Wait ... this is a real thing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
I just want to validate that I thought Krazam was based on total fiction. I'm stunned to see a 2k person livestream about this today in the best way!
Excel World Championship Finals
11–20 of 39 posts
Re: Excel World Championship Finals
#12Am I an asshole for just thinking that at this scale of complexity, it's just easier to build things using a web-app framework?
brainfuck existence should hint at what humans enjoy :)
Re: Excel World Championship Finals
#13Disappointed having watch the earlier rounds there were not much in terms of tips. Just heavy use of index, left$ and if statements.
One thing that's good to see is how Excel can be applied. I was a host when the challenges were:
1. Roulette
2. Biathlon
And, no. It's not heavy on tips. The rounds are timed and each of the contestants have their own methods. It was interesting to see some people use formulas and some people use conditional formatting for the same solution.
Re: Excel World Championship Finals
#14Am I an asshole for just thinking that at this scale of complexity, it's just easier to build things using a web-app framework?
Yes, you are an asshole for suggesting a web-app framework instead just vanilla programming language. Why all the bloat of a web-app?
Re: Excel World Championship Finals
#15Disappointed having watch the earlier rounds there were not much in terms of tips. Just heavy use of index, left$ and if statements.
It's a competition. Not a tutorial.
Re: Excel World Championship Finals
#16Excel still is used heavily in government. I wrote a VBA macro for an Excel spreadsheet that would take a payroll flat text file, import it into SQL Server using OLE DB, do some data clean up, sort and then export to separate sheets in a different spreadsheet by employee name. Before I wrote this macro (which took a couple days), the payroll department of this government organization had dedicated an entire 40 hour per week person to doing this manually. They had been doing that job for years!
Re: Excel World Championship Finals
#17Wait ... this is a real thing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
Finally! Emoji macros are a reality!
Do we all remember the dark days of the Before?
Re: Excel World Championship Finals
#18Obligatory Ian Malcolm:
Re: Excel World Championship Finals
#19Seeing these Excel pros compete reminds me of when I found an old server inventory system at work. Someone had in Excel+Visio+VBS made a system where you could see a top-down map of our DCs, and server cabinets. Each cabinet had an alert light indicating if there were any alerts on any server in that cabinet (fetched from Xymon), you could click each cabinet to get a front view of all servers, with graphics of server fronts reflecting the vendor and model of the server.
The person who made this had quit a long time ago, no one was quite sure of who it was. And of course things had slowly started to break down, like API connections, alerts, it wasn't up to date, but wow. It blew my mind.
Re: Excel World Championship Finals
#20Am I an asshole for just thinking that at this scale of complexity, it's just easier to build things using a web-app framework?
For something that needs to be editable and analyzed and shared among users that are highly proficient in financial tech (excel) but are not programmers, an app framework isn't going to work.
My work is often an input into the work of the finance folks where I'm at, and they have countless very complex excel docs. None of them are programmers, but all them (and anyone else moderately proficient in Excel) can look under the hood, see what's going on, and make their own additions/changes as needed.
And there may need to be new versions of all of these that have slight or major changes made on a monthly/quarterly/annual basis. No single build w/ a web-app framework is going to do this very well without a very large investment in developer costs, and that simply isn't necessary when there is already a perfectly good tool for their needs. Developer costs aside, it would also mean that these folks had a significant delay in their work: They could no longer clone last quarter's sheet and spend a morning making the necessary changes. They'd need to spend a few days going back & forth with a developer over the scope & specs of the changes, a little longer for the developer to write the code, do a bit of UAT, and assuming everything works as expected then get to the actual work and hope nothing new came up before next quarter that would stop their work for more dev time.
The types of systems that eliminate a little bit of this are part of industry-specific monolithic ERP systems, and even those may only cover the 60% of requirements that don't change often or are supported by contractually guaranteed TOS upgrades each quarter from the vendor.