181–190 of 435 posts
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Yeah, it’s draining. They have no desire or intention to learn. You’re not helping them, you’re just doing their job for them. Yours, former excel guy.
I always looked at it as being great job security.
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If you're doing a simple Pivot, sure. But here are the things I run into constantly. 1. When I group by days (i.e. group by 7 day chunks), why does Excel refuse to sort chronologically? 2. How do I make my Grand Total column add up all the subtotals when those subtotals are averages of the underlying records? (It will only do an overall average) 3. Why can't I collapse just this row without collapsing the counterpart…
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" ?
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 on with the inability to filter out the last item of a pivot table. One of these days I'll chase that down. I can't be the only one.
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
You get a perceived performance boost when you get a keyboard with a sonorous click.
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.
This was my reaction to Flash. It's not a "real" programming environment is what everyone told me. Yea but it was a great authoring tool for non hard-core programmers. I helped a designer write a few simple puzzle games in Flash and it was overall a productive experience. Had I attempted to do that in html/JS I'm not sure it would have gone so smoothly. I haven't tried to write web games in the last 10 years so maybe…
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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.
A shameful secret: I firmly believe that the moment I became a programmer was when I discovered Debug.Print in VBA in some elderly version of Excel (97, probably) while bodging pretty charts together for someone to print and fax to someone else. 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.
I converted planning from Lotus 1-2-3 to MS Excel (for shame) and then with my smart Pentium 60 based machine, developed a nearly complete finite capacity planner for the factory - in Excel. The devil is of course in the detail but my labour plan and forecasts beat the planners most of the time - except at Easter and Christmas.
Today, I'm really not a developer 8) I grew up and became a sysadmin (oh and a managing director - but that's another story)
What kind of questions and queries are difficult for you to do in Excel and require an "excel wizard"? Also my email is my profile, would love to hear about challenges folks face.
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
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.
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…