[HN Gopher] Excel World Championship Finals
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Excel World Championship Finals
Author : Silasdev
Score : 144 points
Date : 2021-12-11 15:07 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| ineedasername wrote:
| TIL you actually can enable circular references in Excel. Though
| I struggle to see the practical usefulness except for a few edge
| cases.
| jkaptur wrote:
| How else would you implement Newton's method? ;)
| dsizzle wrote:
| I'm reminded of solving Laplace's equation in Excel. It makes
| some cool animations too
| https://www.av8n.com/physics/laplace.htm
| sl8r wrote:
| 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.
| bmsleight_ wrote:
| Disappointed having watch the earlier rounds there were not much
| in terms of tips.
|
| Just heavy use of index, left$ and if statements.
| martini333 wrote:
| It's a competition. Not a tutorial.
| OzCrimson wrote:
| One thing that's good to see is how Excel can be applied. I was
| a host when the challenges were: 1. Roulette 2. Biathlon
|
| And, no. It's not heavy on tips. The rounds are timed and each
| of the contestants have their own methods. It was interesting
| to see some people use formulas and some people use conditional
| formatting for the same solution.
| aaron695 wrote:
| I don't think watching Magnus Carlsen helps with tips in chess
| either?
|
| Or watching tennis pros.
|
| It might help define the journey you have to go on to get to
| the upper echelon.
|
| You now seem to think 'index, left$ and if' seems to be what
| matters, that's something.
|
| It will be interesting to see where Deepmind takes something
| like this.
| booleanbetrayal wrote:
| Wait ... this is a real thing?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Upload date: 28 March, which is suspiciously close to...
|
| Really well-made though :D
| obnauticus wrote:
| 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).
| sokoloff wrote:
| "Top Sheethead" is going to have me giggling on and off all
| day.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Finally! Emoji macros are a reality!
|
| Do we all remember the dark days of the Before?
| wsinks wrote:
| I just want to validate that I thought Krazam was based on
| total fiction. I'm stunned to see a 2k person livestream about
| this today in the best way!
| Flankk wrote:
| Cell Shock are heading into the finals with an 8-point lead in
| macro chaining but they face fierce opposition from the Miami
| Sheet with their blazing 460 shortcut APM. Five competitors have
| been caught doping but let's hope the others will recover from
| their repetitive strain injuries from last season.
| jackhalford wrote:
| made me think of this [1] parody.
|
| 1: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY
| webdoodle wrote:
| 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 per week person to
| doing this manually. They had been doing that job for years!
| funstuff007 wrote:
| Yes, I've long said don't fear the robot revolution, fear the
| VBA revolution.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Excel still is used heavily in government.
|
| Are you implying that there is somewhere it's not used heavily?
| michaelyuan2012 wrote:
| Excel is good for business office using.
|
| hope this Cement Trailer For Sale is helpful for logistic
| company.
|
| https://www.dreamtruegroup.com/cement-trailer-for-sale/
| CactusOnFire wrote:
| 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?
| ineedasername wrote:
| For something that needs to be editable and analyzed and shared
| among users that are highly proficient in financial tech
| (excel) but are _not_ programmers, an app framework isn 't
| going to work.
|
| My work is often an input into the work of the finance folks
| where I'm at, and they have countless very complex excel docs.
| None of them are programmers, but all them (and anyone else
| moderately proficient in Excel) can look under the hood, see
| what's going on, and make their own additions/changes as
| needed.
|
| And there may need to be new versions of all of these that have
| slight or major changes made on a monthly/quarterly/annual
| basis. No single build w/ a web-app framework is going to do
| this very well without a very large investment in developer
| costs, and that simply isn't necessary when there is already a
| perfectly good tool for their needs. Developer costs aside, it
| would also mean that these folks had a significant delay in
| their work: They could no longer clone last quarter's sheet and
| spend a morning making the necessary changes. They'd need to
| spend a few days going back & forth with a developer over the
| scope & specs of the changes, a little longer for the developer
| to write the code, do a bit of UAT, and assuming everything
| works as expected then get to the actual work and hope nothing
| new came up before next quarter that would stop their work for
| more dev time.
|
| The types of systems that eliminate a little bit of this are
| part of industry-specific monolithic ERP systems, and even
| those may only cover the 60% of requirements that don't change
| often or are supported by contractually guaranteed TOS upgrades
| each quarter from the vendor.
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| Yes, you are an asshole for suggesting a web-app framework
| instead just vanilla programming language. Why all the bloat of
| a web-app?
| agumonkey wrote:
| brainfuck existence should hint at what humans enjoy :)
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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
| don't change much and b) if they do change, the end user
| doesn't need to be the one to do it on the fly. (mostly this
| entails tapping into the underlying data sources-- or first
| building the tools to do so-- and then automating the
| transformations, analysis, and presentation using some
| combination of r/python along with a SQL database & BI
| platform.) I work with finance folks too though, and what
| they do with excel is generally not a candidate for this
| process.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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 all
| suck some use case from excel. I believe that future
| clearly lies in the middle. Microsoft should be wise to
| implement some presentation/component feature to match the
| web.
| SMAAART wrote:
| I found my people!
| kingcharles wrote:
| Obligatory Ian Malcolm:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3j9muCo4o0
| INTPenis wrote:
| 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 fronts reflecting the vendor and
| model of the server.
|
| The person who made this had quit a long time ago, no one was
| quite sure of who it was. And of course things had slowly started
| to break down, like API connections, alerts, it wasn't up to
| date, but wow. It blew my mind.
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