpability is absolute.
I can be sympathetic, but not willfully blind to actual fault.
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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?
Both approaches have tradeoffs:
- TSV files can have so many columns that you can't really edit them in a text editor, you'll never find your place. Some of these in D2 have more than 256 columns.
- INI files don't give you a full list of configurable parameters, so you might not even know what flags the engine supports if they're mentioned only once in the entire file or not mentioned at all. Some object types in Red Alert 2 support over 700 flags, not all of them are actually used in the default config…
- two items described in a TSV file are easier to compare than two INI sections, with INI you need a second editor window and some ordering of the keys to make sense of things.
- on the other hand, diffing a TSV file for changes is a lot more challenging.
At the time, I remember thinking how a proper database would make this easier.
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I have also seen a game where a \n was used as a record separator and \r was used to insert newlines into the text string within a record. Fun times when your text editor tries to "intelligently" handle and normalize line endings.
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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.
Instead the client was given an api to query and no batch processing of information was allowed.
I’ve encountered this idea somewhere, and fortunately have never had to deal with such a broken scenario. Getting piecemeal information is infuriating.
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…