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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

#381

Post by exHFguy1 »

intended wrote: post #315
1000units wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe he is a peer of ours and we actually know something about him beyond ridiculous and disgusting media depictions. Here's a fun question for you as an HN'er: what was the name of Shkreli's pharmaceutical company?

Starts with R? Checks... retrophin. Shkreli was one of many finance types who have fully drunk the koolaid. He is not alone, and the others too would be prosecuted if people had the time and awareness to be incensed with the culture. In his defense, shkrelli didn’t know he was a tool. On the one hand singing praises of the free market and on the other taking advantage of every loophole someone could find. I mean the…

Finance people don’t think this type of behavior is OK either despite the ridiculous views of some people here.

BTW, I could similarly make ridiculous statements about technologists or scientists.

I’ve worked number of places and can’t think of a single person out of hundreds that would think this behavior is OK.

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

#382

Post by zbentley »

scroot wrote: post #380
rhelmer wrote: post #325

As bad (and deserved) as their reputation is for helping well-meaning users to create a big mess, spreadsheet software provides an incredibly intuitive UI to put in front of users that have the domain knowledge but not necessarily direct software engineering knowledge. I've been thinking about this for years, ever since I first read "A Small Matter of Programming" by Bonnie Nardi: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small…

End user "programming" systems are precisely what personal computing was supposed to be about. Aside from spreadsheets and maybe a couple of other things (hangers-on from the business world), that line of inquiry and use has been abandoned. It's worth the development community's time to ask why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s. Let's remember just how popular Hype…

> why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s.

Because we do more with computers (adding complexity to programming as a task) and the amount of money and people involved have both increased (making that complexity hard or impossible to reduce).

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

#383

Post by edraferi »

incompatible wrote: post #352
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…

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

Because there’s too much overhead, it’s too hard to share, and the benefits don’t show up until the problem is more complex than most people ever need.

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

#384

Post by xivzgrev »

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.…

It's a long video is there a specific point where the magic happens? I skipped around and all I saw was him copying and pasting and setting up basic algebra formulas.

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

#385

Post by johnnywritten »

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?

Data wrangler?

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

#386

Post by Jabbermonkey »

julienfr112 wrote: post #370
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 ?

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-mon...

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-wha...

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

#387

Post by scroot »

zbentley wrote: post #382
scroot wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

End user "programming" systems are precisely what personal computing was supposed to be about. Aside from spreadsheets and maybe a couple of other things (hangers-on from the business world), that line of inquiry and use has been abandoned. It's worth the development community's time to ask why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s. Let's remember just how popular Hype…

> why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s. Because we do more with computers (adding complexity to programming as a task) and the amount of money and people involved have both increased (making that complexity hard or impossible to reduce).

Complexity can't be the only answer (and there is evidence it can be tamed anyway). Over the past two decades developer culture and wider technological culture has conditioned regular people to be passive consumers of computing, rather than authors of it.

The fact that there are no compelling RADs for the major platforms -- especially ones that use intuitive metaphors -- speaks volumes. I have worked on many small freelance projects for the past few years and the issues most users have are all more or less the same: they need to organize some information in a way that is useful to them and to interact with it somehow. This might involve more remote fetching than it did in the 90s, but this isn't that much more complicated.

Imagining another way has become completely unfashionable, mostly because of marketing and the stated needs of business. We no longer apply the hands-off funding and timespans for the kinds of computing research that gave us personal computers in the first place.

Things are not the way they are because of some natural law.

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

#388

Post by itsananderson »

scroot wrote: post #380
rhelmer wrote: post #325

As bad (and deserved) as their reputation is for helping well-meaning users to create a big mess, spreadsheet software provides an incredibly intuitive UI to put in front of users that have the domain knowledge but not necessarily direct software engineering knowledge. I've been thinking about this for years, ever since I first read "A Small Matter of Programming" by Bonnie Nardi: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small…

End user "programming" systems are precisely what personal computing was supposed to be about. Aside from spreadsheets and maybe a couple of other things (hangers-on from the business world), that line of inquiry and use has been abandoned. It's worth the development community's time to ask why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s. Let's remember just how popular Hype…

My understanding of that shift is that the average "user" has become less savvy, because of improved UX and an overall increase in the percentage of the population who are "users". This is because over the last 30 years computers have moved out of just the business/academia/enthusiast space into people's homes (and then pockets).

The average "user" can't program a computer because we've been able to bring computing to a whole new population of people with neither the opportunity nor inclination to learn to use a computer at that level. You don't have to be a computer nerd to get immense value from computing, and in my mind that's a very good thing.

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

#389

Post by clairity »

Jabbermonkey wrote: post #386
julienfr112 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-mon... https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-wha...

those are great resources. i've also used the crystal ball plugin for excel, which was bought out by oracle a few years ago: https://www.oracle.com/applications/crystalball/

scenario modeling is useful when you have a set of uncertain inputs and you want to estimate the range of possible output values.

the monte carlo part is providing random sets of inputs that conform to the distributions for each input (often estimated as just a normal distribution for each). you run thousands (or more, depending on the margin of error you wish to achieve) of these random input sets to generate the mean, variance and estimated error of the output variable.

in financial modeling, the inputs are typically estimates of future revenue, costs, cost of capital, etc., and NPV (net present value) of the enterprise as the output. sometimes you even include environmental or regulatory uncertainty (as a binomial value) in the model.

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

#390

Post by clairity »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #240
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

How did she handle the precision problem?

not sure which precision problem you're referring to, but in general, we understood that excel's precision issues are probably overwhelmed by the imprecision of the model.

but i'd be more weary of using excel if we were doing scientific research (R or matlab would be better there).

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