
You Suck at Excel (2015) [video] - kristianp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
======
enitihas
This is the best Excel tutorial I have ever found. Even if you don't remember
much about Excel, the following from this video allows me to basically get
started with any data very quickly:

1\. Ctrl A : Select all the data

2\. Insert table : This will allow you to be able to filter or sort on any
column, provide a row for stats if you want, and will auto format and color
the table. You can also choose to go to a pivot table easily from here.

~~~
Analemma_
Those two suggestions, plus “always work in R1C1 mode”, are enough to
supercharge most inexperienced users of Excel. If you take nothing else away
from Joel’s video, get those three.

~~~
e12e
Hm, so that's using integers for rows and columns, rather than integer/letter
(a1 vs r1c1). Is there a way to do indirect/computed references? Because if
not, I'm not sure I see how it's much better (saner/easier maybe..)? What's
the elevator pitch for r1c1?

[https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_excel-mso_mac/how-to-usecreate-formulas-
in-r1c1-mode/f74759f0-725e-44ec-ba3a-abf1a747f603)

Ed: ok, apparently the video starts with r1c1 - so I guess I've found my
elevator pitch...

~~~
iudqnolq
In one sentence: Excel seems magic because when you copy and paste cells the
references change to still work, but you can understand in less than a minute
exactly how and why that happens if you learn R1C1.

In two more sentences: Specifically if you're in cell A1 and you enter =B1
what is actually stored is =RC[1] (same row, one column more relative to this
cell). So if you copy that into cell H50 it will still be RC[1] and now
evaluate to I50.

------
vermilingua
Did anyone archive the Martin Shkreli video where he shows his Excel workflow?
Think what you will of the guy, but that was one of the most info-dense videos
I've seen, and it's a shame that YT saw fit to remove it.

~~~
1337biz
His tutorials were amongst the best I have seen on financial analysis.
Problematic character but genius level skills and talents that he was willing
to share.

~~~
getlawgdon
Why do you say this? I'm close to people in finance and they derided the
videos and said they were the equivalent of showing off how fast he could
parse filings into Excel when real pro have scads of solutions that automate
it at scale. The view is that he's a criminal with a folk hero reputation for
people who were dazzled by his attitude and his facility with Excel.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
> I'm close to people in finance and they derided the videos

Living among the gentry with good private performers is fine, but the peasants
have to amuse themselves with the traveling minstrels in the fair ... their
technique may not be the best.

------
phn
The video is amazing if you're a coder and might need to use excel at some
point (access columns by _name_?! sign me up!).

However, what I love about excel is to see what it enables people without
formal programming training to do with data, and using functional programming
on top of that!

Is there any tool that comes even close in terms of power, accessibility and
ubiquity? What would such a tool even look like?

~~~
Enginerrrd
I'd love to see excel running python under the hood with easy integrations to
numpy and matplotlib and all that. There actually are a couple such projects
I've been meaning to check out.

In essence, I've spent a lot of my career modeling things in excel. For quick,
easily shareable prototypes(to pseudo-technical people), excel is great. But
add any real complexity and I rapidly find myself using some UGLY hacks to get
the functionality that would be trivial if I could just iterate over the data
more explicitly. If I could just click a cell and set the output equal to a
python function return value, man would that be a tool. THE tool even. I don't
really want to learn VBA or something clunky and not very useful outside of
that niche context. I already keep too many programming languages in my head
between python, c++, FORTRAN, and some bash scripts.

~~~
abakker
Check out XLwings. It can do some pretty handy stuff.

~~~
Enginerrrd
That is one of the projects I've been meaning to check out!

------
TAForObvReasons
Submitted many times, the most active discussion was in 2016
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545)

~~~
eindiran
In the 2016 discussion, the link to the Martin Shkreli video is down. These
are some of the videos in that series where you can see him use Excel:

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poyf3Cnb-
MQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poyf3Cnb-MQ)

~~~
giarc
The fact that there is a world champion Excel user tells me I suck at excel.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SysRS3lZm98&feature=emb_logo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SysRS3lZm98&feature=emb_logo)

------
jrumbut
I wish the Excel developers would bring some of the UI in line with other
apps.

The #1 thing here is the lack of smooth scrolling, scrolling by row actually
gives me motion sickness whenever I use Excel (and that's not a problem I have
with anything else I use).

You can find a legion of people begging for at least a setting to end snapping
to rows here: [https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-
windows-...](https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-
desktop-application/suggestions/19408420-smooth-scrolling-without-snap-to-
cell)

If anyone from MS is reading this, this seems like such a tiny change but it
would really make a lot of people happy. In the meantime, could anyone
recommend a smooth scrolling spreadsheet program? I haven't used the
alternatives too much.

~~~
DonHopkins
It would be nice if the mouse wheel clutch (i.e. Logitech Master 3) controlled
that, so you could feel each row snap by individually when you wanted to, or
toggle the clutch button or spin the wheel fast to scroll smoothly.

~~~
j88439h84
Nice idea. I wonder what would be involved in making that happen.

------
gizmodo59
A must read: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-
rev...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/)

------
emj
That video really helped me to understand the horror that is Excel, but why
fight it instead create a linter for Excel: [https://github.com/plasma-
umass/ExceLint-addin](https://github.com/plasma-umass/ExceLint-addin)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEwUA0h2dsw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEwUA0h2dsw)
It is telling how complicated that linter is.

------
vonnik
Joel's blog about software is also amazing for those unfamiliar with it. Still
worth reading posts that are more than a decade old.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-
lists/top-10...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-
lists/top-10/)

------
clausok
The worst Excel user I've ever seen was my brother. At film school he was
producing a student film. He did the budget in Excel. One day I came home from
work and he had some questions waiting for me. Looking through his sheet, I
noticed that his summation row at the bottom had hard-coded values rather than
the =SUM(...) formulas I was expecting. Thinking he had inadvertently done a
'copy -> paste values', I said, "Look, you killed your formulas here." He
asked, "What are formulas?". Turns out, he had been using a calculator to
tally up all the columns and was typing the total into the cell at the bottom.

~~~
heavenlyblue
It may not be relates to your brother, but I often find that the smarter
people consider themselves to be, the more often they never open the manual
for the tools they are using.

------
Alt-F4
The title reminds me of a part of The Website is Down #2: Excel Hell (slightly
NSFW)

[https://youtu.be/1SNxaJlicEU?t=216](https://youtu.be/1SNxaJlicEU?t=216)

------
juped
The fact that the GUI button to make a table is called "Format as Table" and
placed next to purely visual formatting options (and makes you pick a color
scheme!) has been the roadblock for countless Excel users graduating to power
users, I imagine.

------
notyourgrandma
Such a classic, and great to give to first-year analysts

------
duxup
What always amazes me are the Excel wizards I find who show me a thing they
want on their website in just a few minutes and I'm thinking:

"It's going take me a hell of a lot longer to code that than it took him/her
to show me it working in Excel...."

------
leeman2016
I wish there was one for Access too. I find MS Access less intuitive than
Excel.

------
Exuma
This video is freaking amazing, and I already know a ton about excel.

------
soniman
His rude responses to questions aren't as adorable as he thinks.

~~~
youeseh
He isn't trying to be adorable.

~~~
soniman
He succeeded.

------
mongol
Would be nice with a list of "best of" youtube videos for various topics. This
is probably best in class in the Excel category.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
Did you ever see Martin Shkreli on excel on YouTube?

------
rekabis
This… is supposed to be _difficult_ stuff??

------
Nullabillity
Please, just learn SQL instead of creating more Excel messes...

~~~
dbeley
What's the quickest way to query a simple CSV file with SQL ? Interested in
any gui or cli tools.

~~~
hoistbypetard
If you're accustomed to windows/office you can just set up a CSV as an ODBC
data source and use access.

Otherwise
[csvkit]([https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/))
gives a pretty good command line interface to make sql queries against a CSV
or dump the CSV into a database so you can use any standard database tool to
query.

------
andyreed
I don’t get it, he seems to use his mouse to navigate. Day 1 in finance you
remove the mouse. Video was boring/slow for such a drastic title. Should read
“snarky guy slowly uses different functions in excel and is proud of himself”.
I got my hopes up for nothing :/.

~~~
slowhand09
You do realize Joel Spolsky was the MS project leader for writing Excel...

