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The First Rule of Microsoft Excel -- Don't Tell Anyone You're Good at It (wsj.com)
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.
100% agree. Any excel sheet that complicated that someone needs "help" with it, doesn't belong in excel.
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.
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.
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.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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.
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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 someone's broken spreadsheet.
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 happily accepts circular references, for example. Even using values before they are calculated, and other crazy time-travel-like tricks, thanks to the Tardis monad. Not that I recommend it for this kind of ad-hoc programming that Excel is usually used for.
I wonder is there a program that can serve as a generic spreadsheet-like program, but only serves to enter stuff, while the background can be any programming language you like? Because that would make me install such a thing. Currently I avoid spreadsheet programs because the built-in language is usually so shit.
If people would realize how ad-hoc programming is literally the point of having a personal computer, instead of treating programming like a scary magic thing that's supposedly soo complicated, their lives would be much easier.
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.
... 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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca