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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

#411

Post by Nadya »

SahAssar wrote: post #361
Nadya wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why auto-sliding sliders with text are always a terrible idea. You can never sync them to all users read speed, so some always think they are too fast, and some always think they are too slow.

They should be able to be paused, controlled for prev/next movement, last a minimum of 3 seconds (and longer for large pieces of text). If it is too slow the user can click "next" without it being an annoying experience. If it is too fast - even with the ability to go back - it is an annoying experience without the ability to pause it. But it is always better to be too slow than to be too fast.

My honest advice would be [1] and it should be designed in such a way that all reviews are visible, perhaps in 3 columns, instead of a stupid carousel slider. But slowing down the slider would be more trivial - as I expect very few people are actually able to read all of the text of any of the excerpts before it changes on them.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/time-limits-pause...

[1] http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/

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

#412

Post by pimlottc »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #379
kkarakk wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In investment banking, one of the first things you are taught is excel formatting and how to write readable excel. How to write clear and concise comments, what color different cell types should be (black for formulas, blue for inputs, green for links to other cells, red for weird formulas), how to structure large files (when to make a new tab vs keeping a monolithic file), when to break up a formula into multiple ce…

I'm intrigued by this, are these standard codified and documented anywhere? Would love to know more about Excel best practices.

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

#413

Post by shostack »

kkarakk wrote: post #319
lph wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I was in the agency world, I was frequently inheriting spreadsheets from other teams that needed to be updated with new data, or often overhauled completely.

You definitely have a lot of moments similar to reviewing others' code where you go "Hmmm, this doesn't seem to make sense. Am I missing something? Or did they just do this flat out wrong?" Often the answer was "yes."

There's also a radical spectrum of Excel skills (much like coding). I took a 50MB Excel report that took hours to update manually and brought it down to Whenever possible now, if I suspect a spreadsheet tool or report I've built is too complex to grok just by quick perusal of some formulas and clear naming conventions, I document the hell out of it in a separate sheet or our knowledgebase. The pain of deciphering those things is real, and I would never wish it on anyone.

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

#414

Post by shostack »

function_seven wrote: post #182
PeterisP wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there actual answers to these questions, or are they all "tough luck. now that you have an expert's confirmation that it's impossible, stop trying and go on with your life" ?

Most are "tough luck" ones, a few are expert-help required. The most common way to solve a pivot table problem is to add a column to the underlying data. Kind of a "manual pre-pivot" in a lot of cases. There aren't direct solutions to the list of problems, but there usually is a workaround. Some of the problems (like being unable to format dates when grouping by days) are just "tough luck" I don't know what's going o…

Or, if you're fairly confident the pivot is fairly static and you just need to tack something on, then don't be afraid to do it if a custom calculation isn't solving it for you.

It surprises people but there's really no reason you can't do that if you just need it to work and/or look a certain way.

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

#415

Post by function_seven »

shostack wrote: post #414
function_seven wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most are "tough luck" ones, a few are expert-help required. The most common way to solve a pivot table problem is to add a column to the underlying data. Kind of a "manual pre-pivot" in a lot of cases. There aren't direct solutions to the list of problems, but there usually is a workaround. Some of the problems (like being unable to format dates when grouping by days) are just "tough luck" I don't know what's going o…

Or, if you're fairly confident the pivot is fairly static and you just need to tack something on, then don't be afraid to do it if a custom calculation isn't solving it for you. It surprises people but there's really no reason you can't do that if you just need it to work and/or look a certain way.

I often end up doing that, but it feels “dirty”, you know?

And I also underestimate how long-lived my report will be, and get stuck having to move those sideline calculations out of the way when I need to refresh the pivot (“This will overwrite existing data.”)

Which brings up another gripe: why can’t the Pivot allow me to push those rows or columns down/over instead of clobbering them?

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

#416

Post by imron »

badpun wrote: post #393
imron wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for a financial services company. Their main product was a 30 year old cobol program used by many large banks. 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. Ba…

> 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. A bank I've worked at had a project to replace lots of bank's legacy (Mainframes and Cobol) with Java on Linux. The project's budget was over 1 billion d…

The company I worked for tried to rewrite everything in Java twice.

Both attempts cost millions, both were abandoned.

The lessons (and pain) from the first attempt were ignored because not enough of the upper management were still around, and the only people who remembered the pain were the rank and file, who were ignored by the new upper management types looking to leave their mark on the product.

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

#417

Post by octo6 »

Nadya wrote: post #411
SahAssar wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why auto-sliding sliders with text are always a terrible idea. You can never sync them to all users read speed, so some always think they are too fast, and some always think they are too slow.

They should be able to be paused, controlled for prev/next movement, last a minimum of 3 seconds (and longer for large pieces of text). If it is too slow the user can click "next" without it being an annoying experience. If it is too fast - even with the ability to go back - it is an annoying experience without the ability to pause it. But it is always better to be too slow than to be too fast. My honest advice would…

thanks for the pointers.. passing them on to our UI designer.

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

#418

Post by lenkite »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #379
kkarakk wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In investment banking, one of the first things you are taught is excel formatting and how to write readable excel. How to write clear and concise comments, what color different cell types should be (black for formulas, blue for inputs, green for links to other cells, red for weird formulas), how to structure large files (when to make a new tab vs keeping a monolithic file), when to break up a formula into multiple ce…

Would be nice if someone had documented these conventions somewhere.

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

#419

Post by PhasmaFelis »

pitay wrote: post #360
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Text files or Excel for the game data? Pardon my ignorance, but why aren't they using some sort of database for the data? Or at least storing the data in some sort of master database and exporting it to text files for the game to read? It would be lovely to hear the techniques and reasons from anyone in the know.

I don't know exactly, but I wrote a post about some hypothetical advantages here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18153661

(IIRC it's for convenience in development. I doubt the game ships with an embedded Excel file.)

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