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The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

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Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#211

Post by robotresearcher »

commandlinefan wrote: post #117
css wrote: post #5

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…

> I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Not to pile on or anything, because that phrase seems to have touched a nerve - but, I don't mind helping other people at all. I do mind when I spend 8 hours at work helping other people, and don't have time to complete the work that I was actually supposed to be doing, and then get criticized for not getting the work I was assigned to do done. It…

Write down the hours you spend as a consultant to teammates. Then discuss with your boss how you should best spend your time. It’s not complicated.

Source: am manager who deals with this every day.

Edit: I understand this advice is worthless if your manager is a dolt. In that case run for the hills.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#212

Post by celticninja »

pmiller2 wrote: post #190
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Quickly changing a few stats would probably be easier in an excel file, every stat is directly below the next, one key press to move to the stat and change it.is faster than scrolling 3 or 10 lines to the next one then placing the cursor on the correct character etc. I can see how it would be faster for some use cases. If someone is doing it then it is probably because they found it to be effective.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#213

Post by bsheir74 »

OskarS wrote: post #86

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 are plenty of people whp are great at excel but you chose to talk about him. Don't give that guy any more attention. Thats what he wants. Lets all just forget about him and go on with our lives.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#214

Post by [deleted] »

gowld wrote: post #180
foobarrio wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Has anything replaced Flash as a productive way to build animated games?

[deleted]

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#216

Post by sattoshi »

bsheir74 wrote: post #213
OskarS wrote: post #86

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 are plenty of people whp are great at excel but you chose to talk about him. Don't give that guy any more attention. Thats what he wants. Lets all just forget about him and go on with our lives.

It is sad to me how effective the smear campaign against Shkreli was.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#217

Post by thenipper »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #160
daveslash wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What the other child poster said. This is 90% of my job. It’s really fun a lot of the time and absolutely brutal the rest of it. Be prepared for things like writing code that checks the color or text styling of cells etc. people encode data in whacky ways

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#218

Post by KyeRussell »

sattoshi wrote: post #216
bsheir74 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of people whp are great at excel but you chose to talk about him. Don't give that guy any more attention. Thats what he wants. Lets all just forget about him and go on with our lives.

It is sad to me how effective the smear campaign against Shkreli was.

Really, dude? That made you “sad”?

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#219

Post by pq0ak2nnd »

tomnipotent wrote: post #204
pq0ak2nnd wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FTFY:

"Excel THINKS IT CAN DEAL with many gigs of data thanks to PowerPivot and the addition of an in-memory database."

It's so cute when I hit ctrl-downarrow on a blank sheet and Excel sends me to row 1,048,576. Wishful thinking because if I ever filled 1M cells with functions, well... lololololol... time to use JMP...

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#220

Post by Nullabillity »

vbezhenar wrote: post #203
pmiller2 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably table representation. It's relatively hard to implement something similar using text format. You can have row for every unit in the game with columns corresponding to various characteristics. It looks very natural in Excel, but it would require quite a lot of formatting and errors with text file. Also Excel could have formulas which might be useful somewhere and supporting formulas in config file is another…

Then use a real database. You probably have a SQLite dependency anyway, so take advantage of it.

Or don't, since SCMs are much better at diffing plain text than either.

> Also Excel could have formulas which might be useful somewhere and supporting formulas in config file is another level of complexity and almost certainly it'll be worse than Excel.

You'll have an easier time reimplementing Excel's formula system than basic arithmetic? I find that hard to believe.

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