The First Rule of Microsoft Excel -- Don't Tell Anyone You're Good at It (wsj.com) 202
An anonymous reader shares a report: When Anand Kalelkar started a new job at a large insurance company, colleagues flooded him with instant messages and emails and rushed to introduce themselves in the cafeteria. He soon learned his newfound popularity came with strings attached. Strings of code. Many of Mr. Kalelkar's co-workers had heard he was a wizard at Microsoft Excel and were seeking his help in taming unruly spreadsheets and pivot tables gone wrong.
[...] Excel buffs are looking to lower their profiles. Since its introduction in 1985 by Microsoft Corp., the spreadsheet program has grown to hundreds of millions of users world-wide. It has simplified countless office tasks once done by hand or by rudimentary computer programs, streamlining the work of anyone needing to balance a budget, draw a graph or crunch company earnings. Advanced users can perform such feats as tracking the expenditures of thousands of employees. At the same time, it has complicated the lives of the office Excel Guy or Gal, the virtuosos whose superior skills at writing formula leave them fighting an endless battle against the circular references, merged cells and mangled macros left behind by their less savvy peers.
"If someone tells you that they âjust have a few Excel sheets' that they want help with, run the other way," tweeted 32-year-old statistician Andrew Althouse. "Also, you may want to give them a fake phone number, possibly a fake name. It may be worth faking your own death, in extreme circumstances." The few Excel sheets in question, during one recent encounter, turned out to have 400 columns each, replete with mismatched terms and other coding no-nos, said Mr. Althouse, who works at the University of Pittsburgh. The project took weeks to straighten out.
[...] Excel buffs are looking to lower their profiles. Since its introduction in 1985 by Microsoft Corp., the spreadsheet program has grown to hundreds of millions of users world-wide. It has simplified countless office tasks once done by hand or by rudimentary computer programs, streamlining the work of anyone needing to balance a budget, draw a graph or crunch company earnings. Advanced users can perform such feats as tracking the expenditures of thousands of employees. At the same time, it has complicated the lives of the office Excel Guy or Gal, the virtuosos whose superior skills at writing formula leave them fighting an endless battle against the circular references, merged cells and mangled macros left behind by their less savvy peers.
"If someone tells you that they âjust have a few Excel sheets' that they want help with, run the other way," tweeted 32-year-old statistician Andrew Althouse. "Also, you may want to give them a fake phone number, possibly a fake name. It may be worth faking your own death, in extreme circumstances." The few Excel sheets in question, during one recent encounter, turned out to have 400 columns each, replete with mismatched terms and other coding no-nos, said Mr. Althouse, who works at the University of Pittsburgh. The project took weeks to straighten out.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's effective if you don't want to help anyone. Some people just have 10,000 rows of data and its kinda overkill to put that small dataset into a database.
Re:Move it to SQL (Score:5, Informative)
Some people just have 10,000 rows of data and its kinda overkill to put that small dataset into a database.
I completely disagree. It's overkill to be using excel for 10,000 rows of data. Why are you using a spreadsheet when you have that much data? It's completely the wrong tool. Spend a little time and learn a new tool! SQL doesn't mean having to store it on a server somewhere.
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It's overkill to be using excel for 10,000 rows of data. Why are you using a spreadsheet when you have that much data?
The largest spreadsheet I ever had was 60K lines. That was a subset of a larger spreadsheet with 1.2M lines. The joys of automated data collection. As the end user of this firehorse, spreadsheet was the only format I'm allowed to use.
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60K lines in Excel? Isn't that a bit slow at times?
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Fire the person who decided that you may only use Excel and hire someone new. Preferably not from the insane asylum this time.
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SQL doesn't mean having to store it on a server somewhere.
Indeed. Any Android or iPhone has SQLite built-in as a shared library. Your phone likely has dozens of apps that use it. SQL can have a very small footprint.
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Every PS4 does too.
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I work with one-off data sets with 3-10,000 rows of data all the time, and Excel is an awesome tool for working with it for the 5-30 minutes it might be relevant. Putting the information into a proper database is useless, because the "answer" is all that is ever needed after that first analysis.
Don't get me wrong though-- I do have spreadsheets I spend way too much time with, as they are exported from our accounting system, need to be massaged and analyzed, and are still relevant in a couple weeks when I r
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It's overkill to be using excel for 10,000 rows of data. Why are you using a spreadsheet when you have that much data?
Surely you meant underkill? (Unless I completely missed the meaning of the word "overkill", which is possible.)
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Why are you using a spreadsheet when you have that much data? It's completely the wrong tool.
It's not the data that defines the tool with that tiny dataset. Excel is everywhere, easily usable, adaptable, and transferable. By comparison if you're writing SQL queries and putting your data in a database all you're likely to do is confuse everyone else... and that's before considering that at the end of it all you will be exporting that SQL query into some Excel table for final presentation anyway.
"much data"? Really? With 10000 rows and columns A through Z filled excel will most likely still operate i
Re:Move it to SQL (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are you using a spreadsheet when you have that much data?
Because we don't have a license for an SQL server or an IT department prepared to support a free one. Duh.
So you can afford a license for MS Excel but not pay nothing for SQLite [sqlite.org] or PostgreSQL [postgresql.org]?
Oh, I "forgot" you said you had no IT department to help you with the free one... But you have an IT department helping you with all your Excel problems?
Or you don't? How the **** are you handling all the Excel problems then? If you don't have any, great, your workplace seems to be a place full of Excel wizards. But if they are, they should be able to learn how to use a SQL-engine/server without much trouble.
Learn to use the right tool for the job instead of using shitty tools. After the initial period of learning you will wonder why you were such complete and utter idiots for all those years, when you could have done real work instead in a fraction of the time and with much less headache from trying to debug poorly designed spreadsheets.
SQL doesn't mean having to store it on a server somewhere.
Yes, it does. If the SQL server software happens to be running on your desktop then it's a server, especially if you expect other people to access the data.
No, SQLite [sqlite.org] is "server-less", so there are options if you don't want "servers".
But servers aren't something evil, why are you so obsessed with not having servers? You are right in that any computer serving something to clients are technically servers. But in reality when you talk about servers you mostly mean dedicated servers, servers which is not used as a workstation for someone else.
My computer at my old work was always turned on, so for a while I ran FileMaker to share data with my coworkers, and later my PostgreSQL server which replaced FileMaker on it. When everyone realized it was really helpful to share date we got it a new home on a "real server". But those can be pretty much anything with a little computing power. Heck, you could run PostgreSQL on a Raspberry Pi [opensource.com] if you wanted something that is out of the way, doesn't draw much power and doesn't generates noise. I wouldn't recommend it, but there are all kinds of solutions, and I bet you have some computers unused somewhere that could be used.
If you have machines capable of running Excel, you can sure as heck let them run some kind of SQL-server.
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So you can afford a license for MS Excel
The license for Excel is "free". Everyone using Excel already has Word. There's no version of Office where you get Word without Excel. Any business will have this as part of their package that includes Outlook (effectively making Word free too).
Learn to use the right tool for the job instead of using shitty tools.
Per my other reply with a tiny stable dataset Excel is the right tool for the job. With an ever changing dataset SQL is the right tool ... on the backend ... where your query will export the results to Excel.
The rest I agree with. Many people would be surprised to fi
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No, use whatever flavor is database server is in common use in the organization.
They all have free local, single user versions. They're trying to lock you in, do everything possible with ANSI SQL.
Re:Move it to SQL (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people just have 10,000 rows of data and its kinda overkill to put that small dataset into a database.
How is that "overkill"? After all, Excell IS a database, just very heavyweight and with weak features. 10,000 rows is 200 screen pages. It is insane to try to process something like that with fragile macros.
Whip up a Python script to slurp it into a CSV file, run error and consistency checks, and then insert it into an SQL database. Run your updates and queries, then slurp it back into CSV, and insert it back into Excel. This is powerful, robust, and will give you solid job security, since no one else will have a clue what you are doing.
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good luck sharing that with non-technical people.
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good luck sharing that with non-technical people.
If they are asking for help, they are already in over their heads.
If you give them a solution based on Python+SQL, they can run it from a GUI with a click, and it can give them meaningful error messages, telling them exactly which cells have badly formatted values, so they can fix them on their own and try again.
If you instead write them a convoluted macro, they will still not understand it, but it will be fragile and opaque. It will be harder for them to use, and harder for you to troubleshoot. So they w
Python + SQL won't work (Score:2)
Anyone suggesting it has not ever built a substantial quantitative model. Which is probably everyone on Slash dot.
The equivalent Python program would be huge. And difficult to write and debug. With lots of noise code to deal with UI issues.
Excel does need extra tools to help review them
http://www.spreadsheetdetectiv... [spreadsheetdetective.com]
is the best one IMHO, although I may be biased...
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You can create GUIs from within Excel through VBA. Also, Excel can connect to external sources as well.
Point is you should use the best tool for the job. In some cases, Excel is king. in others, you need a different solution. you could also start with case A (Excel solution) and later it needs to be switched to case B (SQL, etc). Smart businesses do it. Others keep hammering at case A until it's a total mess.
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Sometimes there is more enterprise value in letting someone else spend 4 hours doing something themselves compared to doing it yourself in 10 minutes. The key is in helping that person be more effective with a tool they understand.
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Not to mention that it's going to take them four hours to explain to you why they're doing it and what the data means.
Shit, businesses are moving away from traditional databases, especially in the Excel sweetspot: Finance. They don't want or like Excel, but they also know it's a fuck of a lot better than a seven month wait for IT to deliver something worse. Instead they're going for self-service data presentation and exploration tools that let them perform big data style processing using desktop tools and a
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Excel is not a database.
You cannot transactionally update one file accessed by multiple users.
Re: Move it to SQL (Score:2)
Office 365 disagrees.
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And users find Office 365 disagreeable, so it all evens out.
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It is insane to try to process something like that with fragile macros.
Macros? I thought we were talking about people who are good at Excel.
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So replace it with something better.
It's ok, we'll wait.
Re:Move it to SQL (Score:5, Insightful)
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The reason that Excel gets used by all of these people is that it's simple enough for most people to use and almost everyone has had classes on how to use spreadsheet software at some point in their
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There is an easy way out. Just tell them you're no good at fixing other people's mistakes. You may be an excel wizard - but you're only good at making spreadsheets from the ground up. Other people does things different from you - so you can't work on their stuff. You don't 'get their style' or some such.
If they pester you with something, keep saying "I don't understand this", "What did you do here" and so on. They get tired of that soon enough. Be nice and give hints on how to do stuff - but never fix s
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If they can't get it to work in Excel, do you really think that their database design and any associated code will be any better?
In my experience some Excel is only good at handling projects up to a certain level of complexity. Once you get beyond that point, using more powerful tools makes the job a lot easier.
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How about we rewrite that using Systems Theory 101.
In universal experience, technology tier X is only good at handling projects up to a certain level of complexity. Once you get beyond that point, using more powerful tier such as Y makes the job a lot easier.
In universal experience, technology tier Y is only good at handling p
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They definately shouldn't be writing SQL, just dumping cells and rows into the database. Let the professionals write the SQL.
As for approachable tools, the hammer is quite easily understood by all. However, results vary. Someone who frequently hammers their thumb or chokes up on a tiny trim hammer going tap tap tap tap (ad infinitum) on a framing nail shouldn't try to build a house.
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Let the professionals write the SQL.
They have a team full of sales professionals, recruitment specialists, accountants or process optimisation monkeys.
Not an SQL professional in sight. Why would they invest scarce team budget in hiring one when every single person they employ already knows how to use Excel?
Excel is not a technology choice. It's a business one.
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Of course not. The OP's point was that if they can't get it to work in Excel, it needs to be done by a professional using a professional's tools, not by them.
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I never figured out Excel. It's help just wasn't very good, and it takes too much for granted that you're an expert. I don't use it much which is another issue. Lotus-123 or Visicalc never game me the same headaches.
So when I try to do something simple it rarely works out. I can't even make a chart that give useful information, I dont' know how to zoom in or out on the chart or change it without deleting it and starting over. I don't know how to use a variable instead of clunky $X$Y notation, I don't k
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Most of the help I give people in Excel is about working with values that aren't helpful that have been exported from another system. An example is we have file numbers that have a three letter series, a dash, a two number year, another dash, and a four number sequence. The user might want to be able to sort or filter by series or year. Spend five minutes with them showing them the easy and harder ways of doing that, and they have a very repeatable system for being able to use Excel for more of their wor
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(It is fun to just run a line of sed/awk/grep that gives them the answer instantly, but sometimes that is just being a jerk.)
Unless you're using those daily you end up spending more time looking up the syntax and reminding yourself how to use them than just shoving the thing in excel.
Plus, people can understand excel. You can show them the exact traceability from a->b->c->d and how you incorporated three other comparable data streams to produce e. It's interactively debuggable, and trivial to update.
That said, I tend to use it for one-off activities rather than repeatable processes, and if something needs VBA support the
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Even as crappy as Access is, it's a better database than Excel.
That said, people do do modeling in Excel. In that case I'd steer them to R.
Re:Move it to SQL (Score:4, Interesting)
Excel is a like a chisel being used as a screwdriver
At one time, it was a very nice chisel. It was sharp, held a nice edge, and would even make nice cuts on the end-grain of soft wood like pine.
Then someone needed a screwdriver to open something. Nothing major, just a simple turn. It will only take a second.
Now the chisel has one rounded corner (the other has a nasty barb because they dropped it on the concrete), several large nicks, a chunk missing on one side, and the bevel isn't even square.
What was 10-seconds with a strop to get it back in line, is now an hours worth of work - and that's after putting it on a power grinder to get the nicks and chips out of it.
Point being, Excel is good for something, and lousy for others. R is good for somethings, and difficult and overkill for others. Complex regression? Definitely. Just adding a couple of columns - no matter how long - not worth the overhead.
Like anyone good at any profession - it's knowing the tools of the trade, what they are good for, passable, and lousy at. Selecting the appropriate one for the job, and keeping your skills up to date.
The unfortunately thing is, few folks want to learn anything new, everyone's looking for a magic bullet, and view everything as a one-time one-off effort - without realizing that this will be on-going for many months.
Until behavior surrounding tools improves, Excel will continue to be king of the hill in this regards.
Re:Move it to SQL (Score:5, Funny)
Point being, Excel is good for something, and lousy for others. R is good for somethings, and difficult and overkill for others.
You misunderstand why I'd steer them to R. Somehow you've got the impression I want to help them.
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You can't go in too hard with the power grinder though, as you'll destroy the temper. In fact, I would never go into anything I want to make sharp with a proper grinding disc in the grinder. Even a sanding disc, you have to take care. And then to put a proper sharp edge on the thing, that takes even more care. I guess it makes a difference whether it is a really fine wood carving chisel, or something you are going to use to split bricks or sever rivets.
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Yes. I've been looking for something non-crap but Access like for years.
Like presenting strongly typed tables like worksheets (maybe even with column based formatting) and formulas and then reports on them
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There's dozens. One should be 'non-crap'.
Pretty much any SQL reporting tool.
For a better coder, setup an OLAP cube.
Depends where you're coming from and what you are good at. Accountants, with a little training, can use Excel as a database reporting tool. It kind of sucks, but anything built for them will suck to us.
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I second R. It's more user-friendly than a lot of languages, and if you can write excel macros, you can probably learn to do a bit of R. Code it up for them with good comments, and teach them how to run it. If they're in any way competent, they'll use that script a bit then edit it and break it, and you can teach them a bit more.
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Modern business focussed data tools tend to support R these days too. It's recognised as a powerful and useful language for people that work with data, even if they're not in what's traditionally been considered an IT role.
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Move it to Lotus Improv. (Score:2)
It's not even an Excel thing. I use to do the same with a NeXTStep spreadsheet.
Plus despite the complaints there are Excel alternatives.
https://www.scoro.com/blog/11-... [scoro.com]
SQL also sucks, if not even more. (Score:2, Insightful)
Spreadsheet programs: Just a shitty programming language, with the arrays exposed front and center.
SQL: Just a shitty programming language, with a few convenience functions. (SQL SELECT is just like an extended Haskell list comprehension.)
At least Spreadsheet programs it allow functions in their data structures, like a functional language. SQL can't even do that, and is way more complicated without it actually making thing better.
But otherwise, any real scripting language would be a better choice.
Haskell ha
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Been there, done that and it's been a mixed experience. The short version is that it works real well if you are converging on a long term solution, you do an initial implementation and the tweaks to the code happen less and less often with less and less urgency. If what you want is really Excel - like, the flexibility to just alter a formula and hit save - you're probably going to be disappointed if you have to go through a standard development process of requesting the change, describing the expected outco
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Most large corporations keep their databases, and all access to them, under tight lock and key. In many cases, you are not allowed to even install a copy of their in-house database, or a free database. You are only allowed to use what comes installed on your work machine, which usually is just MS Office. Installing anything you find on the internet is a great way to get fired.
Natu
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Most corp users are married to spreadsheets. They pass them around, share them, toss them up on a share point and so many hands really mess things up.
I got a reputation of being able to tease out data quickly.
How? I cheat.
vlookup is great -- but with so many hands in the cookie jar you have data types shift from row to row. You'll end up pulling out your hair trying to do any comparisons quickly.
The way I cheat is I add a row called ... wait for it. ROW (each value is =row()). I then hide all but the
Look at the bright side (Score:2, Insightful)
Excel wizard here: I actually love doing this kind of work. I get lots of high-profile attention and build my apps for user extensibility. If you set good boundaries about how you expect them to do anything manual, you can get through most applications in 2-3 hours.
On top of that, it just feels good to automate something in 30 minutes that another employee has spent 8 hours/week on for the past few years.
Look at the bright side-Movement. (Score:2)
Been awhile since I had to deal with Excel, but all this heartache makes me wonder if they're translation tools that allow one to compose elsewhere and load into, or move out of?
Re:Look at the bright side (Score:4)
Word gets all the glory in MS office but it's in Excel where most of the work gets done.
I like Walley's solution to this problem.... (Score:5, Funny)
http://dilbert.com/strip/2005-... [dilbert.com]
Article should read STOP USING EXCEL! (Score:5, Insightful)
The over-use of Excel is a result of the under-use of real programming languages, and real developers. This is a CHRONIC problem in corporations all over the world.
Here's what happens:
Some Guy 15 years ago hacked up an excel spreadsheet to do a rudimentary task. Some Guy left 10 years ago, and now it's grown into a series of terrible, horrible hacks over the last 10 years. Corporations finds Some Guy 2, and wants him to look through the horrible code that now exists and "fix it", or "make it do new thing 2". It's the same thing that happens to all software, but far worse.
It's bad enough when it's in a real programming language written by a trained developer. it's 100 times worse when it's written in Excel, and written by a neophyte developer. We had these things all over the place at my last workplace. One of them pulled from a database and created dozens and dozens of database connections each time it interacted with anything. The thing was a nightmare, and we did eventually kill it. But it existed for yeaaars doing god knows what.
Have you ever tried to get IT do something? (Score:4, Interesting)
First you need a proposal. Then get funding approved. Then have lots of meetings determining the spec. Then they subcontract it out to India and something comes back that is useless. Ten more iterations and it might barely work.
The Excel user is done and finished with less work than writing the initial proposal.
Most of the problems with Excel can be corrected with good tools.
http://www.spreadsheetdetectiv... [spreadsheetdetective.com]
Is the best one, although I am somewhat biased...
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Just asked one of my client's IT department for a power cable the other day. Yeah, the one powering your computer. This one was for a workstation, too. She wouldn't do it because she said she didn't know what voltage, amperage, or wattage the computer was. Then I told her: 120v AC, 3 amps, 250 watts. She still wouldn't do it. The cunt.
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Walk into their office, ask, "You guys have a box of spare cables anywhere?"
Walk out with a cable.
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No different than any other big "Favours" (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm guessing that this is in the WSJ as opposed to a place where professional coders hang out.
I've gotten these requests for years/decades and I've never treated them any differently than any other request for coding or any other large task; have your manager make it a request of my manager.
To be fair, I learned this the hard way in 1986 with a piece of assembly language code that started with the statement "I hear you know 8086 assembly code, could you take a look at..." and ended up owning the code with its support until 2009.
even meta-Excel is to be feared (Score:3, Insightful)
My teammates and I found ourselves with what seemed like an easy task: automate the creation of Excel documents for enterprise-wide system resource utilization from our inventory database that would normally take a single person 2 months to do by hand...
18 months later, the code is still under active development, the results are heavily scrutinized (as they are now accurate enough to be used as planning tools for future expenditures), and at least 50% of our effort each sprint is spent improving the code or the underlying inventory data.
Andrew Althouse's tweet (Score:2)
https://twitter.com/ADAlthouse... [twitter.com]
What was the point of quoting a tweet without linking to it?
only because they usually want it for free (Score:2)
I'm good at it. I would gladly make it a business, but those who want help for some reason think that the time they themselves put into it was free and mine should be too.
They see it like writing an email. Few consider the cost of all of the emails they have written in terms of their time. It is viewed more like the time to walk to the bathroom - just a necessary part of living.
Interestingly, I've noted that the same ones that need the most help on their spreadsheets also need the most help on their emails
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A more effective combo imo is python, pandas, and jupyter notebooks. Python is a simple language, pandas data structures lend themselves to the types of calculations you'd do with a spreadsheet, and jupyter notebooks allow one to tell a sequential story as to how a calculation was done.
A million times this. Notebooks kick all sorts of ass. I think a LOT more work will be done this way in the future, because it's really the first format that can combine data, processing steps, documentation, and visualization into one single package. Honestly, notebooks could replace powerpoint and word as well as excel for many use cases.
I Teach Exactly the Opposite (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not a programmer or a system administrator. I'm a bit of a power-user and a trouble-shooter. I tend to master what I find useful. Back in 2003, I found use for Excel (pivot tables, specifically) for a hobby and from thereon out, it was a massive boon to me at work.
Today, having mentored a couple dozen interns and entry-level employees, I can tell you that teaching THEM pivot tables, data norming/data cleaning, and the like has made them extremely competitive in the job market. I tell them, "What I will teach you will not only get you instant interest when submitting an application, but will help make you indispensable to most organizations."
So ya, if your time is too valuable to help someone in Excel, don't tell them you're competent. But if you want to get a job or help others get jobs, learn and train others in the standard formulae (IF/Then, Count, etc.), more complex formulae (Vlookup, Index/Match, etc.), how to clean up data quickly, and pivot tables.
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I have to agree. Many times people don't know how to approach a problem well enough to define how to address it in a higher level system. Making people good at Excel makes them useful for solving day-to-day problems.
Unfortunately, you also need a mechanism for teaching people when and how to create a database instead. Haven't been able to really do that yet myself... but have a few projects that really need it.
Old advice (Score:5, Insightful)
Many (many) years ago, my mom told me, "Don't put how many words per minute you can type on your resume unless you want to get a job as a typist."
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Have you ever seen a linux administrator issuing a 50-character long command within a few seconds?
Alternate, non-paywalled link (Score:3)
Nobody wants to pay you (Score:3)
Also, you can't really get cheap Indians to do the work because it's so basic you can't argue there's no Americans to do it, so companies can't just bring in an H1-B and stick them with that extra 20/hr week of work and not pay for it like they do for other software tools.
I didn't know Microsoft invented spreadsheets (Score:5, Informative)
> "Since its introduction in 1985....... Excel has simplified countless office tasks once done by hand or by rudimentary computer programs, streamlining the work of anyone needing to balance a budget, draw a graph or crunch company earnings."
Wow it's a miracle!
Nah I'm pretty sure computer spreadsheets existed before 1985. Like WordPerfect's Quatro and Lotus 1-2-3
Re:I didn't know Microsoft invented spreadsheets (Score:4, Informative)
Nah I'm pretty sure computer spreadsheets existed before 1985. Like WordPerfect's Quatro and Lotus 1-2-3
The first personal computer spreadsheet was VisiCalc by Software Arts on the Apple II back in 1979.
Visicalc (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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They should make porn with the girls made up in alternating stripes of light and medium green.
For people who miss ASCII porn.
No wonder!!! (Score:3)
When I was 20, I was extremely good with Excel... and you have to know Excel back in the 90s was a lot more simple than it is now. The fist time it started having macros, I was able to automate a full day of work down to a few mins. I thought it should have been a well recognized accomplishment so I bragged to my boss and got fired because she didn't want to pay me a whole day to do 5mins work. But that firing actually became a better opportunity for me though. Few people I bragged to told me where to go to find a job with my Excel knowledge and I actually found a much better job. After 20 years of mild use of Excel I have to say most of my "expert" Excel skills are gone.
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Same thing happened to me. I had a job doing a bunch of manual tasks that took hours to accomplish. I wrote a few batch files that would do the tasks that used to be done manually. Management figured out they didn't need a salaried professional on staff now and could hire monkey from the zoo for a few bananas.
I have absolutely no problem at all helping ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... people with Excel.
If that's my job and I get 90 Euros per hour that is.
If it's extra unpaid overtime, that's a different story.
That's probably what he's talking about.
The First Rule of Information Technology.... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not just an excel thing.
By sheer virtue of knowing the difference between 'The Computer' and Windows I've found myself wearing the IT hat in a small business. I multiple small businesses.
When the mission critical server falls over. It's me that fixes it.
When someone can't get on the network, it's me that fixes it.
When the wordpress site needs to be kicked to do something unusual - I get to do that.
When all company data gets nuked because someone set up the RAID array on the server as RAID 0 rather than 1 - and the controller let the smoke out - I fixed that too. And saved the company.
I'm the one who knows the difference between what a public and private IP is - what subscriber NAT is - and why that piece of hardware wont work with that network operator.
I built an excel tool to automate what I actually do - turning a manual job that can take hours into one of fifteen minutes. It's really just a conglomeration of multiple rules of thumb formed more by accretion than by any actual factored design process. It used to break regularly in ways only I understood - often silently giving a wrong answer only obviously wrong to someone who knew what the right answer should've looked like. It's gotten more reliable and defined as it got used.
It's now become the company's first "app". Eventually an actual software developer will get to see it to turn it into a fancy jolly rancher icon and personal data snaffler. I expect them to run screaming in horror at the undocumented melange.
All it does, is the job I normally did from Monday to Friday. Nobody bothered me about my job on Saturday because it was obvious that, yeah, I wouldn't be in work on a Saturday.
The first time it popped out from beneath the company veil and met an actual user, I got a call on a Saturday. Because they wanted to use it NOW and couldn't log in, (A user error, not a program error - it worked as I intended). It got fixed anyway.
Eventually, when it filters out into the wider world, I'll get more calls. Asking me to fix the automation on Saturday - when the same people would've happily waited until monday morning for me to do the job.
I really didn't want to get into IT for a reason.
This is not an 'Excel' problem (Score:3)
This is an amateur/professional problem.
I Learned this lesson first in 1976 of 78 or so when an actuary wanted me to help him clean up, optimise, enhance a few 10's of thousands of lines for FORTRAN 4 he had written. Needless to say it did not go well.
Be blunt (Score:2)
Be blunt, tell them you're an expert in LibreOffice Excel.
Spaghetti code ... (Score:2)
... is a brain-numbing nightmare.
The trick to taming inherited code (Lord knows there's never documentation) is to get inside the head of the creator and train of of thoughts of those who followed her.
In some instances, I totally refused to go there.
When management threatened me, I called their bluff.
Being an isolated code jockey, pestering end users for specs that are no-shows or ever-changing is a death sentence for an outgoing people-person like me.
I helped the firm choose independent contractors to come
As Dilbert so eloquently put it - (Score:4, Funny)
You have been marked by the Angel of Competence [dilbert.com].
The best career choices (Score:2)
2. Don't ever help anyone
3. When your employer finds out you refuse to help people, especially if it is part of your job. They will promote you and shower you with CEO level money.
Protip: Tell your boss to go fuck himself, and expose yourself to the ladies in HR, and grab a few of their butts while you are at it. The company will be your oyster.
tool (Score:3)
Excel is a tool like any other. It has strengths and weaknesses.
Heck, I've used it to generate a bunch of SQL statements for use in a real database, by adding and filling columns (with SQL keywords, parens, operators, etc.) around existing data export columns, then concatenating and transforming stuff into yet another column with the finished SQL statements). Yeah, I could have done it with sed and awk, lol. Guess which was easier.
It's a freaking Swiss army knife. No, you wouldn't want to build a house or fell a forest with it, but it's good to have in your pocket to pull out for the odd strange task.
If you are good at excel (Score:2)
you will get zero respect for me. It is just a tool which, when you need to be "good at it" is not the right tool anymore.
I'm NOT an Excel guru, but .... (Score:2)
Every single company I ever worked in I.T. for had "that one spreadsheet" ... the king-sized mess of macros and multiple sheets with cells linked to outside data sources that was always causing problems, yet was business-critical.
The worst I ever ran across was at a metal heat-treating company. A former engineer constructed a crazy-complex spreadsheet over the years when he worked there. I'm pretty fuzzy on what its purpose even was, but something to do with generating cost estimates for various metal treat
the problem with excel (Score:2)
Nothing is more stupid (Score:2)
As soon as you create the spreadsheet, it's out of date... let alone creating 20 or 30. Spreadsheets are error breeding grounds.
One person inserts an address as: 123 Maple St NW, AnyCity
another creates three (or four or five columns) to parse it out.
A third person writes it: 123 Mapple Street Norh West
A fourth person writes it 123 Maple Street NW
Instead, they should be
favourite database (Score:2)
What is the world's favourite database ?
Excel
Why would you not want to be useful? (Score:2)
the Eternal Microsoft PSA (Score:2)
Extracting unpaid labour from the teenage geek help support desk was a core feature of Microsoft's business model from the mid 1980s through to Y2K.
But this point, almost everyone realized that the product churn was deliberate and was never going to stop. (Even the briefest contact with the life of times of Visual Basic for Applications accelerated the pin drop to near light speed.)
But in the end, this business model reality took most of a generation to sink in.
Unfortunately, as they say, a fool is born eve
Re:Symptom (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple answer: Excel with sheets linked to database tables.
You only have to show the good ones, once. A database is the place to store any data big enough that you have to filter and/or sort before looking. IMHO anything more than about 100 rows belongs in a table, not on a sheet.
It also helps to demystify databases. If an accounting type can setup a worksheet, he can setup a table. It won't be a good design, but who cares? Hopefully it will have an index.
You won't want to give them access to any database server that's 'live'. Build them their own. They will make mistakes. But don't let them run local, or the data won't get backed up.
Re: (Score:2)
That's because you can't be trusted to not break anything, to not expose the organisation to unacceptable levels of risk, to obey the law or to have the competence to even know what you want or need.
Of course, that doesn't describe you as an individual at all. However, those things are all true at a population level, and that's where the policies have to be set.
It's why I make sure an explicit part of my role is testing new tools and software, for which I require local admin access, and damn well give it to
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure if that's true anymore. I'm told Office web [wikipedia.org] stuff runs fine on Linux. 'Has been so long since I was able to run Linux though—too much work stuff lives in WindowsLand.
Re: A real wizard uses SQL (Score:4, Insightful)
But then, a real real wizard uses sed, sort unique.
I'm not joking you: I was in the strange position at my last job of being considered a kind of an "excel guru". Me! I haven't even used Windows for almost two decades.
Of course, I was not the kind of guru that teaches others how to solve this or that problem on Excel but more the kind of "I've been stomping my head for a full week trying to convince Excel to give me this or that result without success. Can you do something about that?" My neatest trick? CVS export.
Re: (Score:2)
If I want to go back to weekly reindexing, I'd use MySQL.
Re: (Score:2)
The clueless people get an etch-a-sketch. The people who get promoted are the ones that show other people how to get better with the tools that are needed to do their job.
The people that don't get promoted are the ones that never learn or grow.
Re: (Score:2)
So you didn't become a porn star? :-D