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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.
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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.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
100% agree. Any excel sheet that complicated that someone needs "help" with it, doesn't belong in excel.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
http://dilbert.com/strip/2005-...
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.
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.
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.
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'
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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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? You'll probably get a mess of stitched together Frankenstein code from half a dozen different stack overflow questions and a database schema that just might be classifiable as -1NF.
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 life these days.
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.
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.
If you're like me, you either don't have a wsj subscription or don't plan on feeding the pay-for-internet madness. Here is a way to read the article if you fall into either category. Alternate, non-paywalled link: https://outline.com/epLGYZ
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
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.
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.
to maintain Excel Sheets or Access DBs, but they'll be happy to have you work an extra 10-20 hours a week doing it.
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.
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> "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
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
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.
Are you serious? This is exactly what happened to me!
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.
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.
... 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
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.
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.
You have been marked by the Angel of Competence.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
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...
Excel is not a database.
You cannot transactionally update one file accessed by multiple users.
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.
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 find their computers probably already have an SQL server running. It's incredible the number of commercial programs that use SQL behind the scenes and install it.
Fire the person who decided that you may only use Excel and hire someone new. Preferably not from the insane asylum this time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.