Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 435 posts

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

#361

Post by SahAssar »

Nadya wrote: post #133
octo6 wrote: post #63

Shameless plug - we actually founded a service [1] that provides Excel experts on-demand, within 30 to 60 seconds. So if you're tired of being the "Excel expert" at work feel free to pass them on to us. Also happy to answer any questions. Tidbit: Most popular questions tend to be formulas, vlookups, conditional formatting, pivots. [1] https://www.excelchat.co

Word of advice - slow down your sliders. I read at an absurdly fast pace and I barely finish the "Our Experts" excerpts before it scrolls. I know, from testing, that I can mouse over them to pause them but that isn't intuitive to people who don't build these sorts of things as their day job. That being said - bookmarked. I've needed this in the past and while I may not need it right now I probably will in the future.

This is why auto-sliding sliders with text are always a terrible idea. You can never sync them to all users read speed, so some always think they are too fast, and some always think they are too slow.

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

#362

Post by bauerd »

superioritycplx wrote: post #255
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.…

Thanks for posting the video. Please do some research on Martin's story.

Where would I start? I know next to nothing about that guy besides the headlines about the drug price raise. Wikipedia doesn't paint a brighter picture either tbh.

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

#363

Post by nuclx »

laurent123456 wrote: post #358
incompatible wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before you get anywhere near this point, why not just use a real database and programming language?

Db and programming language will give you a backend. You'll still need a front end to display the info, and Excel is great at that. Not to mention you can send an Excel file by email, but you can't just send Docker containers to your clients and colleagues to run your spreadsheet.

Or just send the payload exported as JSON/CSV. We keep all kinds of project-relevant information in Word-/Excel-documents even checked into source control - plus these documents are used as a means to poll data from the customer. I'm actively fighting this terrible practice by writing some simple CRUD UIs (currently with React, but .NET would be a good choice too), to be able to transform project parameters influencing application configuration on our and on the customer side.

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

#364

Post by abledon »

laurent123456 wrote: post #358
incompatible wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before you get anywhere near this point, why not just use a real database and programming language?

Db and programming language will give you a backend. You'll still need a front end to display the info, and Excel is great at that. Not to mention you can send an Excel file by email, but you can't just send Docker containers to your clients and colleagues to run your spreadsheet.

That’s when you upgrade to Microsoft access

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

#365

Post by pitay »

gerdesj wrote: post #137
css wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least with Git there are _tons_ of ways to learn more. With Excel there are next to none because of the lack of developer community. There are few useful resources where someone can go to understand how they can best leverage their toolset. Excel is also notoriously opaque when it comes to debugging, so there often are not useful questions to ask Google if you don't already know or understand what you are looking…

Actually there are some bloody good books on the subject. The help files and online from MS help are not too bad. Debugging: "excel debug a spreadsheet" - quite a few decent returns on page one and two. Related searches in Google gives some more hints.

From memory help for the MS Office products was actually really good. You had sections that showed their object model in a very nice hierarchical manner and you could easily drill down to the individual methods of the objects mentioned. They also had a solid base object library across the Office applications. Things seemed to get more difficult with Office 2007 though, as compared to Office 2003 and earlier. With 2007 and later I believe you were supposed to use Visual Studio to extend it rather than using the inbuilt VBA. Also there was a lot of individual web pages describing how things were done and stackexchange questions answered for Excel and other Office products so it was pretty easy to get decent information to help you. The exception being when searching the internet the only answer to a question was that it was 'impossible to do' when actually it really wasn't, with the effect that most people reading the answer will do it the long and more error prone way.

Warning: This is from memory quite a while ago and it was a very minor part of stuff I did at my job then.

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

#366

Post by killjoywashere »

db48x wrote: post #347
kkarakk wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

using excel isn't not fun, it's just that the mental complexity of excel is offloaded to the user. the user keeps track of the various computations and transformations. anything more than a quick check on some data exponentially taxes the brain leading to an ever increasing dislike of the software being handed someone else's excel sheet is an infuriating experience because they're also handing you whatever convoluted…

I would say that they're _not_ handing you their mental model. Instead using their spreadsheet forces you to come up with a mental model which is congruent to theirs.

On ships they sound the tanks daily (water, oil, fuel) and use the depths to calculate the volumes. There are dozens of tanks. Part of my job was then to use that data to figure out the change in the ship's draft from day to day. Which could be done two ways: drawing lines on Xerox copies of an odd set of nomograms, or brute calculation. I found the nomograms fraught with opportunities for error. Luckily the oil king responsible for the soundings kept them in Excel. So I wrote a sheet that took his data and did all the brute force calculations. So when he printed the daily soundings, instead of handing them to me, the draft report just printed out as the next page. It was more accurate and saved me 1-2 hours a day. And looked nice and crisp coming off the laser printer. Everyone thought I was a magician.

The guy who took over for me had a nervous breakdown.

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

#368

Post by busyant »

1000units wrote: post #263
busyant wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very often slandered and misunderstood. You mean the guy who wrote this? Clearly, he's a diamond in the rough /s. 'Then a letter from Mr. Shkreli came to his home, addressed to his wife. “Your husband has stolen $1.6 million from me,” it read. “Your pathetic excuse of a husband,” the letter added, “needs to get a real job that does not depend on fraud to succeed.” “I hope to see you and your four children homeless,…

Yes. I've said worse to people over much less myself. And I'm a nice guy too.

You've threatened someone's wife and children because of an alleged crime commited by their husband/father?

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

#369

Post by lordlimecat »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #238
brianberns wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that insurance companies pass their costs to their customers, right?

I thought the point of insurance companies was that the customers wouldn't pay the full cost.

The point of insurance companies is to hedge against financial scenarios that you cannot otherwise plan for.

There's no world in which adding a middleman for a regular and ongoing service lowers the overall cost of that service.

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

#370

Post by julienfr112 »

clairity wrote: post #178

the best i've seen is a woman who did corporate financial planning and analysis. i could ask a question and she would have a pivot table spit out the answer as i finished the question. i consider myself a good* (but not great) excel user, but she was amazing! * having done complex financial modeling incorporating monte carlo simulation for predictive what-if analysis

I didn't now you could do monte carlo (and what-if) with excel. Can you tell us more about that ?
Post reply on HN