
Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for? - tinyrisks
I&#x27;ve heard that Excel is really powerful. Do you guys have any stories about that?
Whether it&#x27;s personal or for business what do you use it for?
======
mindcrime
I use OpenOffice Calc, not Excel, but same basic idea. In my case, I use it
for a couple of things.

1\. A file viewer for certain kinds of data (eg, CSV files and the like).

2\. A quick and dirty way to get simple summary stats from some data.
Spreadsheets make it pretty easy to point at some data and get things like the
mean, median, mode, std deviation, etc.

3\. Quick and dirty plotting of small amounts of data. This use isn't as
frequent for me, as I tend to use GNUPlot for most of this kind of stuff, but
sometimes if you're already in the spreadsheet program poking at some data,
you want a chart with a trend-line or something.

4\. Exploratory models to play with "what if" analysis. Useful for a first
pass at coming up with financial projects, evaluating pricing models, etc. The
nice thing about a spreadsheet for this is that you write up all the various
formulas you care about, and then you can update one cell and quickly see all
the updated values. In a sense, spreadsheets are an implementation of a sort
of Dataflow programming[1] and this kind of thing can be very handy.

It's good for getting answers to questions like "If I want this company to
generate $1MM in revenue this year, and we set the price for our product to
_z_ , how many customers do we have to sign up?" and others of that nature. Of
course there are plenty of other ways to do this kind of analysis, but
spreadsheets are pretty convenient here.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_programming)

~~~
tinyrisks
Thanks for the information. I appreciate it. Your point #4 was very
informative. I have learned something new today.

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RossTennis
I spent the last year building a predictive tennis model using Google Sheets
which is basically the same as Excel. I have no technical skills so this was
the easiest way to do it, plus it helped me learn SQL. Basically I have around
50,000 tennis matches in one sheet, filter them into another sheet, into
around 100 comparative points, then in the end produce a probability for each
upcoming match, and bet accordingly. I also use it to produce a little head to
head stats visual and automated 200-word match previews.

It all works perfectly but obviously just for one user at a time. So I brought
on a dev friend a few months ago and will launch a user facing site next week,
as well as a b2b api for match previews / seo rich content.

I'm actually looking for seed funding up to around 25k, if anyone wants to
reach out about that, or has other questions.

If you just want to follow some of the tips I'm running a very basic blog site
at www.tennisacca.com sharing my most highly recommended picks (rather than
listing 100's of games a week and needing a huge bankroll), which win at a ROI
of 10%+ on average. It's mostly just for friends until the main site launches
next week.

~~~
thewizardofaus
Hi! I did something similar a few years ago,instead I used python and machine
learning algorithms + custom ELO implementations for tennis matches.
Unfortunately it worked too well and I was banned from all the bookmakers.

~~~
RossTennis
nice, well done! Why not use betfair or Molly? Or also sell tips etc? Do you
have a site?

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usr1106
I haven't used Excel for 10 years. I use LibreOffice Calc.

I have used it to chart data extracted from syslog, journald, dmesg. For
example trouble-shooting in a Wi-Fi subsystem or boot time optimization work.

And of course all kind of project management type stuff. My job forces me to
do that in Google Sheets these days. Action points, bug lists etc. are easily
maintained in a spreadsheet. On one side it's a bit of a misuse of the tool,
but as long they are short and simple lists with 10s and not 100s of entries
it can be the most efficient solution.

The main drawback is that version history is a pain. If something goes wrong
(wrong formula, wrong editing) it can be impossible to understand what
happened and fix the problem afterwards.

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lhh
Financial modeling. I work as a corporate finance consultant and am a former
investment banker, and it's an extremely valuable tool in my opinion. I think
people are crazy for trying to run a company without making heavy use of a
financial model.

~~~
jason_slack
actually, I'd love to talk with you about this. I find that writing my own
tools gives me what I need but takes me longer. I wrote my own ncurses
spreadsheet that lets me add lambdas to be executed each cell (if the cell
denies one)

I could use some advice on modeling itself too...

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grawprog
I had a commercial real estate appraiser as a client once. She had a massive
excel workbook for the calculations her and her employees used. Originally it
was set up so they input everything by hand, used a calculator to figure
everything out, input the answers back into excel then copy and paste
everything manually into a report template.

I made it so after inputting less than ten variables it automatically
calculated everything they needed, generated several charts and graphs, and a
fully completed report at the press of a button. I turned it from a two or
three day job into a 10 minute one.

Needless to say my client was fairly excited.

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mariojv
I use it to log marathon training. There are a lot of fitness tracking apps
out there, 2 of which I use, but it's nice seeing:

\- Plan for miles run every day of the week, side-by-side with what I actually
ran, notes about pace, weather, and other factors

\- Sum of total weekly mileage done vs. planned, amount left to meet my goals

\- Number of weeks left until race

all in one "dashboard." It's nothing fancy, but the date and sum functions
made it really trivial to make a template for this exactly how I wanted it.

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smacktoward
You're asking in the wrong place. The people who are doing the really crazy
stuff with Excel are not going to be HN readers.

~~~
acct1771
But we may have heard about it.

Like my father, who runs his entire gas station/towing company/repair shop
with Excel macros. lol.

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bastijn
Most excels I use are automatically generated as a build pipeline/Jenkins step
(except 2 and 4)

1\. Accumulating results of performance tests over time. Add columns with
results for each nightly regression and keeping additional columns like
std/worst/avg for last10, last100 etc.

2\. Keeping indexes with locations of our data, and their meta data. So we can
quickly find data that matches to specific problems we need to solve.

3\. Specification files for our performance tests. Listing KPIs for specific
cases, KPIs per type of machine, how to measure (bst5, avg5, single), tracking
what should show up as red/green/orange in our dashboards.

4\. Running FMEA using an excel FMEA template that automatically
fills/calculates certain columns based on answers in the other.

5\. All sorts of automatically generated regression overviews for our unit
tests over periods of time. Showing trends, violations with specs, etc.

6\. Sheets that are connected to our TFS so we can have overviews and do mass
updates on items.

7....

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MrEldritch
Any time I have some repetitive numerical calculation or procedure I am going
to want to do multiple times (whether because it's a common task, or I want to
try many different inputs in a row), I quickly throw an Excel sheet together
for it.

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justaguyhere
Looking for biz ideas? :)

In one place where I worked, someone had programmed financial models in Excel.
It used to run for a long time, crash often etc. But it was good enough for
his team and they used it until I left. That one single Excel file was worth a
lot

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chapium
This is going to be a boring answer, but I use it to fill in data for sql
inserts. Its also nice for repetitive backend server commands. Since excel
places a carriage return after each row, copy and paste into terminal is nice.

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chrislc
My previous company uses a set of Excel files to create construction tenders.
They included a lot of formulas and vba to calculate quantities, costs, labor
hours, etc. I had to set up dedicated backup jobs for those templates.

~~~
DeonPenny
Did you work specifically for a construction GC as a project manager or
something?

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samfisher83
Some one made a 3d engine using excel:
[https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/CBel/20180208/308549/3D_engi...](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/CBel/20180208/308549/3D_engine_entirely_made_of_MS_Excel_formulae__Enjoy_this_Doomxls_file_.php)

Here is someone doing paintings in excel:
[https://pasokonga.com/](https://pasokonga.com/)

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DavidHm
Not me personally, but the amount of complex workflow that I've seen relying
on tortured Excel and VBA is mind-boggling.

In the hands of someone who knows how to use it, Excel is incredibly powerful.
Though at some point it crosses the threshold of "why don't you just get a
junior developer to code this?". And the answer is always "we are
technologically dinosaurs, and we think that any devolopment project costs at
least $200k"

~~~
twoquestions
In some very large enterprises, that's not far off the mark unfortunately.

Large corporate governance is at best, a shitshow.

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ssivark
I wonder whether anyone with some proficiency in Python will have an easier
time doing things in Jupyter (with Pandas, etc.), than a spreadsheet.

I'm curious to hear about things which are easy to do in Excel, but hard in
the Jupyter workflow.

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cbm-vic-20
Maximizing profit for my EVE Online industrial and trading corporation.

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S4M
I use it to do super quick data analysis sometimes, and also I made a few
spreadsheets to help my wife to manage our personal finance.

~~~
TomK32
Did the same for a while, usually to have a short-term period, then I tried
gnucash (no undo) and hledger which nowadays has some features for planning
ahead. But still, I decided to write my own webapp for my personal finances
and long-term budgeting.

If your excel files have anything for forward planning and you want to share
those files, I'd be interested.

~~~
S4M
> If your excel files have anything for forward planning and you want to share
> those files, I'd be interested.

Unfortunately there was no planning involved, one spreadsheet was just for her
to put stuff she bought and the spreadsheet would calculate how much she spent
in the month/week. Another one was for her to calculate how much the Saturday
children center she is running would earn per month.

Since you made a webapp for personal finances, let me mention you the one a
friend made: [https://spendbook.net/main](https://spendbook.net/main) it
doesn't do planning but I think he'll still be happy to get some feedback.

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asgeirn
Plots. Pulling performance numbers from log files, simple statistics, curve
fitting and moving averages.

Even from JSON or XML.

~~~
gekkostate
Have you tried using Mathematica instead? Mathematica has instant
visualization and makes it very easy to import json/xml/csv.

The other advantage is that you have a full language (Wolfram Language) in the
event you want to do further evaluation.

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tudelo
Less and less anymore. I tried to make a graph in excel with like 5k? data
points and it froze every time.

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cm2012
As a marketer, it's a pretty vital tool for understanding detailed attribution
data.

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alexdrans
Personal finance!

