I had a coworker who could really Go Fast in Excel, and by watching him, learned enough tricks to be able to impress onlookers by flying through computations with keyboard shortcuts.
From my perspective, it's gotten harder to use spreadsheet programs efficiently with each new version - the keyboard shortcuts collide more, and everything moving to Office 365 / Google Docs / etc. has made the available tools less powerful.
Microsoft keep bringing in game-breaking features to Microsoft Excel to break the meta. It is aimed at the casual audience to bring in the party gamers and makes the program an absolute mess competitively.
Maybe I imagined it, but I'm pretty sure I CTRL+Z'd in one document and it focused another Excel document and undid it there. Also when I try to save anything it defaults to the cloud rather than the longstanding save dialog. I've heard in the past the Excel team was elite and held back BS but maybe not anymore.
The thing that's always got me is how loose a hold Excel has on the clipboard. Copy a cell and you best not do anything but paste it where you want to, cause so much as breathing will clear that copy.
That has happened to me so many times, I should know better, but it still gets me. When I'm working in a document, I don't want to undo some other document. I just want to work on the document I'm working on. This is such a horrible "feature" that it really is a bug.
so true - I held on to Excel 2003 until 2018 at which point it really just didn't work anymore on Win10
As someone various colleagues have urged to compete at modeloff years ago, it's really just something one would do if they enjoy it, anyone smart/experienced enough to do modeloff/etc. would also know it's not a good value proposition in terms of winnings/expected value/etc.
Also, anyone who writes a formula like "=SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””)" is a bit suspect imo
from chatgpt:
Here's a practical example to illustrate:
Assume cell C3 contains the string "A:B:c".
Removing colons results in "ABc".
Converting to lowercase results in "abc".
Extracting ASCII codes of "a", "b", and "c" gives 97, 98, and 99, respectively.
Summing these values gives 97 + 98 + 99 = 294.
So, the formula SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””)))))) for the string "A:B:c" results in 294.
I would like to see this esport succeed, because I think the numerical skills they're showing off are very commercially useful, and getting more people interested in them would benefit us all.
Thanks to reader mode I can read this article. When I opened the link the first time I just closed it immediately. I know they were trying to be "cool", but that was just horrible.
I found “teaching each other how to use the MOD function” kind of jarring. I guess it’s the journalist thing where anything involving even simple arithmetic is super challenging.
yeah, that was completely out of left field as compared with =SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””) which, while convoluted and a terrible formula/method to use when sharing spreadsheets with others, is far more nuanced
These things are impressive. It is funny that sometimes to do crazy Excel acrobatics to solve what would be a few lines of code in Python or other approaches.
My one excel trick is to copy the data to the clipboard then use xclip/pbpaste, pipe it to sort, uniq, sed, etc then back to xclip/pbcopy and paste back to excel.
Step 1. Open Excel
Step 2. Start building your model.
Or...
Step 1. Open VSCode or PyCharm
Step 2. Front-end... hmmm, web? Electron? Qt? Jupyter?
Step 3. venv
Step 4. pip
Step 5. SqlAlchemy? Psycopg? Raw SQL? Import CSV?
Step 6. "Where we gonna host this? Local? Cloud? Serverless? Do we need Docker? K8s?"
Step 7. git init
Step 8. "Hey, do any of you know what these mean on the specs? IRR? COGS? NPV? I studied CompSci, not this lame finance bullshit"
Step 9. Call up Fred from Accounting for some help.
Step 10. Fred starts with Step 1, above.
That makes me think of these two great parody videos from ~5 years back, of Excel using e-sport tropes, introduced but a (fictional) livestreaming competitor nicknamed Makro.
I find Google Sheets shortcuts absolutely amazing: you don't need to know any but a single one: the invocation of the omni search box. That gives full-text search into any command you cpuld give to the editor. It's amazing.
Readit News
From my perspective, it's gotten harder to use spreadsheet programs efficiently with each new version - the keyboard shortcuts collide more, and everything moving to Office 365 / Google Docs / etc. has made the available tools less powerful.
excel used to almost be a joy to use; now it's sluggish, inconsistent, and buggy
i mostly use excel 2010 now as it's a little less obnoxious than the newest builds...
i look forward to not having to use this steaming pile though I suspect I've got another 20+ years of it :(
However, make sure you know the limits of Excel...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
It's not fair to blame Excel for this, the real issue was using a very outdated file format from before Office 2007
That's "You Suck at Excel" talk by Joel Spolsky.
As someone various colleagues have urged to compete at modeloff years ago, it's really just something one would do if they enjoy it, anyone smart/experienced enough to do modeloff/etc. would also know it's not a good value proposition in terms of winnings/expected value/etc.
Also, anyone who writes a formula like "=SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””)" is a bit suspect imo
from chatgpt:
Here's a practical example to illustrate:
Assume cell C3 contains the string "A:B:c".
Removing colons results in "ABc". Converting to lowercase results in "abc". Extracting ASCII codes of "a", "b", and "c" gives 97, 98, and 99, respectively. Summing these values gives 97 + 98 + 99 = 294. So, the formula SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””)))))) for the string "A:B:c" results in 294.
Smells like K, except way more human-friendly :)
Or...
Step 1. Open VSCode or PyCharm Step 2. Front-end... hmmm, web? Electron? Qt? Jupyter? Step 3. venv Step 4. pip Step 5. SqlAlchemy? Psycopg? Raw SQL? Import CSV? Step 6. "Where we gonna host this? Local? Cloud? Serverless? Do we need Docker? K8s?" Step 7. git init Step 8. "Hey, do any of you know what these mean on the specs? IRR? COGS? NPV? I studied CompSci, not this lame finance bullshit" Step 9. Call up Fred from Accounting for some help. Step 10. Fred starts with Step 1, above.
Step 1. Open Colab. Step 2. Start building your model.
"Microsoft Excel stream highlights" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
"XLOOKUP" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI