You're asking in the wrong place. The people who are doing the really crazy stuff with Excel are not going to be HN readers.
Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#12This is going to be a boring answer, but I use it to fill in data for sql inserts. Its also nice for repetitive backend server commands. Since excel places a carriage return after each row, copy and paste into terminal is nice.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#13I use it to do super quick data analysis sometimes, and also I made a few spreadsheets to help my wife to manage our personal finance.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#14I spent the last year building a predictive tennis model using Google Sheets which is basically the same as Excel. I have no technical skills so this was the easiest way to do it, plus it helped me learn SQL. Basically I have around 50,000 tennis matches in one sheet, filter them into another sheet, into around 100 comparative points, then in the end produce a probability for each upcoming match, and bet accordingly. I also use it to produce a little head to head stats visual and automated 200-word match previews.
It all works perfectly but obviously just for one user at a time. So I brought on a dev friend a few months ago and will launch a user facing site next week, as well as a b2b api for match previews / seo rich content.
I'm actually looking for seed funding up to around 25k, if anyone wants to reach out about that, or has other questions.
If you just want to follow some of the tips I'm running a very basic blog site at www.tennisacca.com sharing my most highly recommended picks (rather than listing 100's of games a week and needing a huge bankroll), which win at a ROI of 10%+ on average. It's mostly just for friends until the main site launches next week.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#15I use it to log marathon training. There are a lot of fitness tracking apps out there, 2 of which I use, but it's nice seeing:
- Plan for miles run every day of the week, side-by-side with what I actually ran, notes about pace, weather, and other factors
- Sum of total weekly mileage done vs. planned, amount left to meet my goals
- Number of weeks left until race
all in one "dashboard." It's nothing fancy, but the date and sum functions made it really trivial to make a template for this exactly how I wanted it.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#16My previous company uses a set of Excel files to create construction tenders. They included a lot of formulas and vba to calculate quantities, costs, labor hours, etc.
I had to set up dedicated backup jobs for those templates.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#17My previous company uses a set of Excel files to create construction tenders. They included a lot of formulas and vba to calculate quantities, costs, labor hours, etc. I had to set up dedicated backup jobs for those templates.
Did you work specifically for a construction GC as a project manager or something?
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#18Plots. Pulling performance numbers from log files, simple statistics, curve fitting and moving averages.
Even from JSON or XML.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#19Less and less anymore. I tried to make a graph in excel with like 5k? data points and it froze every time.
Lol that is a lie or your computer is an utter piece of shit.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
#20Plots. Pulling performance numbers from log files, simple statistics, curve fitting and moving averages. Even from JSON or XML.
Have you tried using Mathematica instead? Mathematica has instant visualization and makes it very easy to import json/xml/csv.
The other advantage is that you have a full language (Wolfram Language) in the event you want to do further evaluation.