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Excel World Championship Finals

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Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#21

Post by ineedasername »

agumonkey wrote: post #12
CactusOnFire wrote: post #10

Am 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 :)

To explain the competition? Sure.

To explain why people build highly complex excel applications to get work done? That's more about industry standards, learning curve, portability, need for rapid modification of requirements by users...

I've certainly done a lot of work over the years eliminating the need to use Excel docs that require manual maintenance, but mainly for things where a) the underlying data structures don't change much and b) if they do change, the end user doesn't need to be the one to do it on the fly. (mostly this entails tapping into the underlying data sources-- or first building the tools to do so-- and then automating the transformations, analysis, and presentation using some combination of r/python along with a SQL database & BI platform.) I work with finance folks too though, and what they do with excel is generally not a candidate for this process.

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#24

Post by dsizzle »

jkaptur wrote: post #23
ineedasername wrote: post #22

TIL you actually can enable circular references in Excel. Though I struggle to see the practical usefulness except for a few edge cases.

How else would you implement Newton’s method? ;)

I'm reminded of solving Laplace's equation in Excel. It makes some cool animations too https://www.av8n.com/physics/laplace.htm

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#25

Post by funstuff007 »

webdoodle wrote: post #16

Excel 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 p…

Yes, I've long said don't fear the robot revolution, fear the VBA revolution.

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#26

Post by sl8r »

ineedasername wrote: post #22

TIL you actually can enable circular references in Excel. Though I struggle to see the practical usefulness except for a few edge cases.

Interestingly, they’re actually used all the time in LBO models. Because the default is to sweep all FCF to pay down debt, but then the interest expense is dependent on FCF, which depends on the interest expense… Sort of a trivial example b/c you could solve it by being more granular with time periods, but in practice people just use the circular ref.

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#28

Post by aaron695 »

bmsleight_ wrote: post #2

Disappointed having watch the earlier rounds there were not much in terms of tips. Just heavy use of index, left$ and if statements.

I don't think watching Magnus Carlsen helps with tips in chess either?

Or watching tennis pros.

It might help define the journey you have to go on to get to the upper echelon.

You now seem to think 'index, left$ and if' seems to be what matters, that's something.

It will be interesting to see where Deepmind takes something like this.

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#29

Post by wolverine876 »

webdoodle wrote: post #16

Excel 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 p…

> Excel still is used heavily in government.

Are you implying that there is somewhere it's not used heavily?

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#30

Post by agumonkey »

ineedasername wrote: post #21
agumonkey wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

brainfuck existence should hint at what humans enjoy :)

To explain the competition? Sure. To explain why people build highly complex excel applications to get work done? That's more about industry standards, learning curve, portability, need for rapid modification of requirements by users... I've certainly done a lot of work over the years eliminating the need to use Excel docs that require manual maintenance, but mainly for things where a) the underlying data structures…

Ah well it's a million dollar question.

These people were trained in excel I assume, it's cultural and then you also have this weird pivot point like C where excel has reactive semantics, data table, ad-hoc input / modeling .. it's a massive reactive data notebook on steroid that requires next to no fiddling to get working.

Now as you point, things are changing.. R/julia/numpy/notebooks, reactive web frameworks.. can all suck some use case from excel. I believe that future clearly lies in the middle. Microsoft should be wise to implement some presentation/component feature to match the web.

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