161–170 of 435 posts
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
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> Having used Excel for many years on the trading floor, I have to say it's awful. But the interface is not awful - it's absolutely wonderful as a quick way to enter and share data and do a fast analysis. The part that's awful is when you do more than that. And once you've got the data into Excel, why go through the trouble of changing to something else just to do one additional thing, even if that additional thing i…
As technological scrap paper, I admit it can be useful. But as soon as your "fast analysis" is done, you need to be hardening whatever process it is you are creating. After all, that is what your analysis is about, right? Building some sort of repeatable, often auditable, transparent process.
Just Get stuff done.
Your boss will worry about an auditable process after the prototype shows merit.
Nothing in the world is feee/without trade offs. Any excel like program will have excel like problems.
The alternative being a world fragmented between different spreadsheet programs and no interop.
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Can you help me with RegEx in Excel?
Curious- what’s the issue you are trying to solve ? There are Addins which give regex support as I recall. Usually though it’s a matter of find/right and other hackery to make it work.
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> I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. You, sir, have not been the victim of help vampires. > A lot of people struggle to find answers specifically because of this lack of community around using Excel as a tool I am unaware of this lack of information. Perhaps I am not doing the really, really, really exotic stuff but every question I have ever had on Excel has been answerable via Goog…
The ability to compose queries and sift through google results and find the answer to a question in a timely manner is a skill in and of itself that not everyone has.
I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort. Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software…
It isn't about being helpful or not, but about letting yourself be abused or not. Often times, the only difference between myself with a technology and the person asking me for help is that I am willing to read the documentation while the other isn't. Often, the person seeking my help doesn't even realize they are abusing me but still, if I point out that they can read the documentation as well as I can, I get a look…
I feel the same way about technology questions. I'm really glad to help when someone asks something that they have looked into ahead of time, or if they're interested in learning a skill that they know I have rather than just getting me to do their work. It really annoys me when someone has just not put in enough effort and would rather have me expend the effort in solving their problem.
People say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Where are the easy adhoc reports? Where are the forms? I guess if you're on Windows you can use Microsoft Access, but that's the only accesible tool I know of that doesn't require a team of programmers or an enterprise license for some Oracle/SAP type monstrosity.
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At least with Git there are _tons_ of ways to learn more. With Excel there are next to none because of the lack of developer community. There are few useful resources where someone can go to understand how they can best leverage their toolset. Excel is also notoriously opaque when it comes to debugging, so there often are not useful questions to ask Google if you don't already know or understand what you are looking…
Actually there are some bloody good books on the subject. The help files and online from MS help are not too bad. Debugging: "excel debug a spreadsheet" - quite a few decent returns on page one and two. Related searches in Google gives some more hints.
I'm willing to bet that I am not alone.
Don't be too hard on Excel - some of today's clueless spreadsheet monkeys will be real bona-fide developers in fifteen years.
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Obligatory Comment: "Excel as a Database" by Rory Blyth, circa early 2000's. "As a developer, you've probably, at some unfortunate point in your life (possibly several points, actually), been handed an Excel file that has been crammed full of 'data' by someone in marketing and told to 'do something with it.' " http://wyorock.com/excelasadatabase.htm
As a developer, what should I do if I actually want to do that? Because I get a lot of satisfaction out of massaging messy wads of data into a clean, uniform, accessible form. Is there a job title or something I should look for?
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.…
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.