Rate your Microsoft Excel skills

the tournament looked pretty cool. I'm pretty damn strong in excel but not on that level. Like you I've moved most of the work I'm doing out of excel and into Azure Dataflows, PowerBI, or Python.

Hint - if you are strong at excel and using the old school approach of pivots and mutiple related files - check out PowerBI. Great little desktop ETL that can transform your daily work without a ton of heavy lifting and give you great visualizations to boot.

 

Yeah, I've always said that you think you know something until you see people that really know that something. I was that way with Excel until I saw these ladies in Japan and their spreadsheet from hell. Sure it was dog slow and croaking under the weight of the data/lookups, and you still had to cut and paste crap from worksheet to worksheet, but damn, it was impressive. lol.

re: PowerBI - That's funny, because before I quit my last job I started playing around with PowerBI just for giggles (and since I couldn't get any access to Tableau at the time ... wasn't free or something - I forget). It's pretty neat, but I quickly found out I'd rather play with the data than the display of the data (for the most part). I may get back into it with some stuff I'm working on now, but it would just be for fun.

 

Yeah - I like the power query side as well and that’s what got me into it from an automation perspective. However, I have just as much fun building the visualizations now too. It’s crazy the level of development you can do and how beautiful/interactive you can make things in it. I highly recommend if you’re a data dork like me.

 

I'd rate my Excel skills #DIV0!/10

 

Do you think advances in computer CPU over the past decade have caught up with the monster spreadsheets or have they made the spreadsheets even bigger since they now have more CPU capacity to use?

 

In the few cases I've seen in the workplace with crazy huge spreadsheets, I think it's just that people were using spreadseets to do something meant more for a database or a more thought-out app. The spreadsheets were kluged together out of necessity by someone, then someone else said "that's pretty neat! can I have it?", it grew into more functionality on more worksheets that referenced more junk, etc. Pretty soon you're traversing across multiple worksheets and multiple cells trying to figure out what anything is doing over thousands of rows of data with hidden columns, when they should've just hired some developer to get the data from a backend, manipulate it and put a front-end on it.

The most recent instance I encountered, I think the sluggishness in the spreadsheet had more to do with something over 100 columns of data and tens of thousands rows with tons of VLOOKUPs and conditional formatting everywhere. I don't know what else they had going on in that spreadsheet, but a lot of it was replaced with just using Python, retrieving required data from a database and spreadsheets, doing the calculations within the Python, and then spitting it back out with formatting using openpyxl into an Excel file for the pricing/business people to read/filter/do whatever with. I think Excel itself is pretty good once they jacked up the row limit over 1,000,000+ rows. There's a tool for everything, but you have to choose the right one, I guess. I still love using Excel, but don't really do anything complex with it anymore.

 

Highlight some rows then, Alt, D, F, F,

 

Doing those kinds of things outside of the corporate IT has been going on for decades.

1. IT wouldn't approve the project, so no programmer hired/assigned for it.

2. IT didn't have enough funding, so they couldn't hire a programmer for the project.

3. IT promised to do it, but it was down the list because they were backlogged.

4. The software vendor that had installed the primary corporate system said that the needed capability would be in the next release. To be rolled out next year.

5. The needed capability is in the latest software release, but rollout to all customers is going to take a while.

6. What was desired/needed was fairly unique and the vendor wasn't interested in devoting the resources to add that specific capability.

Foxpro
dBase
Access
Excel
etc

are things that have been used over the years to supplement corporate IT.

 

I bet these guys are good at Dwarf Fortress.

 

I work in accounting so almost exclusively work in excel, but I know I'm not as proficient as others. In interviews, my go to when they ask me my Excel skills is, "Better than average. Pretty good with pivots, vlookups, formulas (sumif, etc.) but I don't really do macros and those types of things".

I can generally get what I want out of it, but sometimes have to google.

 

This Excel integration announcement got me more interested in this game than ever:

 

Properly being able to google is a super skill in itself. You have to be able to break the requirement down to a translatable form - find something similar in nature and reengineer it to fit your needs.

 

I remember playing Eve several years ago, and all I wanted to do was play it for the economy sim in it. I hate PVP because I suck at it, but love the exploitation of resources, financial, economy-building, etc. of a lot of games. EVE made this worse because they had one of the best economiess/economy engines in any game back then, but the game was pretty much a free-for-all, cut-throat, ganking nightmare for anybody that just wanted to trade. lol. I gave it up as a result of no PVE option or no point in playing it at the time, I think. I don't know what it's done in the years since I stopped playing or how it plays now, but people were exercising Excel spreadsheets in that game like crazy back in those days. They used to call it "Excel in space".

 

In 1997 they were fine, then the skills graduated to Access and then other bigger things and they were 100% top shelf.

I haven't done anything outside of a simple spreadsheet in more than a decade, it's glorious.

 

Couldn't you use CTRL+shift+L (after highlighting)? I usually just use that one since it's one action (all 3 keys at once).

I know there's a ton of shortcuts, so just making sure I'm not missing something!

 

Yes diifferent ways to the same goal.

If both hands on keyboard both can work.

I'm right handed, so if task is mouse centric, i can sequence dial with left hand and not having to remove my right hand off the mouse.

 

Very cool, thanks for confirming! And definitely agree on why you'd use one way over other etc.

 

1.5 at best a 2.0

 

I can almost flawlessly add up cells without having to find the ribbon command
=(sum