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Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?

#31

Post by grawprog »

I had a commercial real estate appraiser as a client once. She had a massive excel workbook for the calculations her and her employees used. Originally it was set up so they input everything by hand, used a calculator to figure everything out, input the answers back into excel then copy and paste everything manually into a report template.

I made it so after inputting less than ten variables it automatically calculated everything they needed, generated several charts and graphs, and a fully completed report at the press of a button. I turned it from a two or three day job into a 10 minute one.

Needless to say my client was fairly excited.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?

#32

Post by xcubic »

RossTennis wrote: post #14

I spent the last year building a predictive tennis model using Google Sheets which is basically the same as Excel. I have no technical skills so this was the easiest way to do it, plus it helped me learn SQL. Basically I have around 50,000 tennis matches in one sheet, filter them into another sheet, into around 100 comparative points, then in the end produce a probability for each upcoming match, and bet accordingly.…

Out of curiosity. How did you manage to gather so much data?

Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?

#33

Post by usr1106 »

I haven't used Excel for 10 years. I use LibreOffice Calc.

I have used it to chart data extracted from syslog, journald, dmesg. For example trouble-shooting in a Wi-Fi subsystem or boot time optimization work.

And of course all kind of project management type stuff. My job forces me to do that in Google Sheets these days. Action points, bug lists etc. are easily maintained in a spreadsheet. On one side it's a bit of a misuse of the tool, but as long they are short and simple lists with 10s and not 100s of entries it can be the most efficient solution.

The main drawback is that version history is a pain. If something goes wrong (wrong formula, wrong editing) it can be impossible to understand what happened and fix the problem afterwards.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?

#34

Post by RossTennis »

xcubic wrote: post #32
RossTennis wrote: post #14

I spent the last year building a predictive tennis model using Google Sheets which is basically the same as Excel. I have no technical skills so this was the easiest way to do it, plus it helped me learn SQL. Basically I have around 50,000 tennis matches in one sheet, filter them into another sheet, into around 100 comparative points, then in the end produce a probability for each upcoming match, and bet accordingly.…

Out of curiosity. How did you manage to gather so much data?

Various data feeds, working in the industry, plus some open source

Re: Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?

#35

Post by acct1771 »

smacktoward wrote: post #11

You're asking in the wrong place. The people who are doing the really crazy stuff with Excel are not going to be HN readers.

But we may have heard about it.

Like my father, who runs his entire gas station/towing company/repair shop with Excel macros. lol.

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