201–210 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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There needs to be an Excel "pro mode" where the mouse is disabled and you have to do all navigation by keyboard. People would become so much more efficient that way.
Haha, that’s how analysts were trained at one of my old firms - they just removed the mouse and forced everyone to get work done in short deadlines. One of the rare times a gaming habit and keyboard skills was an advantage.
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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…
I don’t understand how editing a number in an excel file is any easier than editing a number in a text file. What was it that made the difference?
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Does being good at excel mean that one knows the shortcuts of navigation? The video indeed showed that Martin knew his ALT+, CTRL+ etc., but is that what differentiates an excel pro from a newbie? I thought that 'knowing' excel goes much deeper than the navigational shortcuts: solver, array formulas, powerpivot, vba etc. etc. - this is what I'd call more sophisticated excel features. If someone clicks the number form…
In my 25+ years of using Excel, here's what makes a pro: 1. Someone who knows how to use two dimensional TABLE()s and vector functions. 2. Someone who can implement an imperative convergence (such as Newton/Raphson or non-plug-in goal seek) 3. Someone who can audit their dependencies and not shit out dozens of unused vars 4. Someone who knows the limit is 10 sheets and 20MB. :) Visual Basic and shortcuts do not a pro…
Excel can now deal with many gigs of data thanks to PowerPivot and the addition of an in-memory database.
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Explaining it to the same person for the 15th time though...
As a career educator, and ruling out learning disabilities that are not appropriately accommodated, I believe that generally means you're not doing a good job of explaining in a way the other person is capable of grasping. Blame goes both ways. And the original point still stands. It is productive to teach someone to improve their own processes.
Everyone should be using airtable now
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Is it english only?
yes, currently all English. But the expert opens a shared sheet that you work together in, so you can collaborate in Google sheet or Excel. Hope that makes up for English only
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.…
Does being good at excel mean that one knows the shortcuts of navigation? The video indeed showed that Martin knew his ALT+, CTRL+ etc., but is that what differentiates an excel pro from a newbie? I thought that 'knowing' excel goes much deeper than the navigational shortcuts: solver, array formulas, powerpivot, vba etc. etc. - this is what I'd call more sophisticated excel features. If someone clicks the number form…
http://www.decisionmodels.com/calcsecrets.htm
Straight from the 90s (which is cool, functionally excel hasn’t really evolved since)!
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In my 25+ years of using Excel, here's what makes a pro: 1. Someone who knows how to use two dimensional TABLE()s and vector functions. 2. Someone who can implement an imperative convergence (such as Newton/Raphson or non-plug-in goal seek) 3. Someone who can audit their dependencies and not shit out dozens of unused vars 4. Someone who knows the limit is 10 sheets and 20MB. :) Visual Basic and shortcuts do not a pro…
> 4. Someone who knows the limit is 10 sheets and 20MB Excel can now deal with many gigs of data thanks to PowerPivot and the addition of an in-memory database.
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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?
The Analytics team at my company does this. ETL's we call them (Export, Transform, Load). Some of us are app devs and some are data analysts; there's cross-over. We do other things too, but moving data between systems is a big part of it. As for job titles; Software Engineer (or Developer) of Analytics, Data Analyst, Data Scientist, or something along those lines. Probably varies by company.
Recently I worked on a contract doing some data ingestion that the resident team didn't want to deal with.
They had been provided a JSON api to get what should have been a batch file. The owner/api creator said "this is good enough we won't accommodate you." So much for sensible data transmission and batch processing.
Because I have had to deal with these sorts of things before I have a fairly robust tool chain to hammer api's with requests to get the data in a reasonable time frame. In this case my client went full tilt - and simply hammered the API till its owner gave in and started sending batch files.