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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

#431

Post by [deleted] »

liftbigweights wrote: post #353
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.…

Please watch your language. And like most things, shrekli wasn't as evil as the media paints him out to be and equally, he wasn't as great as his supporters think he is.

[deleted]

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

#432

Post by paultopia »

ryanmonroe wrote: post #231
guelo wrote: post #72

People say "use a real database", fine, but where is the visual data entry? Where are the easy adhoc reports? Where are the forms? I guess if you're on Windows you can use Microsoft Access, but that's the only accesible tool I know of that doesn't require a team of programmers or an enterprise license for some Oracle/SAP type monstrosity.

Not having a good data entry gui is the biggest benefit of not-excel in my experience. 90% of the time your data has a real source that's not "Jim's head" and you should find a way to impute the data from that source directly, avoiding the ever-present inaccuracies that come from human-imputed data.

Also, even when you need human entered data, a spreadsheet is waaaaay too easy to make typos with, like putting things in the wrong row/column, overwriting previous entries, etc. Use a form.

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

#433

Post by shostack »

function_seven wrote: post #415
shostack wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, if you're fairly confident the pivot is fairly static and you just need to tack something on, then don't be afraid to do it if a custom calculation isn't solving it for you. It surprises people but there's really no reason you can't do that if you just need it to work and/or look a certain way.

I often end up doing that, but it feels “dirty”, you know? And I also underestimate how long-lived my report will be, and get stuck having to move those sideline calculations out of the way when I need to refresh the pivot (“This will overwrite existing data.”) Which brings up another gripe: why can’t the Pivot allow me to push those rows or columns down/over instead of clobbering them?

It absolutely feels dirty. Every. Single. Time. It has likewise bitten me more than once when I formatted everything identically, but then forgot that I had tacked something on that isn't updating.

And yeah, one feature on my wishlist would be "It looks like you're about to overwrite a ton of data! Rather than make you cut/paste it elsewhere, how about we just shift them!"

There's probably some repercussions I'm not considering for why that is problematic, but its a problem worth solving.

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

#434

Post by __blockcipher__ »

blihp wrote: post #349
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you mind if I derail the thread for a little bit? [if yes] I currently work at a small-medium sized company, and we have one BI guy. Our ops team is ~5 people, and 1-2 of the more junior guys are tasked with doing everything necessary to support the BI guy. which basically means making sure the BI software is installed properly on the container, configured properly, has access to the db, and it comes up properly e…

The definition of what is BI varies by company and is one of the 'squishier' terms in IT becaise the needs and roles vary quite a bit. In a small company (which it sounds like yours is) one BI person does everything out of necessity. In a Fortune 500 company, a BI person would likely be on a reporting team and spend their days doing nothing but generating reports and performing analysis... there would be another team…

That was an awesome response - that helped a lot. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

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

#435

Post by FabHK »

jessaustin wrote: post #304
natalyarostova wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is you're being glib, but Markowitz literally is quoted as saying diversification is the closest thing there is in finance to a free lunch.

Diversification? An insurance policy is a wager made with one party on a series of closely related events. There's nothing diverse about it, from the consumer standpoint. Some diversification is possible for the insurance firm itself, although there are limits to that so most firms purchase reinsurance.

Of course it's diversification. Instead of being short your own illness only, you enter a swap where you receive coverage for your own illness (thus being flat on that clump risk), and pay a small floating leg covering (a small proportion of) everyone's illness. You have much smaller variance, but the same expected return (minus administration costs) - just like any diversification.
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