
The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It - sonabinu
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-rule-of-microsoft-exceldont-tell-anyone-youre-good-at-it-1538754380
======
OskarS
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.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw)

~~~
kamaal
>>You know, the Wall Street ... who's in jail now?

He is a seriously misunderstood figure. Have watched his YouTube videos too,
not just the investment class but also his working sessions. Sure his excel
skills are legendary.

But I learned a lot from him about skills, learning and mastery. Merely
watching him work not only motivated me. But gave me tremendous perspective on
time, its utility to life and how skills and knowledge need to work in
general.

This guy has legendary skills in investing world. But apart from that he was
always reading a book or two. He was doing organic chemistry, chess, playing
guitar, learning programming and interests in wide variety of topics in
economics.

He was first genuine example of 10k hour practice I have watched live in
practice.

You also get to look into the mind of this guy, and see what's at the core of
it, and you see most is basically 'knowledge and practice'.

~~~
nv-vn
Agreed. He really is an inspiration. In jail he's spending his time reading
and learning, which you can follow along with on his blog. He's a very
intelligent guy and I think he's almost like an anti-hero who's bad at
portraying himself. I think if he played his cards right he'd paid a fine and
spent no time in jail, but he had way too much fun stirring up a scene.

~~~
kamaal
I largely believe now that the left movements across the world have degraded
to making a virtue out of laziness, poverty and people lack of ability to take
initiative.

There was no way this guy could have survived, in fact Martin should have
spent time learning a little politics too.

If you have the kind of skills, motivated enough, have ability to take
initiatives and overall quality of human enterprise that this guy has you are
bound to attract envy, spite and more importantly people just want to see the
end of you for being a live anti thesis to their lives.

I have a feeling that people won't relax until they see Elon Musk meeting the
same fate too.

------
lozaning
If we're sharing awesome excel videos, You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky has
to be among the best I've ever seen. Joel, being on the team that made excel,
has an incredible amount of excel knowledge.

The video is meant to be in the same vein as the You Suck at Photoshop videos.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)

~~~
mynameishere
He's got a Bloomberg console and he's typing data manually from a PDF into
Excel. That's just got to be the incorrect workflow. If not, there is room for
huge improvement in financial tools.

~~~
imron
I used to work for a financial services company. Their main product was a 30
year old cobol program used by many large banks.

Some of them would use our software to print various reports and then
_manually enter those printed values in to excel_.

Even worse, the software could export to a format excel could process so it
wasn't necessary in the first place.

Don't expect to be disrupting banking anytime soon though. Banks are
incredibly risk averse, especially when it comes to messing with expensive
legacy software that has been working for decades.

At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how
much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and
so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi-
million dollar yearly licenses.

~~~
badpun
> At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how
> much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures,
> and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the
> multi-million dollar yearly licenses.

A bank I've worked at had a project to replace lots of bank's legacy
(Mainframes and Cobol) with Java on Linux. The project's budget was over 1
billion dollars and it was estimated to take 5 years.

~~~
imron
The company I worked for tried to rewrite everything in Java twice.

Both attempts cost millions, both were abandoned.

The lessons (and pain) from the first attempt were ignored because not enough
of the upper management were still around, and the only people who remembered
the pain were the rank and file, who were ignored by the new upper management
types looking to leave their mark on the product.

------
octo6
Shameless plug - we actually founded a service [1] that provides Excel experts
on-demand, within 30 to 60 seconds. So if you're tired of being the "Excel
expert" at work feel free to pass them on to us. Also happy to answer any
questions.

Tidbit: Most popular questions tend to be formulas, vlookups, conditional
formatting, pivots.

[1] [https://www.excelchat.co](https://www.excelchat.co)

~~~
Nadya
Word of advice - slow down your sliders. I read at an absurdly fast pace and I
barely finish the "Our Experts" excerpts before it scrolls. I know, from
testing, that I can mouse over them to pause them but that isn't intuitive to
people who don't build these sorts of things as their day job.

That being said - bookmarked. I've needed this in the past and while I may not
need it right now I probably will in the future.

~~~
SahAssar
This is why auto-sliding sliders with text are always a terrible idea. You can
never sync them to all users read speed, so some always think they are too
fast, and some always think they are too slow.

~~~
Nadya
They should be able to be paused, controlled for prev/next movement, last a
minimum of 3 seconds (and longer for large pieces of text). If it is too slow
the user can click "next" without it being an annoying experience. If it is
too fast - even with the ability to go back - it is an annoying experience
without the ability to pause it. But it is _always_ better to be too slow than
to be too fast.

My honest advice would be [1] and it should be designed in such a way that all
reviews are visible, perhaps in 3 columns, instead of a stupid carousel
slider. But slowing down the slider would be more trivial - as I expect very
few people are actually able to read all of the text of any of the excerpts
before it changes on them.

[0] [https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/time-limits-
pause...](https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/time-limits-pause.html)

[1] [http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/](http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/)

~~~
octo6
thanks for the pointers.. passing them on to our UI designer.

------
guelo
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.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I read a thing a few months back about some Western game developers
collaborating with Japanese counterparts for the first time, and their biggest
surprise was that a whole lot of game data is stored in an Excel file during
development. If you want to change an enemy's stats or a physics parameter,
you don't dig through config files with a text editor, you just pull up the
spreadsheet. Reportedly it made a lot of tweak-test-repeat work much quicker.

~~~
pmiller2
I don’t understand how editing a number in an excel file is any easier than
editing a number in a text file. What was it that made the difference?

~~~
vbezhenar
Probably table representation. It's relatively hard to implement something
similar using text format. You can have row for every unit in the game with
columns corresponding to various characteristics. It looks very natural in
Excel, but it would require quite a lot of formatting and errors with text
file. Also Excel could have formulas which might be useful somewhere and
supporting formulas in config file is another level of complexity and almost
certainly it'll be worse than Excel.

~~~
Nullabillity
Then use a real database. You probably have a SQLite dependency anyway, so
take advantage of it.

Or don't, since SCMs are much better at diffing plain text than either.

> Also Excel could have formulas which might be useful somewhere and
> supporting formulas in config file is another level of complexity and almost
> certainly it'll be worse than Excel.

You'll have an easier time reimplementing Excel's formula system than basic
arithmetic? I find that hard to believe.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _You 'll have an easier time reimplementing Excel's formula system than
> basic arithmetic? I find that hard to believe._

I'm not sure you understood what the parent was saying? This seems like a non
sequitur.

In a spreadsheet, derived values can be updated instantly. Say you want to
upgrade a bandit from leather armor to chainmail (6 or so equipment items
changed), and then verify that his total defense and modified movement speed
are still within reasonable ranges for the part of the game where he appears.
With a text file, you've got some arithmetic to do. With a spreadsheet, it's
there at a glance.

Or say your enemies are missing too much, and you want to give them +10%
accuracy across the board, for all of 50+ enemies. In a text file, that's a
lot of cursoring around. In a database, you could knock together a query to do
it, but that still might take a couple of minutes, depending. In a
spreadsheet, I could do it in 15 seconds. (And if I screw it up, a couple of
Ctrl-Zs puts everything back where it started. That's not so easy in a
database.)

And, y'know, a lot of programmers really underestimate the value of good
formatting. A database can spit out nice columnar tables easily, but a
spreadsheet can do things like put borders between stat clusters related to
different categories; automatically color-code data so you can see at a glance
what the highest and lowest values in a given column are, or spot out-of-range
derived values; add alternate-row shading to make it easier to scan across a
long row; and on and on. That is _useful._ It lets you find and correlate the
data you want faster with fewer errors. Not everything has to be viewed in
flat text.

~~~
shabble
Your first couple of points reminds me of a talk[1] about using a graph
database for tracking all sorts of entity and quest dependency relationships
to assist in game balancing and content creation.

[1] [https://www.airpair.com/neo4j/posts/modelling-game-
economy-w...](https://www.airpair.com/neo4j/posts/modelling-game-economy-with-
neo4j)

------
rhelmer
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-
matter-programming](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming)
where she explored the history of end-user programming systems, and concludes
that spreadsheet and CAD software are the only examples that have had
widespread and undeniable success.

ASMOP was published in 1993 and I think it is still just as relevant today.

Just as it's possible to write a terribly-architected and designed program in
any language, I suspect that with the right engineering effort and insight,
modern software engineering practices could bring the complexity under
control.

We shouldn't expect to just take spreadsheets and stick them into production,
just as you wouldn't take a hastily-written prototype written in any
programming language and do the same.

~~~
scroot
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 Hypercard was and what it meant for personal
computing. It did not die because people weren't using it. It was allowed to
wither on the vine because it never made business sense. And that's tragic.

~~~
itsananderson
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.

~~~
scroot
Excel is programming a computer. So was Hypercard. Any UX that reduces user
"savvy" rather than enhacing it can hardly be said to be improved. A large
part of the developer community has a very static idea of what a computer can
be or what programming can be. What does it mean to author in the medium and
why have we stopped trying to figure it out?

~~~
regularfry
I think it depends what you mean by "savvy". A UX which reduces what the user
has to think about to get stuff done is generally positive. That's what an
abstraction is, and we intentionally create them all the time.

The counter-example is trite, but it's true: it's a very good thing that I
don't need to know how a Xeon is going to reorder the instructions that v8 is
going to turn my webpage into after Babel has turned my es6+whateverextensions
into something node can actually execute. I can go down the stack and find out
if I absolutely have to, but it's a total waste of time otherwise.

I also don't think we've stopped trying to figure it out. We see new
languages, new environments coming forward fairly regularly. My instinct is
that the reason it seems that way is because the computing field selected for
people interested in that stuff _early_ , and more recent incomers are a)
people who don't yet have the experience to understand where the limits are;
and b) as a population are less interested on the whole in asking those
questions, because if they had been interested, they'd already be present.
It's also dramatically harder for a single project to become ubiquitous the
way Hypercard was, simply because of the size of both computer-using and
software project populations. It's a statistical artefact, in other words.

------
css
I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling
people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for
everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few
minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no
effort.

Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning
opportunities given by open-source software. A lot of people struggle to find
answers specifically because of this lack of community around using Excel as a
tool. I know I personally have floundered learning things that would have been
simple to understand had there been someone to guide me, so I try to provide
that same support to other people when they face the same obstacles.

Yes, its fun to cringe at people's inexperience. It is also important to
recognize we all started there.

~~~
mynameisvlad
It's less "not wanting to help people" and more "once people know you're 'the
Excel person' they come to you for everything to do with Excel". It's very
similar to being 'the computer person' in a family/group of friends and
everyone coming to you with all their various tech support questions. At a
certain point, it starts ruining your productivity since you get taken out of
your regular job to do these one time help requests.

~~~
semitext
This is my experience working in offices like law firms that are filled with
people that have limited technical aptitude for using software. Showing any
sort of competency is a recipe for increasing your workload with no conferred
benefits.

~~~
izacus
That's fine, the problem is that you also get all the blame as well. Once you
"fix" a computer, everything that will break will suddenly be your fault.

~~~
maxxxxx
Very true. I once installed a printer driver in a friend's company. I got
blamed for missing files by several employees during the following weeks.

~~~
sk5t
I've heard that auto mechanics know these as "Ever since you..." stories.

------
dragonshed
I suck at excel, but confession: i know how to make Installer programs and I
don't tell anyone anything about them, EVER. I learned how to make MSIs
packages and NSIS installers about 15 years ago and it didn't stop until I
completely redacted the info and experience and changed jobs.

~~~
imhoguy
Know your pain, I know how to use grep/awk/sed/..., now I am "logs
investigation" expert too often, ugh..

~~~
zaphar
I'm not sure which is worse. Being that awk/sed guy or being that Git guy.

~~~
dmos62
Who uses "guys" anymore? Didn't stackoverflow replace that?

~~~
Klathmon
SO often can take hours to weeks for a good answer, and that's assuming it
doesn't just get closed as a dupe when the other one doesn't answer the
question.

A good "guy" (or girl!) is a phone call away and can often solve the problem
in minutes.

~~~
zachberger
Totally agree, that network of SMEs is a huge productivity multiplier

------
maybecorrect
I have a joke I tell about Excel:

 _Excel is amazing, because it 's the wrong tool for everything! Which is
really impressive, since there aren't many tools you can do everything with!_

I realize it's not a very funny joke, but I do think it's true.

~~~
seizethecheese
This is great, thanks for sharing.

------
onychomys
I'm "the excel guy" for a lab of about 100 people, and it is indeed a
challenge sometimes. Mostly I just yell at them and tell them to stop using
excel sheets as makeshift databases. Then I yell at them some more and make
them switch from formulas (which, being written in reverse Polish, are
terrible to debug) over to macros. Then I yell at them for recording macros
instead of writing them themselves. Then I just do it for them. It's not a ton
of fun, but the money is good and the yelling is cathartic.

~~~
PascLeRasc
There needs to be an Excel "pro mode" where the mouse is disabled and you have
to do all navigation by keyboard. People would become so much more efficient
that way.

~~~
jstanley
If "pro mode" is optional, it would be no more effective than the existing
"pro mode" of simply taking your hand off the mouse.

~~~
function_seven
I'd use it.

If there was a pro mode buried in a sub-dialog of the options panel, I would
turn it on and see if I could make it for 10 minutes. Then 15, then 20 and so
on. Instead of reaching for the mouse when I wanted to give up, I'd have to
click on [File] > [Options] > [Advanced] and clear the "Enable pro mode"
checkbox.

Wait... no. I'd have to enter [ALT], F, T, ↓, ↓, ↓, ↓, ↓, [ALT]+R (to get to
Pr̲o Mode), then [SPACEBAR] :)

------
clairity
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

~~~
paulryanrogers
How did she handle the precision problem?

~~~
clairity
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).

------
drb91
Readable, non-paywalled version:
[https://outline.com/epLGYZ](https://outline.com/epLGYZ)

------
kelvin0
There should be a gameified excel online course. You've got challenges which
you must overcome by learning ever increasing advanced excel concepts.

This would have people more 'engaged' at learning the concepts instead of
trying to find the 'excel person' and dump their woes onto them.

Excel is great product (I hate it) but so often misused and abused by
technically challenged individuals.

~~~
csours
Heck, this could be an excel workbook itself!

------
kehrlann
Joel Spolsky used to be a Program Manager for Excel. He has a great, 1h long
video doing an Excel demo a few years ago - here, now YOU can be the Excel
guru
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)

------
paultopia
As someone who finds himself called upon to operate in a lot of situations
where Microsoft products are called for---I do wish the unix philosophy would
have taken hold in business software.

Excel genuinely is very hard to use. As is Word, as is Photoshop/Illustrator,
etc. Personally, I find those problems substantially more difficult than
ordinary programming. Because you have a substantial fraction of the
horsepower of an ordinary programming language, but hidden behind a forest of
menus and semi-incomprehensible icons and weird terminology and poor
documentation.

At least with word processing we have the capacity to strip it down to
something resembling the unix philosophy, thanks to toolchains like markdown +
pandoc. But for spreadsheets, what is there that's lighter than excel?

------
claar
Sounds like a cool startup idea.

A legion of VLOOKUP gurus manning a helpdesk, only $20 per screen-share!

~~~
octo6
Mentioned this elsewhere but we created a startup that does exactly this [1].
We charge a lot less than $20 though! Happy to answer any questions

[1] [https://www.excelchat.co](https://www.excelchat.co)

~~~
ac29
How is the pricing sustainable at $20/hour or $30/month "unlimited"? Do you
just employ overseas where labor is cheap? Or are you counting on people
paying $20 for questions that only take a minute or two to answer?

~~~
atr_gz
From their website, it says they pay experts from $2-$10 an hour.

------
makecheck
The widespread use of the Excel grid layout may explain why people seem to
have a high tolerance for improperly-sized UIs.

Personally it drives me crazy to see things truncated all over the place,
peppered with useless empty cells, for no reason other than “somebody
shoehorned this sparse data into a grid and never looked back”. It’s like
people just don’t see how much time they’re wasting constantly doing a mental
reconstruction of their poorly-described data because they can’t SEE most of
it.

We really need better tools.

------
cde-v
I love being the excel guy at my office. I wish it was my only job.

------
dhairya
Shameless plug, I'm an AI researcher at Talla (talla.com). This is a problem
space we're fascinated by. We want to make it easier to allow users to ask
natural language questions about data in Excel, Sheets, pdf tables or really
any tabular source.

What kind of questions and queries are difficult for you to do in Excel and
require an "excel wizard"? Also my email is my profile, would love to hear
about challenges folks face.

------
debaserab2
I've always said that if I ever do one thing with my child, I'll make sure
they understand how to use VLOOKUP in excel. If I do that, I'm pretty sure
they'll be set for life.

Every office I've worked in those that can perform VLOOKUP's correctly become
the Wizards of the office.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
> Every office I've worked in those that can perform VLOOKUP's correctly
> become the Wizards of the office

Some of them don't use the power wisely, though, and create poor clunky
databases spread over dozens of sheets.

It would be nice if MS added more Access like data integration as an adjunct
to spreadsheets. The current ODBC functionality is clunky at best and doesn't
work well for shared documents.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/HkCDe](http://archive.is/HkCDe)

------
ThePhysicist
You can say what you want about Excel, but it succeeded at something where
countless other software failed: Providing a smooth transition between manual
data entry and programming and putting it in an interface that's easy to
understand while powerful enough to accomplish many interesting tasks.

On a side note, one could say that Tensorflow is a (very) distinct Excel
relative, as it also builds up a declarative description of your computation
in form of a graph and then figures out how to compute that graph in an
efficient manner. Excel is (in my understanding) doing something very similar
by analyzing the dataflow between individual cells to compute or update
values.

So maybe if we add support for backpropagation into Excel it could make a
fantastic deep learning tool :D

------
srazzaque
The true story of almost every finance/tech project:

Trader: "I've got a problem with my spreadsheet." Tech: "You shouldn't be
using Excel for that. Let's make this better." Trader: "OK - how?" Tech:
(Proposes solution - involving databases, redundancy, risk management, GUI,
streaming prices, booking, etc.) Trader: "Great! So I guess at that point
there (points at whiteboard), we can import it back into Excel?" Tech: "Sure."
(facepalm).

This said - Python is fast becoming the new crack/Excel for front-office.
Thank God for that.

------
ultrabenos
The first rule of Excel is to expect immense frustration.

Named ranges and tables can't be used as conditional formatting targets, Excel
just converts them to absolute cell references right before your eyes. Even if
you use INDIRECT.

Most formula errors result in #N/A, a generic error which never has anything
remotely useful in the Excel help articles. You have to waste time searching
keyword by keyword until you accidentally get the right combination to display
relevant SO or obscure forum links from over 3 years ago.

------
franzwong
I also have a non-IT friend who worked in a local bank. He mainly produced
different kinds of report for analysis. His main tool was Excel and he was
very good at it. He told me the reason why he became good at it is, in
enterprise, IT resource is grouped into a single department instead of
spreading across every department. Acquiring IT resource is difficult and
slow. It is faster to just use excel instead of proper tool to generate the
reports. Finally he acquired the skill.

------
michalxnet
If you like to get better in Excel learn some nifty tricks with tables then
watch

You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)

Replace vlookup() with index() + match() combination.

[https://chandoo.org/wp/vlookup-match-and-offset-explained-
in...](https://chandoo.org/wp/vlookup-match-and-offset-explained-in-plain-
english-spreadcheats/)

------
tareqak
Is there a word for being good/talented at something you find undesirable?

~~~
jimmcslim
Cursed.

~~~
tareqak
For certain curses I suppose [0]. I wanted something more general because not
having words for certain concepts can affect the perception of that thing e.g.
make it less relatable.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra)

------
tonyedgecombe
Excel would be fine if people didn't keep creating spreadsheets with it.

~~~
pge
it’s even worse when they use it as a database...

~~~
wyoung2
What's the alternative?

Microsoft leaves Access out of many of its Office license plans, so it's an
extra cost add-on to most people, hence uninteresting.

Filemaker is very nice, but even more costly in most cases.

I've never used Base in LibreOffice, but I also don't see people sharing their
Base files, from which I infer that it isn't very popular. (Could be my
myopia, though.)

Even if LibreOffice Base is gaining users much more rapidly than I think it
is, they're missing the cloud component for offline and mobile users, which
acts as a brake on adoption, given Office365 and Google Sheets pushing people
to stick with spreadsheets when they want to share tabular data across sites
and to mobile users.

Collabora Online is moving LibreOffice into the cloud, but they haven't done
anything with Base, as far as I can see.

Apple's iWork web apps are very nice, and they have native clients on many of
the platforms I care about, but there's no GUI database component at all.

Without a free, cloud-capable, normal-person focused GUI/web database system,
I don't see Excel-as-database going away.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Easy peasy. Everybody should just use SQL Server Express via VBA and ODBC to
store and retrieve data for their spreadsheets.

More seriously, It would be nice if MS added a better way to manage data
tables outside of sheets in Excel. They have the underlying technologies to do
it. It just needs a low friction UI.

------
samspenc
I've always wondered: these clunky Excel sheets are used at billion-dollar
companies. Why don't they invest in building a sane web application (or
similar) that can do all the validation and calculations in a much better
looking interface that is suited for the job / application?

~~~
froindt
>Why don't they invest in building a sane web application (or similar) that
can do all the validation and calculations in a much better looking interface
that is suited for the job / application?

Inertia, training cost, and risk of failure.

1 year ago I made a very extensive spreadsheet to analyze planned production
and forecasts at a factory. It took about 6 months after the logic was
thoroughly vetted to transition it into an IT supported auto-update to a
database as the primary project for 1 IT analyst. No pretty front end to
modify production parameters or anything like that. If we transitioned any
earlier, it would have been the typical "our user keeps changing the scope and
logic of the application we're trying to build for them".

This was probably the best way things could have reasonably gone. No long term
spreadsheet usage, spreadsheet had good documentation, used tables, names
ranges to make the formulas easy to read, etc.

Excel _can_ do a decent job at figuring out the required logic. But it is used
as an everything tool where task specific applications would be best. And
people only know enough to be dangerous

------
weliketocode
This article seems like it was written 10 years ago.

BI, Technical Account Managers, Sales Engineers, and Finance People should all
have a decent excel grasp at minimum.

Is it that common for there to be desperate needs for minimal competence in
organizations?

~~~
barry-cotter
Yes. The world is full of overwhelming incompetence. After a brief honeymoon
period where you're learning almost every job turns into "I'm surrounded by
idiots" unless you're the idiot. The exceptions are very effective
organisations, and when they're businesses, very profitable or fast growing.
Lots and lots of people reach the level of competence sufficient to not get
fired and basically stay there.

------
arrty88
Everyone should be using airtable now

~~~
Dave_TRS
I agree it's incredible! Everyone owes it to themselves to try it for 5 min if
not yet familiar. Its as easy and intuitive as excel (if not more) and has
many of the benefits of a database plus a great interface, document
attachments, integrated maps, etc.

~~~
cpeterso
Airtable can be mistaken for "just a pretty spreadsheet" at first glance, but
it has nice column constraints, user access control, and (my favorite part)
Trello-like comment history for each row.

------
fellellor
What this tells me is that companies need excel expertise and they need it
badly, but are rarely willing to pay for it. This tells experts, that
advertising their skills in this area is not going to result in rewards,
rather it will cost them their time sorting messed up data. Is this a valid
interpretation?

Also, since half the thread is Shkrekreli, I predict this will be featured in
this week's n-gate.

------
princeb
A lot of people here talking about pivot tables and vlookups. There’s so much
more to be good at in excel other than BI! Vba, udfs, volatile functions and
dependency chain optimisation, com interop, windows libraries, vsto, etc.

You can build an absolutely massive application out of excel. And people will
appreciate it being fully compatible with their own sheets.

------
agumonkey
But I can fix your printer.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
PC Load Letter:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER)

------
NicoJuicy
First rule of development, client needs a custom report, export to Excel or
ask them their Excel files

------
forkLding
Happened to me before as I used to be able to do VBA and use Excel's data
analysis toolkit and then a lot of my assignments as a intern was to literally
help department managers with their Excel spreadsheets even though that wasn't
what I was hired for.

------
advertising
I learned this one with typing in high school. Being the only person who could
type proficiently, I was barraged by friends to type out their papers for
them. After awhile I just charged people to do it. The next school I went to I
made sure not to tell anyone.

------
awl130
I'm an expert at Excel but I switched to Google Sheets years ago and haven't
looked back. Version control is probably the biggest improvement; but also
ability to insert SQL queries, `arrayformula`, the list goes on.

------
jgamman
I hate Excel. I use it extensively every day. It is amazing.

~~~
intended
Hah, Excel is the true weapon of mass destruction.

And of course, it feels great when you know how to wield it.

------
kregasaurusrex
Meanwhile, my current job uses VBA scripts written in the 90s instead of
properly training its employees on how to create multi-sheet formulas.

------
guiomie
There is a paywall sadly.

I myself have stopped using excel for the last 3 years. My company runs on
GSuite, and I love how there can be one source of truth updated in real-time
for 1 document. For the better and the worst, some of our internal processes
are Google sheets centric now.

I believe the next generation of business will be "fighting" google sheets
intrusion in operation processes. Some processes are fine in a Google sheets,
but not all of them.

~~~
hv42
[https://outline.com/epLGYZ](https://outline.com/epLGYZ)

------
m3kw9
What does this remind you of in general life? Don’t tell people you have lots
of money!

------
tssva
Forget Excel. Never ever ever let anyone find out you are good with Microsoft
Project.

------
DailyHN
Google Sheets > Excel

~~~
jediazse
In what universe?

~~~
awl130
uh version control (have u tried the version history?); live updates,
arrayformula, importrange, the list goes on and keeps getting longer

------
kristianp
That should be the first rule of SharePoint too. Yuck.

------
lordnacho
Having used Excel for many years on the trading floor, I have to say it's
awful.

It does everything, badly. Which is why it's popular. People can get by
without properly thinking things through, just jamming a few formulas on a
spreadsheet, and patching the calculation when something comes up. You're
never forced to think rigorously.

You can use it as a crappy database. Or a crappy UI. Or a crappy place to call
external DLLs from. It's the perfect tool for that guy who "has a great idea,
but just needs it coded up".

If a guy comes to you with an Excel question, he wants _you_ to help _him_.
Contrast this with a range of other technologies. If a guy comes to you with a
question about c++, you tend to be helping each other. Same can be said for
any number of things that non-techies would not think to ask. When was the
last time someone asked you about Haskell or Erlang where you were treated
merely as a means to someone else's end?

~~~
bachmeier
> Having used Excel for many years on the trading floor, I have to say it's
> awful.

But the interface is not awful - it's absolutely wonderful as a quick way to
enter and share data and do a fast analysis. The part that's awful is when you
do more than that. And once you've got the data into Excel, why go through the
trouble of changing to something else just to do one additional thing, even if
that additional thing is complex?

~~~
lordnacho
As technological scrap paper, I admit it can be useful.

But as soon as your "fast analysis" is done, you need to be hardening whatever
process it is you are creating. After all, that is what your analysis is
about, right? Building some sort of repeatable, often auditable, transparent
process.

~~~
intended
But that’s a great job done. You’ve described both - the ethos of hacker news
from back in the day, and the point of excel with that original sentence.

Just Get stuff done.

Your boss will worry about an auditable process after the prototype shows
merit.

Nothing in the world is feee/without trade offs. Any excel like program will
have excel like problems.

The alternative being a world fragmented between different spreadsheet
programs and no interop.

------
valgaze
"Excel Everest": [https://exceleverest.com/](https://exceleverest.com/)

------
neurotech1
non-paywall: [http://archive.is/HkCDe](http://archive.is/HkCDe)

------
Lordarminius
Paywall.

------
suff
The truth is that Excel is an ODBC compatible data source, and can be scripted
to run SQL queries against itself... but you didn't hear that from me.

------
miki123211
For me, this article shows as paywalled. Paywalled articles should be banned,
or at least some indication of a paywall should be included in the title, as
people sometimes do with PDFs.

~~~
dang
If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the
thread.

This is in the FAQ at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
and there's more explanation here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

~~~
quickthrower2
Looking at their other comments it seems the OP is blind. I could see why this
would be especially annoying for a blind person if you only found out once you
start reading. Not sure what the answer is but I thought it was worth
mentioning.

