I've heard that Excel is really powerful. Do you guys have any stories about that?
Whether it's personal or for business what do you use it for?
Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#2I use OpenOffice Calc, not Excel, but same basic idea. In my case, I use it for a couple of things.
1. A file viewer for certain kinds of data (eg, CSV files and the like).
2. A quick and dirty way to get simple summary stats from some data. Spreadsheets make it pretty easy to point at some data and get things like the mean, median, mode, std deviation, etc.
3. Quick and dirty plotting of small amounts of data. This use isn't as frequent for me, as I tend to use GNUPlot for most of this kind of stuff, but sometimes if you're already in the spreadsheet program poking at some data, you want a chart with a trend-line or something.
4. Exploratory models to play with "what if" analysis. Useful for a first pass at coming up with financial projects, evaluating pricing models, etc. The nice thing about a spreadsheet for this is that you write up all the various formulas you care about, and then you can update one cell and quickly see all the updated values. In a sense, spreadsheets are an implementation of a sort of Dataflow programming[1] and this kind of thing can be very handy.
It's good for getting answers to questions like "If I want this company to generate $1MM in revenue this year, and we set the price for our product to z, how many customers do we have to sign up?" and others of that nature. Of course there are plenty of other ways to do this kind of analysis, but spreadsheets are pretty convenient here.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#3Not me personally, but the amount of complex workflow that I've seen relying on tortured Excel and VBA is mind-boggling.
In the hands of someone who knows how to use it, Excel is incredibly powerful. Though at some point it crosses the threshold of "why don't you just get a junior developer to code this?". And the answer is always "we are technologically dinosaurs, and we think that any devolopment project costs at least $200k"
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#4I use OpenOffice Calc, not Excel, but same basic idea. In my case, I use it for a couple of things. 1. A file viewer for certain kinds of data (eg, CSV files and the like). 2. A quick and dirty way to get simple summary stats from some data. Spreadsheets make it pretty easy to point at some data and get things like the mean, median, mode, std deviation, etc. 3. Quick and dirty plotting of small amounts of data. This…
Thanks for the information. I appreciate it.
Your point #4 was very informative. I have learned something new today.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#5Not me personally, but the amount of complex workflow that I've seen relying on tortured Excel and VBA is mind-boggling. In the hands of someone who knows how to use it, Excel is incredibly powerful. Though at some point it crosses the threshold of "why don't you just get a junior developer to code this?". And the answer is always "we are technologically dinosaurs, and we think that any devolopment project costs at l…
I see! In your opinion, if I am trying to track various parts of my life. Like a schedule, todo stuff. Should I just code it as a programmer, instead of using excel?
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#6Less and less anymore. I tried to make a graph in excel with like 5k? data points and it froze every time.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#7As a marketer, it's a pretty vital tool for understanding detailed attribution data.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#8I wonder whether anyone with some proficiency in Python will have an easier time doing things in Jupyter (with Pandas, etc.), than a spreadsheet.
I'm curious to hear about things which are easy to do in Excel, but hard in the Jupyter workflow.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#9Not me personally, but the amount of complex workflow that I've seen relying on tortured Excel and VBA is mind-boggling. In the hands of someone who knows how to use it, Excel is incredibly powerful. Though at some point it crosses the threshold of "why don't you just get a junior developer to code this?". And the answer is always "we are technologically dinosaurs, and we think that any devolopment project costs at l…
In some very large enterprises, that's not far off the mark unfortunately.
Large corporate governance is at best, a shitshow.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#10Looking for biz ideas? :)
In one place where I worked, someone had programmed financial models in Excel. It used to run for a long time, crash often etc. But it was good enough for his team and they used it until I left. That one single Excel file was worth a lot