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

Spreadsheets are all you need

spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 178 posts

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#61

Post by ccppurcell »

pipes wrote: post #35
mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

One of my biggest weakness as a developer is that I can barely use excel. It's really embarrassing, especially since I've moved to a financial firm. Do you have any recommendations for becoming semi competent with it?

Just an idea but how would you advise someone learning programming/a new programming language? Probably you'd say: build something with it. So same goes for excel. Try to hook up a spreadsheet to some database, have it update automatically, have drop down lists that populate automatically from the database (e.g. have a "country" drop down and automatically populate a "region" drop down based on the choice of country) and so on. You need some BASIC and SQL for this but not much

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#63

Post by Shrezzing »

pipes wrote: post #35
mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

One of my biggest weakness as a developer is that I can barely use excel. It's really embarrassing, especially since I've moved to a financial firm. Do you have any recommendations for becoming semi competent with it?

The MS documentation for Excel is a pretty good resource to learn from these days, with text descriptions for just about every function, and videos for most too. This page [1] is an especially great resource. It's got a "top-10" list, which is a good place to start, as it covers the majority of things you'll see in a normal business document.

After those 10, they break them down by category, and have one for Financial Functions, which is going to be useful for you. Similarly, the Logical, Math & Trig, and Stats functions, will all be useful for looking at a Finance firm's spreadsheets.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/excel-functions-b...

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#64

Post by sebastiennight »

emmelaich wrote: post #59

Related? I was copy'n'pasting a few chars from one column from to another in gsheets. Gsheets intuited that I wanted to do this multiple times and offered this formula: > =RIGHT(A7,LEN(A7) - (FIND(CHAR(160),SUBSTITUTE(A7," ",CHAR(160),2))))

Wait... this... outputs the right-hand part of a cell in column A that follows the second space character in the string?

How is that related to anything?

Was it, at least, the correct formula for your need?

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#65

Post by emmelaich »

sebastiennight wrote: post #64
emmelaich wrote: post #59

Related? I was copy'n'pasting a few chars from one column from to another in gsheets. Gsheets intuited that I wanted to do this multiple times and offered this formula: > =RIGHT(A7,LEN(A7) - (FIND(CHAR(160),SUBSTITUTE(A7," ",CHAR(160),2))))

Wait... this... outputs the right-hand part of a cell in column A that follows the second space character in the string? How is that related to anything? Was it, at least, the correct formula for your need?

I presume it was the AI/ML part watching me doing the manual stuff and automating it, which is cool.

Yes it was correct.

It gave me 43h0m from "08 Jan 43h0m". Obviously over a column. I was able to adjust that to give me time durations.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#66

Post by ponector »

It is truly amazing!

Funny thing is that excel can do such thing but cannot replace dates within the sheet. For example on Windows in Office 2021 if I want to replace text cell which has value 2023-10-10 with new value 2023-10-11 I have only two options as the result: 10/11/2023 or 45210.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#68

Post by xbmcuser »

pipes wrote: post #35
mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

One of my biggest weakness as a developer is that I can barely use excel. It's really embarrassing, especially since I've moved to a financial firm. Do you have any recommendations for becoming semi competent with it?

For excel/spreadsheets etc chat gpt or google gemeni are a lot more useful than for normal programming as a lot of stuff about spread sheets is explained in easy steps for non technical people to implement so that has become a treasure trove of information for llm models.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#69

Post by throw0101d »

Related to strange things running in spreadsheets, if you want to see how a 16-bit CPU works, Inkbox has created one in a spreadsheet:

* https://github.com/InkboxSoftware/excelCPU

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rg7xvTJ8SU

A twenty-four instruction assembly language is also provided.

Re: Spreadsheets are all you need

#70

Post by ramses0 »

mckn1ght wrote: post #2

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

Check out "Google AppSheets". I've only scratched the surface while investigating other stuff but it's basically "drag-and-drop mobile GUI builder w/ sheets as a backend". If it were 2005 it would SLAY so much code. As it is, it seems really useful but the outcome seems a bit generic for modern tastes.
Post reply on HN