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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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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 or PostgreSQL?
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 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 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.
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.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
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...
Is the best one, although I am somewhat biased...