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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

#311

Post by DCoder »

semitext wrote: post #17
mynameisvlad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is my experience working in offices like law firms that are filled with people that have limited technical aptitude for using software. Showing any sort of competency is a recipe for increasing your workload with no conferred benefits.

It's quite similar to being a senior programmer and assisting junior colleagues instead of doing their own work. Though in this case I suppose the blame falls on management for not allocating time properly.

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

#312

Post by intended »

clausok wrote: post #191
intended wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software. Source needed. There’s crap tons of excel help, and the amount of excel queries+answers will easily put other languages to shame. The difference is that excel is not usually treated as an engineering tool, with the various rituals that go with it. In contrast, take a look at how financial analysts lear…

>excel is not usually treated as an engineering tool This is a good point. I've seen C# & Python devs who read the release notes and adopt new features of C#\Python with alacrity while at the same time their Excel development work, which they spend considerable time on, evolves not at all. E.g., still using IF(ISERROR(...)) rather than IFERROR; VLOOKUP rather than INDEX(MATCH()); slow & brittle array functions rather…

Ooh aggregate, I didn’t know of that. Seems like overkill for my use cases. And as you know, there is no kill like overkill

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

#313

Post by intended »

css wrote: post #179
intended wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software. Source needed. There’s crap tons of excel help, and the amount of excel queries+answers will easily put other languages to shame. The difference is that excel is not usually treated as an engineering tool, with the various rituals that go with it. In contrast, take a look at how financial analysts lear…

So, yes, there is content that exists. What does not exist are real-world examples of problem solving a la open source. As I said in another comment, debugging Excel is incredibly opaque (#NA) and most people will never find what they are looking for when they Google "=GETPIVOTDATA #NA error." There is no GitHub for Excel workbooks where people build and extend generalized solutions that people can read, understand,…

You can get many, many excel sheets and examples which highlight problems and provide solutions. You can dowload a 3D graphics engine in excel if you so desire, as well as more mundane examples and videos.

It’s not couched in engineering terms, but effectively a body of work and reference does exist to help people use excel - I’ve constantly used it to improve myself.

It is definitely not made by engineers and coders, but by normal people and excel jockeys.

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

#314

Post by tomnipotent »

intended wrote: post #301
tomnipotent wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this in 2016, and do you have to do anything specific to make it load large data sets ?

Actually much earlier in 2012, when Excel first shipped with xVelocity branded PowerPivot. It supports a new data model that reminds me of Microsoft Access in some ways (drag & drop relationships etc). This is a whole different beast from copy/pasting data into sheets - in fact, the data doesn't show up in sheets by default and you usually have to add other things (like pivot tables) to take advantage of it.

Microsoft is a sleeping giant in BI self-service right now, and the things they've been "quietly" adding (only if you don't follow them) are actually very compelling. I actually run a Windows VM on my MBP just so I can run Power BI.

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

#315

Post by intended »

1000units wrote: post #246
bsheir74 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or maybe he is a peer of ours and we actually know something about him beyond ridiculous and disgusting media depictions. Here's a fun question for you as an HN'er: what was the name of Shkreli's pharmaceutical company?

Starts with R? Checks... retrophin.

Shkreli was one of many finance types who have fully drunk the koolaid. He is not alone, and the others too would be prosecuted if people had the time and awareness to be incensed with the culture.

In his defense, shkrelli didn’t know he was a tool. On the one hand singing praises of the free market and on the other taking advantage of every loophole someone could find.

I mean the argument that “no body has to pay a dime more.” Is so patently ludicrous for someone who works in finance, that it can only be called disingenuous.

The difference between HN and New York is that finance thinks it’s ok. HN was founded by people/culture who saw Wall Street as everything they didn’t want to be. (And now a sad reminder of how money changes perception)

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

#316

Post by ChuckMcM »

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

It is interesting to see how many of the things that could not be done in Google sheets when that video was made are now available.

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

#317

Post by toast0 »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #238
brianberns wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point of insurance is that the customers pay the full cost. (And a little extra). It's just that customers share the full cost of all the customers, not their individual costs.

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

#318

Post by intended »

tomnipotent wrote: post #314
intended wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this in 2016, and do you have to do anything specific to make it load large data sets ?

Actually much earlier in 2012, when Excel first shipped with xVelocity branded PowerPivot. It supports a new data model that reminds me of Microsoft Access in some ways (drag & drop relationships etc). This is a whole different beast from copy/pasting data into sheets - in fact, the data doesn't show up in sheets by default and you usually have to add other things (like pivot tables) to take advantage of it. Microsof…

Is this power bi..? Ah, I think it is. I’ve really tried to get up to speed with it, but it feels so alien to normal excel in many ways. I feel an existential dread when I drop a column in power BI.

But yeah, it’s very powerful. It’s very sql like in the way you have to treat actions and data.

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

#319

Post by kkarakk »

lph wrote: post #201
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

20 minutes in: the dawning horror that, yes, I'm watching a video about Excel for fun

using excel isn't not fun, it's just that the mental complexity of excel is offloaded to the user. the user keeps track of the various computations and transformations. anything more than a quick check on some data exponentially taxes the brain leading to an ever increasing dislike of the software

being handed someone else's excel sheet is an infuriating experience because they're also handing you whatever convoluted mental model they used

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

#320

Post by nerdponx »

shawn wrote: post #170
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.…

Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag There's no reason to couch your comment like this. He's not a heartless douchebag, and the claims of him causing medicine shortages were greatly exaggerated.

Citation needed? Seriously, if there's evidence to morally exhonerate him, let it be public information.
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