
You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky (2015) [video] - carlesfe
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
======
Benjammer
This video of Martin Shkreli using Excel [1] is what really made me realize I
suck at Excel...

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be&t=211)

~~~
Kiro
Does everyone love this guy all of a sudden? I thought he was the most hated
person in the world but I don't see a single bad comment about him here or in
the YouTube comments. Quite on the contrary.

~~~
nocman
Might be of help to someone else to realize that you are talking about Martin
Shkreli, rather than Spolsky.

I missed the parent you were referencing, and thought one of the child
comments was saying that Joel Spolsky was out on bail for securities fraud
(which was the result, obviously, of me not catching who you were talking
about)

oops!

:-D

~~~
greenshackle
Ooooh thanks. I've been reading a lot of Spolsky's blog posts from
2005-2006... I was thinking, what's happened to this guy in the last 10 years?
Everyone hates him? Securities fraud? What?

------
tominous
In my line of work I often see tech vendors and consultants trying to plan
infrastructure changes using Excel (or worse, tables in Word, but we won't go
into that). The results are horrendous.

They start with a manual inventory of the configuration in question, type it
ad-hoc into a spreadsheet, then go through making manual changes, notes and
additions until it feels good. There's lots of highlighting, different
coloured text, etc like layers of sedimentation. Formulas are only used for
sums and counts in an ad-hoc way.

The end plan _always_ contains mistakes and omissions that really hurt during
deployment time.

The correct way requires discipline: immutable input sheets (from machine-
generated config dumps), a parameter sheet, output tables (with consistent
usage of formulas with "$" notation to lock rows and columns), and cross
checks with conditional highlighting.

Unfortunately this is _really hard_ for people without programming
instincts/experience. Good job security I guess. But if you can do it, it's
both faster and safer than the manual free-form method.

~~~
cm2187
In my line of work I see an organisation regularly burning $50m in IT budget
for developping a software that is completely flawed, horribly designed, not
fit for purpose, though take years to develop and for that amount of efforts
and money, could be much more efficiently done in Excel for 1/10000th of the
cost!

This week I am trying to extract data from a data cube that was created for
reporting. Problem, the cube was designed so that only one node can be
retrieved at a time, and so if I need a bulk retrieval, which I need, it needs
to be queried a billion times, sinking the server, timing out the queries,
taking hours. The IT team is trying to figure out a way to run an overnight
job so that it sinks the server during quiet hours. Basically these guys
designed a vault where you can only add data but never retrieve it. They
should be fired.

[edit] and before someone starts to think "yeah but this is big data", the
underlying populated numbers in this cube would fit in a 5MB spreadsheet.

I am not sure that the audience of hacker news realises how terrible is the
reputation of IT and developers in large companies from the business side.
They are seen as a world of hyper-bureaucratic, common sense-free, business
sense-hostile, half-assed lemmings.

Excel is not great but one has to have a hard look at the alternative.

~~~
carlesfe
Somebody said that before starting a startup you should evaluate what your
competition is, and that includes Excel.

Many, many startups are competing against a moderately-complex Excel sheet,
and they don't even know that.

~~~
cm2187
I am frustrated I can only upvote once!

~~~
snowwrestler
If HN were an Excel sheet, you could upvote as many times as you want! :-)

~~~
cm2187
I could automate in VBA me upvoting. Try to do that in a business application!

------
IANAD
First, I learned a lot from this. But, here's some light criticism:

1\. Joel saying "I didn't understand that question" and then moving on might
have been succinct and practical, but it was just not a good reflection of
him.

2\. He acts like R1C1 mode is the only way handle relative references for the
first 13 minutes. One of the first things I learned in Excel was $ to pin a
reference to row or column in what he calls "baby mode". I think it's not
babyish to use $ which is more succinct; you can edit the formula and see the
calculated value right away. It seemed like he waited a long time to talk
about that.

3\. "Almost none of which you can do in Google spreadsheets" at 18:15. Sounds
so pro-Microsoft, right? Yet, if you look, he's obviously using OS X, which is
surprising to me, because MS Office has historically sucked on OS X compared
to its Windows counterpart, and it's been incomplete:
[https://9to5mac.com/2016/01/21/windows-mac-ipad-microsoft-
of...](https://9to5mac.com/2016/01/21/windows-mac-ipad-microsoft-office-
comparison/) even though, yes, it's a lot better than it used to be. Also,
Google docs is free.

~~~
harryh
4\. All the stuff he starts describing at 18:40 Google Sheets will actually do
just fine except the Growth Trend bit on the heights.

5\. 33:25 - Nope, that works in Google Sheets too. Just like Excel.

6\. OK that table shit was cool though. Sheets can't do that.

~~~
blahi
I remember watching this video a while ago and it is super basic. I can assure
you that there are great many things that google sheet lacks.

~~~
harryh
Ya I know. Was just pointing out that Google Sheets isn't _quite_ as basic as
people think.

It really should be better though. I wish Google would commit to it more.

------
graham1776
Is there a standardized excel knowledge test and or certification? As a senior
analyst excel expertise is requisite, but is very hard to interview for...I
had to make an excel test just to empirically rate our analyst candidates. I
know there are the excel competitions
([http://www.modeloff.com/](http://www.modeloff.com/)) and great resources
([http://www.chandoo.com/wp](http://www.chandoo.com/wp)), but no rating system
for knowledge (even basic) of excel. Think the big investment banks would be
interested in "testing" their analysts empirically before hiring them?

~~~
cdolan92
everyone employed to a relevant position at our company takes a pretty in
depth excel assessment so we know what they need taught on Day 1.

Named ranges/tables is always top of the list!

 _edit_ : business schools usually make you take an excel course/exam your
first year. Its always awful, using some absurdly priced flash-based webapp
from 2003 that has such strict validation on answers/inputs, you often
struggle just to input your answer because you solved it in a different manner
than they expect. So, the IBs likely think you know Excel before getting in
the door (which is not always the case).

~~~
oli5679
Hi, I'm interested in taking your test too?

------
cm2187
There are lots of things he does that are still rookie mistakes! Like
index/match without doing a strict match (microsoft: when are you going to add
a shorter syntax for that??).

Then he probably does that to make it visual but he should be using his mouse
a lot less. F2, CTRL Enter on a range to apply the first formula without
applying the formatting.

Also two data tables one above the other. As one expands it will hit into the
other. That's where excel lacks a feature that apple introduced in numbers:
not using a unique grid but a table being its own grid, placed as a shape on a
sheet. That solves lots of problems.

Range names are not a good solution with experience. You get name clashes when
merging spreadsheets, ambiguous duplicate names when duplicating tabs. For
formula auditing F2 is your friend. And there are some third party add-ins to
go to a reference within a formula and come back with keyboard shortcuts.

And no demo of excel is complete without showing the power of array formulas.
In particular SUM(Col1 * Col2 * (Filter1=Col3) * (ABS(Col4)<4)) to do a
sophisticated conditional sumproduct.

~~~
roel_v
"index/match without doing a strict match"

I that the same as for vlookup? I never understood how that is supposed to
work - when do you want to _not_ have a strict match?

~~~
cm2187
There are cases where it is useful. Like I want to retrieve the FX rate for a
given day but my time series might be missing days, so finding the nearest
result is practical.

Also the default assumes that the values are in ascending order, which is
computationally efficient as it can do a binary search.

But very dangerous in the most common scenario.

What would be even better is to be able to tell Excel to create a hash table /
dictionary in memory from a table so that it can be queried very efficiently.

But as I posted everywhere on this page, Microsoft doesn't seem to be minded
to add new features. Changing the color scheme between versions, making minor
improvements, keeping bugs as they are, incrementing the version and shipping
it!

~~~
roel_v
Oh I never thought about using vlookup for anything but categorical values,
but yeah your example makes sense.

I like the new functions that make you not having to wrap everything in
ISNA(), like ISERROR()...

------
vba
Joel played a part in creating VBA for Excel (and likely the other Office
clients) when he was a program manager at Microsoft in the early 90s (see
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html)).

I'm a developer on XL (at Microsoft), only half way through the video and have
learnt a thing or two. Out of academic curiosity I sometimes ask old-timers if
they ever worked with Joel. So far nobody recognizes his name, though there is
next to none left in Excel who were XL in early 90s or before.

~~~
flukus
Does MS not follow that old habit of C developers to put stuff like last
edited by and lust updated in the comments?

You'd think his name would be everywhere on the internals.

~~~
vba
They did have the code owners' name in nice formatted comments but they don't
do that anymore, at least not in the Excel codebase. There are plenty of
artifacts with the code owners names left behind (many having since moved on
from Excel and Microsoft). Mr Spolsky was a program manager, so I doubt he
wrote much if any code that made it into the Excel binaries, but I'm
interested to know if he did.

~~~
Intermernet
His name doesn't appear in either the Excel 97 flight simulator monolith
credits, or the Excel 2000 "dev hunter" driving game, so he may have joined
the Excel team after that, or they may not have been exhaustive lists.

They're still very cool ways to put developer credits into enterprise software
:-)

------
oli5679
Excel is super useful for the range of tasks where speed and transparency to
business execs is more important than flexibility or maintenance.

Its great to rattle something off in a couple of hours that you can email to
your boss to tinker with

It's absolute hell flicking through tabs trying to find a bug or trawling
through stack overflow looking at grim VBA contortions which have one-liner
equivalents in python.

~~~
abricot
With named ranges and named tables it is a hell of a lot easier to debug a
sheet.

(Not commenting on VBA)

~~~
oli5679
The problem is if enough people have been working on a sheet for long enough
it becomes very difficult to replicate your work. this is particularly true
for projects involving data processing and if they have poor version control
practices.

------
circa
You instantly brought me back to the "You suck at photoshop" series.

Enjoy and you're welcome!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M&list=ELME28FkTdZ...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M&list=ELME28FkTdZHo)

~~~
gfody
Along the same line - here is Scott Hanselman with some Word basics:
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VIDEODoYouReallyKnowHowToUseMi...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VIDEODoYouReallyKnowHowToUseMicrosoftWordThePowerOfTabsAndIndents.aspx)

------
kevin_thibedeau
Paste values isn't almost always what I want. When copying formulas around I
usually want the actual formulas which have been judiciously constructed with
fixed row and column references where needed. The default paste is ideal for
people doing actual calculation in Excel.

~~~
LukeShu
I've often wanted some references in the formula to shift when I paste, while
having others be fixed. This can be accomplished by putting the fixed
references as string argument to the INDIRECT function (ex `indirect("F7")`).

~~~
gberger
You can also use $F$7.

Or if you do just F$7, only the column changes when pasting. Or $F7, only the
row changes.

~~~
DiabloD3
This right here is maybe the most important thing anyone can learn in Excel.

The second most important thing is how to use vlookup() for cross-sheet
lookups, using a column in the other sheet as a foreign key.

~~~
NamTaf
Stop using vlookup. Use index and match, either through named references as
Joel does it or just manually even. It's more powerful, faster and less prone
to failure because vlookup relies on an assumed order of sorting but most
people won't know this and will wonder why it's cocking up.

~~~
yread
You really should use MATCH with last argument 0 (exact match) and use it only
within IF(ISERROR:

IF(ISERROR(MATCH(Key;Keys;0));"null";INDEX(Values, MATCH(Key; Keys))))

------
rtpg
As a person who doesn't get to use Excel much but wants to... is there such
thing as "fun" Excel problem sets? Like Eurler Problems but for Excel?

Some kinda meaty stuff rather than just "here's how you sum"

~~~
infinite8s
Have you tried solving the Euler problems in Excel?

------
robterrin
Does anybody else feel that the vast majority of these things are either
available in Google sheets or worth just doing in R? My last consulting
project was on a VaR model built in VBA/SQL with a bunch of Excel sprinkled
about and it was horrendous. Not Excel, VBA or SQL's fault, but it felt like a
more thoughtful architect would have used better tools.

~~~
msl09
Yeah if excel was coughing with a few dozen tables I wonder what starts to
happen when you process thousands or hundreds of thousands of values.

The pivot table got me jealous though.

~~~
vehementi
You can do pivot tables in Google sheets

~~~
blahi
If you are a masochist .

------
eriknstr
I think the most interesting thing in this video was the explanation of R1C1.
I've always thought of the apparent automatic changing of references as almost
magic. Now I know.

For me, the most useful things he talked about was, in order; giving names to
cells and columns, use of INDEX and MATCH, leaving space around tables,
defining and using tables, pivot-tables, copying formatting with the
paintbrush, goal-seek, and finally, control-semicolon to insert today's date.

The various forms of paste special, I knew about from before, and I also knew
about the dragging to fill in values stuff.

All in all, a very good video with a lot of things I didn't know.

~~~
greggyb
This is not a judgment on you, but I've seen this echoed in a couple places in
this thread and yours is a top-level comment that starts with it.

I really grokked the concept illustrated with R1C1 notation within a day or
two of being exposed to $-pinning with A1 notation, and the concept of a
relative offset was my mental model in Excel for a long time before I even
learned about R1C1.

Yes, R1C1 notation is helpful because you literally type in an offset if you
want it, but it seems pretty apparent in playing with Excel that the automatic
reference rewriting is based on the relative offset of one cell compared to
another. Seeing it rewrite a range as you drag a formula around seems to
illustrate this concept very clearly.

On the other hand, I came from a non-technical background and came up as an
analyst in a sales department. The person I learned Excel from didn't know
about pivot tables, so I didn't learn about pivot tables for some time. What I
did learn was how to make my own (much less flexible) pivot tables by hand
very quickly. I got to the point that I put off learning pivot tables better
once I was introduced to them, because they were an inefficiency for me. I
eventually learned better.

~~~
eriknstr
I should probably have phrased what I said a bit differently. I have not had
trouble understanding relative offset and how to use it. What I've always
wondered about and finally got an answer to in this video is how the
implementation works so that Excel is able to preserve the offsets even when
pasting a cell in a random location into a spreadsheet :)

~~~
greggyb
Ah gotcha. Yeah, for that I just had an implicit mental model of R1C1 without
realizing it was physically implemented.

I interpreted you (wrongly it seems) as saying that the relative offsets were
confusing and I responded to that. You were curious about the implementation
instead.

I didn't care about the implementation when I was learning Excel, and simply
assumed a mechanism like R1C1 without much interest in it.

------
criddell
That's a pretty good demonstration of some of the strengths of the ribbon
interface.

After watching this, I went to Google Docs to try to reproduce some of this
and it felt very clunky. The first thing I realized I didn't have is a styles
manager but I was able to install an add-on. For other parts (like creating
tables) I was stuck.

I wonder if a similar demo in Libre Office would be as impressive?

Edit: I just tried Excel Online and it worked surprisingly well. Last time I
tried it, Google Sheets felt way better but now I'm not so sure.

------
TallGuyShort
I've been using Linux on the desktop for years and have never missed Microsoft
Office (except for Project, a little bit). Now seeing R1C1 notation is making
me want Excel... Any recommendations for FOSS spreadsheet software that
supports R1C1 notation or that is generally better than LibreOffice Calc?

~~~
riboflava
[http://www.gnumeric.org/](http://www.gnumeric.org/) is pretty good.

~~~
ams6110
Unless it's improved quite a bit in the last few years, no it isn't very good.

~~~
mschaef
It's been a year or two since I've used it, but the last time I checked, it
hasn't improved all that much. It was generally rather slow and limited.

This is really a shame, because of Gnumeric's history. It was (along with
Gimp) one of the very first GTK applications, and present at the beginning of
the Gnome desktop suite.

------
Erwin
I had a chuckle at Joey calling @ "a bagel". I guess that's a New York thing.

Over here we call them "elephant-trunk-A" (interestingly elephant symbols are
quite common here in e.g. royal/government coats of arms and the "Order of the
Elephant" being the highest chivalric order).

~~~
duncanawoods
I liked it too... but its clearly either a Chelsea Bun or a Cinnamon Swirl :)

------
Globz
Great video, it actually reminded me of CTRL+D!

One of my many assignments at my job is to work with excel on a weekly basis
exporting data dumps from MYSQL to excel ranging from 50k to 100k rows.

At first it was a daunting task but once I learned how to build some solid
templates then all I had to do was to dump the data set into a tab and let the
formulas do the work, everything was already formatted so I could just start
validating the data then email it to the sales team for further analysis.

If you take the time to analyze your data sets and get to know how to handle
each type of data then you can build some really solid template in a fairly
short amount of time.

I try to avoid using excel as much as possible but this damn thing is so
deeply rooted into the "business analyst" world that you can't really escape
it so this is why I told myself that I would be better off mastering it and
build solid reporting templates instead of trying to change their mind about
using alternative software.

On a side note we started using WebFocus... that's another monster to tame...

------
partycoder
For many uses, I dropped Excel and replaced it with R. Doesn't hang with
thousands/millions of rows.

~~~
roel_v
Once you know what to do, yes. But for scenario analysis and prototyping,
anything with a code/run cycle is just painful. I've tried switching many
times.

Plus, Excel has a 'gui' (of sorts) build in. (Shiny is not a substitute for
that - here too, shiny is fine for productizing once you know what you want to
do, but not for quick one offs)

~~~
em500
> for scenario analysis and prototyping, anything with a code/run cycle is
> just painful

For scenario analysis and prototyping, you'd use RStudio as GUI and the
command line for REPL. But personally, I find Jupyter notebooks with Pandas
even better.

~~~
roel_v
RStudio is not a gui, it's an ide. If you change a parameter somewhere you
still have to re-run the code and hunt for whatever it is you're calibrating.
In Excel, you just change values and you see immediately what has changed. In
Excel, you can trivially show subsets (with a dropdown that show you all
values in a range), or checkboxes for booleans, do conditional formatting to
highlight special values (< 0, within ranges etc). All of which is a pita with
R and with anything that has a code/view report cycle, basically.

~~~
em500
The table viewer in RStudio shows any changes in dataframes live as you change
them in the REPL, so I don't really see your point.

------
ForFreedom
He says,"I am not taking your questions because your questions are stupid and
check the internet"

------
pgt
This is great. I just made a little internal slideshow for everyone at our
company to get them to watch this. Link:

[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d00Cetvp8_4fW7Y854tF...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d00Cetvp8_4fW7Y854tFcGtfEKTe0T5fUzXLksXTNIk/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=30000)

Thanks, Joel!

~~~
rietta
This is the first time in my computer science career that I've heard Excel
(and spreadsheets in general) called a functional programming language! What
an excellent, excellent point!

~~~
pgt
The lambda calculus is incredibly value-oriented. Consider that it is
impossible to write a formula that injects another formula into a blank cell:
all values flow from other values. To overcome this, you need to write a side-
effecting Excel macro. This is why some people have integrated Python into
Excel. It's a shame that the CLR (and more functional languages like Clojure)
is not better integrated into Excel.

Story time (MS rant):

When Microsoft pulled Access (the best relational DB UI) to avoid competition
with SQL Server, stopped adding features to IIS (still no wildcard domains!)
and did not fix the botched Visual Studio deployment story (publish 10MB
binaries for 1-line changes when you control the web server and the OS?), they
ceded the "IDE" wars. Excel is sort of a business IDE, except sharing
spreadsheets is a nightmare, which is what Google Sheets is really good at. I
reluctantly started switching to other "IDEs" like IntelliJ (still worse than
VS) and the Google Apps suite. However, SQL Server Management Studio is still
the best SQL writing interface for me.

------
thomasthomas
i've worked for many banks. amazing how reliant the whole industry, therefore
the world economy, relies on excel.

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-12/how-rookie-excel-
er...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-12/how-rookie-excel-error-led-
jpmorgan-misreport-its-var-years)

~~~
dagw
And despite this, and despite the mind boggling amount of money at stake, no
one seems to making moves to actually do something about it. It's like the
finance industry has collectively decided that a few billion in losses each
year is an acceptable price to pay to get to keep using Excel.

~~~
sten
I’m in the industry, everyone here uses spreadsheets for everything. They only
have us working on other stuff now because we’re reaching memory limits and
row limits for calculations.

But primarily we have a few factors working in excels favor. 1\. Inertia. 2\.
Difficulty in switching to a more advanced solution for non-technical folks.
3\. Speed. If you can get a MVP up and running before another firm you have an
advantage. Even if it’s in Excel and held together with spit and string.

------
mooneater
The Goal Seek part was painful to watch. Why would rounding completely break
that? And why would it end up at 9 billion?

~~~
princeb
like he said the rounding made 975000 an impossible result.

if you have rounding or some kind of non-continuous function the right feature
to use is actually Solver (which is an included add in you have to enable in
Excel options) which provides you with an fmin function (or several) as
opposed to goal seek's fzero.

------
hkmurakami
Things in which people consistently overrate their skills: Super Smash
Brothers, Scalable Backend Systems, Microsoft Excel.

~~~
scarmig
Are there things where people consistently underrate their skills?

~~~
TorKlingberg
To give a serious answer I read somewhere: unicycling. Very few people can
actually ride one, so if you can ride a regular bicycle you are probably above
average at unicycling.

~~~
x1798DE
> Very few people can actually ride one, so if you can ride a regular bicycle
> you are probably above average at unicycling.

I don't understand, are you saying that the average person can't ride a
bicycle?

------
Hydraulix989
This guy was an ex PM for Excel at Microsoft.

He even had Bill Gates review his spec:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html)

------
erikb
He is so entertaining despite only having taught me one or two minor things.

------
avindroth
Is there Excel with vim bindings? Or anything with equivalent speed/modal
editing?

Or is the default Excel good enough to warrant relearning all the navigation
hotkeys?

And how is org-mode as an alternative?

~~~
MagnumOpus
No Excel with vim bindings or model editing. Excel has its own set of arcane
keybindings that make using it really fast. If you are a heavy user, you can
print out a reference sheet just like you did with vim when you started out.

Org-mode is not an alternative, there is zero overlap in functionality between
it and Excel.

------
Gustomaximus
I can't agree with'always name a cell/range' and dont put numbers. This gets
very confusing for a second person working on the workbook. Typically sheets
get large and they get all these names building up over time. You end up with
no idea with what someone is referring to.

Also for 'paste special' I dint notice him mention Crt+Alt+V which is really
shortcut vs using menu dropdown.

Ctr+D was new to me. Thats a great one.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I disagree with your disagreement. The principle of naming your cells/ranges
is basically the exact same principle as "don't put magic numbers in code, use
named constants".

~~~
kilgor13
I mostly agree with you. Where the names are clear and obvious, naming is very
helpful.

However, when it is no longer obvious what the name refers to, there is no
more benefit than the original cell reference. In fact it is even worse
because it's not immediately apparent where the cell is now the reference
isn't showing. I often run into this problem with very large spreadsheets
where every cell is named.

Our workplace has a strict "everything has to be named" in Excel and it really
makes life much more difficult when working with extremely large calculations.
Often I will want to know what a certain formula is doing. I will look at the
formula. There are about 6 named cells that I have no idea what they refer to.
I then have to use the drop down list (which includes about 500 names) to find
the cell it refers to. Looking through this list is a lot slower than just
reading the cell reference and looking at that cell. It's also quite easy to
pick the wrong name in a list of 500, because there is likely to be a lot of
similarly named cells.

~~~
aninhumer
>There are about 6 named cells that I have no idea what they refer to.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but doesn't that mean they're just badly named?

------
ishtanbul
talking about the importance of variable input cells in minute 43 smh. working
in finance this is not very impressive. also excel on a mac is inferior.

I think only about 1% of excel users actually build models with it so the need
for advanced skills in using the program just aren't necessary, such as for
storing data and maybe making pivot tables...

------
swingbridge
Being an Excel jockey was "cool" in the 90s and 00s but all the cool number
crunching kids are much more likely to be using something like Jupyter
Notebook, R or homebrew command like stuff these days.

------
rietta
One thing I find interesting is that on the Mac OS X Excel, Cmd+T is the
toggle for the relative/absolute cell references, but in Google Sheets it's
F4, just like Windows Excel.

------
hellofunk
I take offense at this. Mr. Spolsky, you do not know me! King Kong ain't got
nothing on me! I excel at Excel!

------
trymas
Good content, but could he please stop calling listener a dummy baby!

I understand that he is presenting to his employees or to some company, but
it's still disrespectable. If he is not my greatest buddy - don't call me a
dummy baby.

~~~
rblatz
He is presenting in the style of the popular You Suck at Photoshop videos.
Check them out they are hilarious.

~~~
trymas
I have not watched that series, though I was not laughing while listening to
the Joel's talk..

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unixhero
Yeah. He probably has a crowd that sucks at Excel because that goal seek stuff
is not exactly a revolutionary Excel trick.

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TimesOldRoman
Wow I've read stuff by Joel but never watched; he comes across as a total
prick.

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FabHK
Did he cover volatile functions? Did he cover F9 vs Shift-F9 vs Ctrl-Alt-F9?

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lgomezma
I really suck at Excel

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s_chaudhary
pandas anyone?

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branchless
Interesting, any recommended resources to take it up a level?

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madengr
Many years ago there was a harmonic balance (circuit) simulator in Excel.
Pretty crazy.

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fu9ar
idk im pretty good at exporting to CSV.

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taneq
Dunno why you're getting hammered, this is part of a good Excel workflow. Do
what you can using the nice GUI, if you have bulk changes to make that are
easier to script than find-and-replace then dump it to CSV, do the grunt work
with some command line tools or a script, and re-import it.

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rspeer
I have never seen anyone with an Excel workflow that involves exporting to CSV
that does not immediately mojibake every non-ASCII character.

Yeah, I know there's a well-hidden option to export in tab-separated UTF-16.
Nobody uses it.

So I guess you're fine if your data is just numbers, and if it's not labeled
with words, names, or places.

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yen223
Excel also messes with CSV values that look like integers but aren't (think
serial numbers or IDs), leading to many frustrating days of support.

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jhbadger
Not to mention the famous mangling of gene names that look like dates. Yes, I
know scientists shouldn't be using Excel -- I agree. But I'm a computational
biologist. Experimentalists know how to use exactly three programs 1)
Microsoft Word 2) Microsoft Excel 3) Microsoft Powerpoint.

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Neeek
I find myself working with four letter codes to identify wards and facilities
at my work, inevitably I have to compare my SQL output to someone's
spreadsheet. No excel, I didn't mean March 02, just give me MAR2 like I asked.
Drug codes that start with a '.' are another headache, they will be auto
formatted as a decimal number. Worse is when they want to put info from a
spreadsheet in to the database, no one understands the need for consistent
field formatting :'(

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mistermann
Have you tried bringing in with PowerQuery instead? Much more flexible.

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Neeek
I haven't tried pulling Excel -> SQL with PowerQuery yet, only really dabbled
in presenting data the other way. Do you know if this works easily with a
document that utilises a lot of macros and VBA? Or are we still talking flat
CSV.

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mistermann
What are you talking, Excel with VBA is importing/consuming the data, or it is
the datasource for something else?

I assume Excel with VBA is importing/consuming the data in which case Power
Query / Power Pivot would likely solve most of your problems. Refactoring a
large complicated existing spreadsheet to use PQ rather than your existing
peocess, hard to say how tough that would be.

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GrumpyNl
wow, i want a i-phone so i can play a 25 year old game on it.

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guyzmo
well, the main feature Excel really suck, and makes it almost impossible to
use: Undo/Redo. Why the hell did they make undo/redo work across spreadsheets
(eventually reopening closed spreadsheets)?

And then, why is it impossible once you wrote some content, to copy it, undo
writing it and paste it? The copy gets undoed!

To me, that behaviour makes Excel unusable.

And anyway, why would any decent SW engineer want to use Excel, which is like
a 2 dimensional view of the world, whereas after a career designing software I
can see the multiverse.

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orbitingpluto
Real men use PowerShell to edit their Excel files. :j

edit: I did do this once, but it didn't scale to larger files. Also, it was
the only option on those Windows RT Surface tablets.

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jackinmyshoes
That was incredibly boring, why is this getting so many up-votes?

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whorleater
Because it was moderately enjoyable, I learned quite a bit, and I assume other
people did too? That table shit in excel? Blew my fucking mind.

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Graphon1
What's the table shit? vlookup() ? edit: oh, 37:00, I see.

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whorleater
The actual tables function, it's about 2/3rds of the way through the video.

