[HN Gopher] The Microsoft Excel superstars throw down in Vegas
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The Microsoft Excel superstars throw down in Vegas
Author : leotravis10
Score : 156 points
Date : 2024-06-12 15:52 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| sokolova46 wrote:
| This was really cool to see, I imagine it was a lot of hard work
| to develop
| Terr_ wrote:
| That makes me think of these two great parody videos from ~5
| years back, of Excel using e-sport tropes, introduced but a
| (fictional) livestreaming competitor nicknamed Makro.
|
| "Microsoft Excel stream highlights"
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
|
| "XLOOKUP" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI
| LocutusOfBorges wrote:
| Hyped for Ballmercon 2024!
| Yhippa wrote:
| ...is that a real thing?
| dreadlordbone wrote:
| it can be
| robingchan wrote:
| a fellow sheethead
| schnable wrote:
| and I thought these were just jokes!
| fragmede wrote:
| > hereThere is one inescapably weird thing about competitive
| Excel: spreadsheets are not fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful,
| very interesting, very important, but they are for work.
|
| My nerdy friends have a saying. If you don't have a spreadsheet,
| are you even having fun? Of course, their idea of fun is to
| min/max whatever game is at hand in order to win as best they
| can, which sometimes sucks the joy out of it for the rest of the
| players but it's all also fun to see how broken some game
| mechanics are.
| golergka wrote:
| Playing against professionals at the top of their game is
| rarely fun for amateurs in any kind of sport. You just lose,
| quickly, and don't even understand what's going on.
|
| (Not applicable to semi-professionals, they can at least figure
| out what's happening and learn).
| LegitShady wrote:
| If you enjoy problem solving and you're good at Excel often
| spreadsheets can be fun. It's not necessarily playing a game
| but about the satisfaction of logically laying out data,
| transformations and calculations in a way that solves a
| problem.
|
| That's not fun for everyone but it is fun for some people. The
| same way coding challenges and learn 2 code gamified websites
| are fun for some people.
|
| [Insert Dilbert "the knack" show segment]
| verticalscaler wrote:
| So there's this weird playlist about Excel by Martin Shkreli of
| all people:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI_riscmviI&list=PLJsVF3gZDc...
|
| It keeps popping up as he is apparently quick and knows the ins
| and outs. But I've never bothered to go through it as it is seven
| years old at this point and focused on finance.
|
| Can anybody recommend something similar but up to date with the
| new goodies so a fella could be competitive at this? I'm talking
| more keyboard shortcuts and advanced features (many of them
| overlap). The latest versions of Excel sort of open it up anew.
|
| _puts on headband and cracks knuckles_
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Shkreli had quite a following back in the day.. there was a
| video archive and a few of his padawans got quite rich
| filoleg wrote:
| It helped that those streams of his were nothing what a
| normal person from the outside would expect from him. So the
| audience for his financial analysis streams self-selected
| kinda nicely.
|
| TLDR on those streams: it was Shkreli just opening excel
| spreadsheets and going super deep on analysis of corporate
| financials, in the most plain unemotional way possible. He
| even did fun exercises to show his viewers how he works
| things: the audience would vote for a random public company
| ticker that Shkreli never analyzed betore, and he would just
| spend the next few hours populating his excel spreadsheet
| from scratch and trying to make some conclusions. With the
| preference for picking companies that he actually knows
| absolutely nothing about in terms of their finances.
| Literally just gathering all relevant publicly available
| information and analyzing it, with lots of hard numbers and
| excel magic involved. No joking, no non-sequiters, no guests,
| just lazer-focused on financial analysis. Not going to lie,
| it blew my mind when i was first trying to follow along at
| the time.
|
| If you aren't into that type of a thing, i imagine it would
| be extremely boring to watch, as it was nothing like his
| "more known" livestreams focused on trolling and ragebaiting.
| It was just cold "thinking outloud and populating
| spreadsheets" type of content. The viewership numbers
| reflected that too, with the financial analysis streams
| having magnitudes less views (with most people not even
| knowing they existed, despite being posted on the same
| channel as his more popular and controversial streams).
| verticalscaler wrote:
| Sounds great. I wasn't aware he has a reputation as a stock
| picker. All I know about him is that he had some
| shenanigans with Pharma price gauging and that's both how
| he made his money and ended up in jail.
|
| The trolling is uninteresting except maybe the Wu Tang
| thing.
|
| I'm only after pure Excel-fu here. It is actually weird for
| me that people use it to analyze stocks instead of Python
| but I probably don't know what I'm missing.
|
| Edit: The first few minutes seem neat, I'm biting the
| bullet
| infecto wrote:
| I don't believe he ever got in trouble for pharma
| pricing. It was securities fraud.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| Sorry I misremembered. The Pharma pricing thing just made
| him an easy target for the media you are correct.
| 7thpower wrote:
| Well, I know what I'm going to be watching for the next few
| hours...
|
| I find these types of analysis very helpful at work and
| building strong fundamentals has never left me regretting
| the time investment.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Didn't Shkreli get rich from the market way before his
| shenanigans started? And he did it from scratch, the old
| school, poor immigrant from New York way. Shkreli is the
| misssed opportunity of the Obama years
| filoleg wrote:
| Yeah, he went working on wallst at some firm at 16 and
| never went to college, comes from an albanian immigrant
| family of little means (his dad was a janitor iirc).
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Shkreli would definitely be sith, and so he would have
| apprentices, not padawans :P
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| I've watched Shkreli livestream financial modeling and I've
| watched the excel world championship and he's on another level.
| I'd study him any day.
| mc_maurer wrote:
| "the world's most important piece of software"
|
| "there's simply no more powerful piece of software on the planet
| for turning a mess of numbers into answers and sense"
|
| I never want to be one to downplay Excel's ubiquity and
| importance, but these statements seem a tad... hypberbolic.
| hgyjnbdet wrote:
| I genuinely would like to hear about a more important piece of
| software for businesses. Or more used. In those respects I'd
| have to agree with each of those statements.
| mc_maurer wrote:
| I think "for businesses" is probably the caveat here. It
| feels like a trope to mention it at this point, but I think
| the world would suffer greater consequences if, say, the
| Linux kernel broke.
|
| I'd also argue that Excel isn't really the most "powerful"
| per se, but the most accessible and convenient for sure.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| It is for sure the most widely utilized functional coding
| environment on the planet.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| SAP or Salesforce is often the critical piece of software in
| many an organization. My current assignment (I don't work
| with SAP though, thankfully) is an energy company with ~3
| million customers, each and everyone's data is managed in SAP
| along energy usage, billing/invoicing, the works. Small army
| of people managing and maintaining it, too.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| First statement maybe yes. Hard to find any software used in so
| many places with so much money / importance etc.
|
| Second statement hard no. It is a good balance of ease of use,
| familarity and power but for sure not even close to being the
| most powerful tool to crunch numbers on scale.
| EricE wrote:
| "not even close to being the most powerful tool to crunch
| numbers on scale." So what tool would be that's as broadly
| accessible as Excel is?
| kube-system wrote:
| "powerful" is being used there in terms of real world impact:
| intuitively powerful. Not as in "raw compute power".
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yeah, the crown for raw computer power for crunching
| numbers at scale would probably go to CUDA or, better yet,
| TPU job executors.
| kube-system wrote:
| The fastest supercomputer is actually running AMD chips:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_(supercomputer)
| maxglute wrote:
| But I do find this a fascinating question. What enables human
| flourishing more? instant messaging, word, excel, cad,
| photoshop, databases? Or something even more esoteric. I
| remember someone saying if MacOS disapearred tomorrow, we'll
| adjust, if older versions of windows disappeared, the world
| stops.
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| They are true. As an entrepreneur, 90% of the time my most
| serious competition is an Excel file.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| What % of Global GDP would be lost within 24 hours if Excel
| suddenly disappeared tonight (all other things staying the
| same)?
|
| A double-digit % would be lost, and possibly a very high one at
| that.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I find the page style annoying. It does not facilitate reading.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Agreed: .cell * { color: black !important; }
| .cell:not(.lede) { background-color: white !important;
| background-image: none !important; height: auto !important;
| border: 0 !important; }
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| And the font family
| blahyawnblah wrote:
| Yeah, my eyes couldn't take that for very long
| razster wrote:
| Closed it as soon as I saw that green. Just a bad design.
| mandibeet wrote:
| It helped me to wake up a little
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| Switching to black on white makes it easier (there's an option
| in the corner). In general, though, I like the thought and
| effort that went into it. The Verge does these sorts of one-
| time article layouts semi-frequently and I tend to appreciate
| how they augment the reading.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I wish I had one of these competitive folks in my office next to
| me teaching me new tricks. I used to do this for others. And it
| was fun and I was popular in Uni and work.
| tamad wrote:
| If anyone's interested, here are some example cases published by
| the Financial Modeling World Cup:
|
| https://fmworldcup.com/product-category/case-studies/excel-e...
|
| Most are behind a paywall, unfortunately.
| canadianwriter wrote:
| Looks like this one is free:
| https://fmworldcup.com/product/the-forecasting-power-exceler...
|
| The video alone lays out how these things work, very
| interesting. My brain started solutioning right away. Lots of
| fun.
| julianeon wrote:
| I would like to see this esport succeed, because I think the
| numerical skills they're showing off are very commercially
| useful, and getting more people interested in them would benefit
| us all.
| JCM9 wrote:
| These things are impressive. It is funny that sometimes to do
| crazy Excel acrobatics to solve what would be a few lines of code
| in Python or other approaches.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Step 1. Open Excel Step 2. Start building your model.
|
| Or...
|
| Step 1. Open VSCode or PyCharm Step 2. Front-end... hmmm, web?
| Electron? Qt? Jupyter? Step 3. venv Step 4. pip Step 5.
| SqlAlchemy? Psycopg? Raw SQL? Import CSV? Step 6. "Where we
| gonna host this? Local? Cloud? Serverless? Do we need Docker?
| K8s?" Step 7. git init Step 8. "Hey, do any of you know what
| these mean on the specs? IRR? COGS? NPV? I studied CompSci, not
| this lame finance bullshit" Step 9. Call up Fred from
| Accounting for some help. Step 10. Fred starts with Step 1,
| above.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Ever tried to normalize/parse a list of dates in Excel? It takes
| a formula a mile long, and I've never gotten it to work quite
| right.
|
| E.g.
|
| 01/15/2024
|
| 1/15/2024
|
| 1/15/24
|
| 01/03/2024
|
| 1/3/2024
|
| 1/3/24
|
| Unless you write something in VBscript or whatever Excel uses
| now, it's a nightmare.
| HaZeust wrote:
| I just do it in Google Sheets with Apps Scripts and then move
| on from there.
|
| function dateFix() { var sheet =
| SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getSheetByName("Sheet1");
| var dateRange = sheet.getRange("A:A"); var dateValues =
| dateRange.getValues(); for (var i = 0; i <
| dateValues.length; i++) { if (dateValues[i][0]) {
| var fixedDate = fixDate(dateValues[i][0]); if
| (fixedDate) { sheet.getRange(i + 1,
| 2).setValue(fixedDate); } } }
|
| }
|
| function fixDate(dateString) { var datePattern =
| /^(\d{1,2})\/(\d{1,2})\/(\d{2}|\d{4})$/; var match =
| dateString.match(datePattern); if (!match) {
| return null; } var month =
| match[1].padStart(2, '0'); var day = match[2].padStart(2,
| '0'); var year = match[3]; if (year.length ===
| 2) { year = '20' + year; } return
| month + '/' + day + '/' + year; }
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| This is what I'm saying. It takes a dozen LoC to do what
| Excel is theoretically built to do: format a column of dates
| "as date".
| hot_gril wrote:
| Does DATEVALUE not solve this?
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Nope. DATEVALUE fumbles this badly.
|
| It's precisely for parsing dates but on a column with 1-digit
| vs. 2-digit days/months and 2-digit vs. 4-digit years (all in
| d/m/y format, mind you), it fails in one instance or the
| other.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Text to columns with a date value? (it works fine if it's
| one columns)
|
| I expect it gets your example there right, but you may have
| other issues in mind that you didn't push into the example.
| elmer007 wrote:
| I just put all 6 of the examples above into Excel as text,
| then used DATEVALUE to parse them. It worked correctly for
| all 6. However, in the immediate parent comment, you
| mention d/m/y format, which 3 of the examples above could
| not be, so perhaps the details of the issue you've
| encountered are more subtle (such as 2-digit years that
| require context to determine the century); but, at present,
| it looks like DATEVALUE handles this well.
| m16ghost wrote:
| > (all in d/m/y format, mind you)
|
| The examples you gave are in m/d/y format though, and
| DATEVALUE() parses your examples correctly into Jan 15th,
| 2024 and January 3rd, 2024.
|
| DATEVALUE() parses ambiguous short date formats (e.g.
| 1/3/24) using the short date format specified in the Region
| settings of Windows Control Panel. So if you want to parse
| d/m/y format, you can try changing the settings there.
| SECProto wrote:
| If you type those into cells in excel, they all display the
| same. Excel doesn't store them as dates, it just displays them
| as such. If you format it as a generic number, the first three
| lines all show 45306, while the latter three lines show 45294
| as the cell value.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| In my case, usually the column comes into Excel via
| copy/paste of a dozen mixed columns, or File-Open on a CSV.
|
| The workaround, at least for CSVs, is to do an import via
| "Get Data" -> "From Text (legacy)" and tag the relevant
| column as "date". This doesn't always work though.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I learned how to format cells in early 2000s on Excel, so I
| know this functionality has existed for a long time, and these
| instructions are valid all the way back to Excel 2016, and up
| to current Excel 365. On Excel desktop, you can even set your
| own custom date parsing format. I don't know if this will work
| for you, but it is built-in and supported using the GUI, no
| coding/scripting necessary.
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/format-a-date-the...
| zamadatix wrote:
| The main hangup is probably around what year "24" should auto
| convert to being ambiguous as that adds an extra IF() to handle
| converting to 2024 instead of 1924. Beyond that it should just
| be =TEXTSPLIT(A1, "/") and =DATE(D1, C1, B1).
|
| If I was going to drop my hackerman shades and pull up to an
| Excel code golf competition this is the "fewest total
| characters using a single cell" I could come up with:
| =REGEXREPLACE(A1 "^0?(\d{1,2})\/0?(\d{1,2})\/(..)?(\d{2})$",
| "20$3/$2/$1")
| chungy wrote:
| I like spreadsheets to get things done quick 'n dirty, but I feel
| like the threshold to where a spreadsheet becomes painful and the
| problem is better solved with a database (SQLite would do) and
| custom application is remarkably low.
| iamsam123 wrote:
| Fair, and the number of people that use Excel and understand
| this sentiment is also remarkably low.
| bluedino wrote:
| Oh the ERP world...you get some stubborn user that refuses to
| learn the reporting language or SQL, and instead wants to load
| data dumps into Excel. Requires about ten times the hardware to
| do the same thing.
| tivert wrote:
| Except that there's no real path for non-technical people to
| learn and do that, but there is on for them to become Excel
| power users and solve their problems with that tool.
| mandibeet wrote:
| You're absolutely right. Excel's accessibility is an ideal
| tool for non-technical users
| mcdonje wrote:
| For some use cases. If someone is using a spreadsheet as a form
| app, then sure. But spreadsheets are one of the best tools for
| analysis work.
| beau_g wrote:
| I agonize over this decision a lot. I normally figure the
| tipping point is about 8 hours of me looking into the data, or
| planning to revisit it 3 or more times in the future. Whichever
| way I choose, I normally later decide I made the wrong choice.
| racl101 wrote:
| If it weren't for the rest of the world using spreadsheets,
| especially the clients we're supposed to impress, you know, the
| people with the $$$ that can make or break one's business, I
| wouldn't even bother with those spreadsheets. I'd just use
| Python, Numpy and Pandas for everything involving 2 dimensional
| data.
|
| And of course ... I'd have less grey hairs ... :(
| JCM9 wrote:
| Spreadsheets have this strange productivity curve where for quick
| and dirty stuff it's very fast but go deeper and the spreadsheet
| turns into this unmanageable mess that greatly reduces
| productivity long term (vs say using code to do the analysis in a
| repeatable way).
|
| The business world is full of the later. For example, some
| bonkers monstrosity of a spreadsheet that Bob from finance built
| 5 years ago. Bob is no longer with the company and said
| spreadsheet is the only way the TPS reports get done each month
| so the whole company is held together by this thing nobody really
| understands.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| Exactly. Because Excel sheets have no tests or code review
| ok_dad wrote:
| That's because corporate policy usually precludes running
| actual code. I made plenty of huge ass spreadsheets when I
| worked at one place because there was no way for me to do my
| job otherwise, unless we wanted to pay hundreds of thousands of
| dollars to specific developers to build and validate it. The
| spreadsheets were okay because of reasons beyond my
| comprehension. The key factor was, I think, that no one else
| was allowed to write to the spreadsheets, they could just read
| them and integrate that information into their decision making.
| I was the only person who could modify and input data.
| shagie wrote:
| How much difference is there between =IF(A1
| > A2, (B2 + B3), (C2 - C3))
|
| and (if (> aye-one aye-two) (+ bee-two bee-
| three) (- cee-two cee-three))
|
| Infix vs prefix, coordinates vs variable names.
|
| It is syntax on top of the essence of a functional
| programming language.
|
| And it has the same things. One liner of perl, python, or
| powershell - anyone can write it and it doesn't take too much
| to manage its complexity.
|
| However, once you get into more complex relationships between
| data and structures, it takes discipline to manage it.
| Spreadsheets often are poor at giving you the tools to manage
| it and so it takes more effort to make sure that you're not
| making a mess.
|
| A complex spreadsheet _is_ a complex program that needs to
| have someone who has the discipline and abstractions
| necessary to manage it.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| We used spreadsheets to manage offices -- there is about 15
| separate offices -- complete data set (clients, analytics, call
| logs) and each sheet has many, many different formulas
| interconnecting all the sheets in the book.
|
| We use Google Sheets, as we changed from Office at the
| beginning of this year, and 10-15 times a day my tab crashes on
| Chrome from just _existing_ , let alone when trying to do any
| operations.
|
| It's a mess, and I'd rather build a simple web app to replace
| it, but don't have the time, approval, or financial resources
| to make the switch. So instead of letting me improve 100+
| peoples daily workflows, we just suffer.
|
| Go spreadsheets!
| rudasn wrote:
| I know it sounds like a terrible idea,but next time you wait
| for the tab to restart how about looking into the sheets api
| docs? And the next time,try to write a quick script that just
| makes updating the cells you need to update a bit easier. At
| the end of it,at least _you_ won 't have to suffer.
| epolanski wrote:
| Afaik Excel is still way faster than Google Sheets.
| personalityson wrote:
| What is the alternative?
| enjoyyourlife wrote:
| Any programming language
| svara wrote:
| Honestly this is something you say as a person who doesn't
| really run into the use cases for spreadsheets.
|
| I've been writing code since I was a kid, but there are
| jobs a spreadsheet is just the right tool for. Almost
| anything that involves creating an overview of lots of
| interdependent numbers really.
|
| Excel in particular is a lot more powerful than you might
| be aware of if you're a casual user, and I would honestly
| recommend you learn it properly, as you would learn a
| programming language, since it's a really useful skill to
| have (1).
|
| That said, I've often thought about what a programmer's
| spreadsheet tool would look like. Scientific grade
| plotting, N-dimensional spreadsheets, a real programming
| language in the cell formulas...
|
| Someone must have attempted it?
|
| (1) By the way, ChatGPT is great at teaching Excel.
| amarant wrote:
| >That said, I've often thought about what a programmer's
| spreadsheet tool would look like. Scientific grade
| plotting, N-dimensional spreadsheets, a real programming
| language in the cell formulas...
|
| Someone must have attempted it?
|
| That sounds suspiciously similar to any SQL database if
| you ask me...
|
| I like postgres myself, but people talk fondly of mySQL
| too.. as for viewing the "spreadsheet", there are
| probably hundreds of solutions. I'm partial to DBeaver
| myself, if it's the spreadsheet feeling you're looking
| for at least.
| adammarples wrote:
| It's not that they're not powerful, it's everything else.
| Spreadsheets are great for quickly putting down some data
| and evolving your understanding as you go. Make a pivot
| table, filter it, make some charts, show it to someone,
| throw it away. Where they come unstuck is on long running
| more or less static important calculations that everyone
| uses. This is because 1) no version control, so you have
| copies upon copies being passed around. 2) inscrutable
| formulas that should be documented udfs. 3) data with no
| constraints like types, nullability, foreign key, so the
| data has no integrity. 4) insufficient tests. 5)
| insufficient error messages. 6) insufficient logging.
| Etc, etc.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| Usually databases. 8/10 times I see excel used badly is when
| it should have been access.
| JCM9 wrote:
| The killer app would something with the general ease of use of
| spreadsheets but with the audit-ability and change management
| rigor of code development.
| scrapcode wrote:
| I'm in a predominately administrative position for a large
| organization, with an education in development and a lot of
| freelance experience, but that's just not the path my
| professional career took. Our system privileges are strict and
| I have to dance around things like SharePoint, PowerApps,
| PowerAutomate, Access, Excel, and sometimes VB Script within...
| I have access to Node and Python, but user privs are blocked at
| using npm. I've tried to request perms to utilize basic
| packages such as Yeoman in order to develop in SPFx SharePoint
| Framework and they consider each package an application that
| would require a thorough vetting process
|
| All that to say, it's an absolute cluster-fsck to automate
| anything with the proper tooling. If there is any way I can
| just do it in Excel these days, I do it. I've created some
| pretty ridiculous stuff in it. The upside is that once I am
| able to navigate cutting all of this red tape and use proper
| tools, I'll have plenty of projects in mind and likely be asked
| to return as a contractor for double+ the money to maintain
| them in retirement.
| mandibeet wrote:
| Indeed but spreadsheets still are an incredibly versatile tool,
| but their utility can diminish as complexity increases
| listenallyall wrote:
| Every criticism, like this one, of spreadsheets getting
| unwieldy and confusing and difficult to untangle is entirely
| applicable to most internal code bases as well. Technical debt,
| old languages, uncommented code blocks, obsolete anti-patterns,
| tied to some vendor product or github repo that has been
| discontinued/abandoned, code copy-and-pasted from Stack
| Overflow (or ChatGPT generated) that nobody ever understood,
| horribly inefficient database calls, etc etc.
|
| Further, even a big messy Excel model (including VBA code) is
| usually self-contained in a single file, while a code-based
| model can be dozens or hundreds of files, many of which are
| support libraries for stuff that's built-in to Excel (front-
| end, vector math, charting). And lets not get started on
| breaking up a model into distributed microservices!
| arsenide wrote:
| Probably true in general. But there are always exceptions. Hard
| to imagine a tool better than Excel for slot game math
| calculations. Maybe it can be done?
|
| Calculations for slot machine mechanics and payouts have been
| in Excel for a long time. There can be a LOT of complexity in
| these workbooks. Sometimes it's tricky to debug - but what's
| the alternative? Code is often hard to debug too.
|
| Simulating results (Monte Carlo) is nice but having two sets of
| data for validation/checking against each other is nice.
|
| I am not aware of any alternatives.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| It's not just "spreadsheets", this happens to any software not
| written by someone trained in software engineering practices -
| e.g., some script written by a data scientist that only runs on
| his machine.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| To be fair, regular code also becomes something nobody
| understands. A spreadsheet might get big, but it doesn't
| typically grow to like 20,000 loc or greater that somebody
| wrote in spaghetti code. I mean they certainly can, but that's
| a lot rarer.
| doubloon wrote:
| Yes.... you wind up with business people who know a ton about
| business but nothing about software engineering.
|
| No version control, no approval process, no source code
| repository, no unit or regression testing, no logging, no test
| vs production environment, no central place where all
| code/macros are saved, no documentation.
| mandibeet wrote:
| Love Excel. When I was little was really into exploring its
| features.
| bbayles wrote:
| I had a coworker who could really Go Fast in Excel, and by
| watching him, learned enough tricks to be able to impress
| onlookers by flying through computations with keyboard shortcuts.
|
| From my perspective, it's gotten harder to use spreadsheet
| programs efficiently with each new version - the keyboard
| shortcuts collide more, and everything moving to Office 365 /
| Google Docs / etc. has made the available tools less powerful.
| surfingdino wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg will turn you into
| a more proficient user of Excel.
|
| However, make sure you know the limits of Excel...
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
| queuebert wrote:
| > Four decades later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Excel
| "the best consumer product we ever created." He doesn't just see
| it as an enterprise tool. It's for everything. Nadella said he
| simply can't imagine a world without Excel. "People couldn't make
| sense of numbers before, and now everyone can."
|
| So the best thing they ever did was make a clone of Lotus 1-2-3
| and VisiCalc? Sounds about right.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| You're just trying to be contrarian for imaginary internet
| points. Satya is right about this one.
| bbarn wrote:
| People also seem to forget spreadsheets as a concept pre-date
| computing.
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