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Excel World Championship Finals

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Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#31

Post by DwnVoteHoneyPot »

sl8r wrote: post #26
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.

I've also seen it basterdize into running a loop for a monte carlo sim instead of using a VBA macro. Genius and stupid all at the same time.

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#32

Post by ourlordcaffeine »

wolverine876 wrote: post #29
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?

The place I work at pretty much did away with it for all analysis and statistics

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#33

Post by watersb »

INTPenis wrote: post #19

Seeing these Excel pros compete reminds me of when I found an old server inventory system at work. Someone had in Excel+Visio+VBS made a system where you could see a top-down map of our DCs, and server cabinets. Each cabinet had an alert light indicating if there were any alerts on any server in that cabinet (fetched from Xymon), you could click each cabinet to get a front view of all servers, with graphics of server…

IIRC, Visio Pro had some network crawling routines for just this sort of system map.

I had an app for this on my Macintosh(AppleTalk!)network, by a great bunch of folks at a company named Neon. (I believe that was the name of the company, or maybe the app.)

Basic reporting was a GUI front end for SNMP queries. It had a great packet sniffer, too.

We had a senior network manager who ran all of the Ethernet cable, and maintained all of that infrastructure. A really sharp fellow, really knew cabling and networking, routing topologies etc. At one point, he was trying to sort out a problem in network authorization that had been escalated to him from application support team, because it seemed to occur on a particular network segment. He had a lunchbox PC with some dedicated network hardware and an application, a turnkey system from somewhere, cost ten thousand bucks. He was working the problem, capturing the packets... I was able to use my damn Macintosh setup to identify the authorization packets in like five minutes.

We all went with Windows NT soon after that. It has fantastic monitoring capabilities, and I bought Visio before they were re-absorbed back into Microsoft. Network maps were fun to set up with a bit of Visual Basic.

I was a horrible, horrible programmer, but I loved network administration.

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#34

Post by ineedasername »

agumonkey wrote: post #30
ineedasername wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Microsoft should be wise to implement some presentation/component feature to match the web

Yep, they would be. Although I think they're trying push the whole Power Apps model. Which, I'll admit, is an interesting ecosystem, but something on the desktop to enhance excel power users that will never have their needs satisfied by Power Apps would be beneficial. But possibly also eat into the user base that might be enticed into Power Apps instead, and the steady stream of monthly revenue from Power Apps clouds resources usage is preferable ( to MS ) than the "buy once" model for Office.

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#36

Post by thefunnyman »

obnauticus wrote: post #9
booleanbetrayal wrote: post #3

Wait ... this is a real thing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY

God I love krazam. I think what makes it better is the hint of amazon hell he adds into all his videos (I believe he works there).

Pretty sure he does. The offices in “The Hustle” looks exactly like an Amazon building.

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#37

Post by fuzzfactor »

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?

Like when your main focus is array math, and you work with a uniquely different database on each of 5 worksheets and the deliverable output has to be in the form of another Excel spreadsheet anyway?

And it has nothing to do with the web or networking at all?

JK, I know you mean much lesser scale of complexity.

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#38

Post by Rebelgecko »

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…

When I sometimes interfaced with people in the government, it was astounding how often a higher-up told me they had a "database" that turned out to be an Excel spreadsheet maintained by some GS-8

Re: Excel World Championship Finals

#39

Post by wolverine876 »

ourlordcaffeine wrote: post #32
wolverine876 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Excel still is used heavily in government. Are you implying that there is somewhere it's not used heavily?

The place I work at pretty much did away with it for all analysis and statistics

What industry? When? Is it common in your industry?

What replaced it?

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