I used excel like crazy in college, being a lab monkey, but now I rarely use it, and never for anything more than the simplest spreadsheet. My boss literally was amazed by my skill when I set the labels at the top so they scrolled with you. I learned that in 7th grade. At a public school. My teachers lied about how important it would be to my future.
@hchavers Pivot was the name of a pretty nice CMS back in the day… I used to run it at work until they made us downgrade to microsoft sharepoint, even though it sucked.
Actually, the pivot table implementation in Excel pretty much sucks. Very powerful but horrible user interface and doesn’t always work the way you’d expect it to.
Confession: in a prior life there were deep dive financial projects where, for extended periods, I spoke more Excel than English. Even got a reputation for it at the company. It became a problem my manager tolerated - trouble-shooting other departments’ Excel roadblocks.
@RedOak Amen. I haven’t had too many issues with it not working as expected, but I have had issues where I’ve had a perfectly pivotable situation that Excel just didn’t seem to want to pivot. And, even when it does work, the UI/UX is shit. Shitty Shit McShitterson.
I got pretty good at it in college, I had never really used it before so when I found out how formulas worked, it was like magic. But I’ve barely used it since.
I’ve switched to Kingsoft’s WPS Office.
Yup. FREE. 1GB shared cloud to sync with 1PC and 2 mobile devices. They have Win, Linux, and iOS flavors. Mix and match.
You don’t have to use the cloud part!
Has fully drop-in Word, Excel, & PowerPoint replacements. With the ribbon. OpenOffice/LibreOffice doesn’t.
Compare versions.
$80 for 3yr standalone (Business) or $30/yr (Pro) for family/household use (3PC, 6 mobile) + shared sync (like Office365).
Although I’ve not tried WPS’ pivot function in its spreadsheet app.
Making sure Excel sheets stay mostly functional (while we work on Tableau replacements for the visualizations) is literally my day job, which makes sure I can afford things like an apartment and food and continued VMP, so I do kind of “live to pivot”, or at least “pivot to live”.
Team Index-Match forever, though. So much more powerful than VLookup!
I feel they are “Excel-lent”. Then I’ll see someone do some type of advanced formula, formatting, or something that I didn’t know existed and feel like a beginner all over again.
I chose the place I’m living based on a comparison spreadsheet featuring weighted values for attributes of various cities.
For several years, I acted as scorekeeper for a niche fantasy football league, entering several hundred values a week that cascaded through 10 different sheets, generating per-team, per-owner, per-week, matchup, aggregate, and other stats.
I was once at my at-the-time in-laws’ house to watch a movie, and my father-in-law (head high school football coach) lamented the fact he’d lost his stats spreadsheet in a data corruption incident. That sounded like more fun than the movie, so after a few minutes of talking and taking notes, I spent about two hours making a user-friendly (even color-coded) set of sheets to track all the useful stats for a football team, including per-player and per-game aggregates and comparisons. He said it was far superior to the one he had been using.
I recently created a spreadsheet to determine what TV show to watch next.
I don’t know some of the most esoteric functions of Excel/Google Sheets, but I sure use the more common/semi-common ones a lot. I love data.
I’ve always thought a relational database was a better choice for the types of things that people tend to use ‘advanced’ excel for. I guess google sheets now has their neat little hybrid where you can write psudo sql queries against our data sets. Well so long as its less than a couple million things.
viva la LibreOffice Calc!
@thismyusername get out of here, Satan!
I use Google Sheets a lot more these days. (Not that I ever actually used Excel that much).
I do not excel.
@shahnm None of us do. That’s why we’re on meh.
@shahnm Yeah because you refrigerate.
@shahnm me either “excel”late answer!
I’ve spent the better part of several commutes teaching a fellow passenger pivots as of late so… the pivot one.
I used excel like crazy in college, being a lab monkey, but now I rarely use it, and never for anything more than the simplest spreadsheet. My boss literally was amazed by my skill when I set the labels at the top so they scrolled with you. I learned that in 7th grade. At a public school. My teachers lied about how important it would be to my future.
Pivot!!! That’s it, the new name of my spreadsheet program that will crush Microsoft.
I wanted to call it 123, but we all know numbers can’t be copyrighted.
@hchavers Pivot was the name of a pretty nice CMS back in the day… I used to run it at work until they made us downgrade to microsoft sharepoint, even though it sucked.
=find( mid,"///advanced///",4,11)
Actually, the pivot table implementation in Excel pretty much sucks. Very powerful but horrible user interface and doesn’t always work the way you’d expect it to.
Confession: in a prior life there were deep dive financial projects where, for extended periods, I spoke more Excel than English. Even got a reputation for it at the company. It became a problem my manager tolerated - trouble-shooting other departments’ Excel roadblocks.
Is it kinda weird, the excitement I felt, when Microsoft added the sumproduct function to Excel?
(After years of doing that function the manual way for vehicle option installation rates and model mixes in price and product cost analysis.)
@RedOak Amen. I haven’t had too many issues with it not working as expected, but I have had issues where I’ve had a perfectly pivotable situation that Excel just didn’t seem to want to pivot. And, even when it does work, the UI/UX is shit. Shitty Shit McShitterson.
‘Fact, I feel like pivoting right now.
I got pretty good at it in college, I had never really used it before so when I found out how formulas worked, it was like magic. But I’ve barely used it since.
I’ve switched to Kingsoft’s WPS Office.
Yup. FREE. 1GB shared cloud to sync with 1PC and 2 mobile devices. They have Win, Linux, and iOS flavors. Mix and match.
You don’t have to use the cloud part!
Has fully drop-in Word, Excel, & PowerPoint replacements. With the ribbon. OpenOffice/LibreOffice doesn’t.
Compare versions.
$80 for 3yr standalone (Business) or $30/yr (Pro) for family/household use (3PC, 6 mobile) + shared sync (like Office365).
Although I’ve not tried WPS’ pivot function in its spreadsheet app.
@mike808
I seem to recall also an Android version of this.
I started with Lotus 123 back in the 80’s. Excel? Get off my lawn!
Is this a repeat poll? “I live to pivot” seems familiar.
@SSteve You’re confusing it with polling on Republican congresscritter pressers.
Making sure Excel sheets stay mostly functional (while we work on Tableau replacements for the visualizations) is literally my day job, which makes sure I can afford things like an apartment and food and continued VMP, so I do kind of “live to pivot”, or at least “pivot to live”.
Team Index-Match forever, though. So much more powerful than VLookup!
I feel they are “Excel-lent”. Then I’ll see someone do some type of advanced formula, formatting, or something that I didn’t know existed and feel like a beginner all over again.
Never actually touched Excel in my life, but I’m pretty slick with Google Spreadsheets.
Depends on how recently I googled how to <whatever> since I build spreadsheets so rarely.
That would be spreadsheets, tho
Not Excel spreadsheets.
Sorry, M$, but it’s been at least 6 months since I last booted or used win. Perhaps a year.
Guess whose machines aren’t patched?
Guess who doesnt much care at the moment?
(When I do boot, I’ll mess with that. Thru a router that I hope is not compromised and a VPN.)
Excel is such a versatile program. You can do so much with it. Even make art, if you can believe it.
@ACraigL Awesome! I really like several of those. I’m impressed.
@ACraigL I saw those a while back. Amazing. Somewhere or other there is a website with a ton of them.
I chose the place I’m living based on a comparison spreadsheet featuring weighted values for attributes of various cities.
For several years, I acted as scorekeeper for a niche fantasy football league, entering several hundred values a week that cascaded through 10 different sheets, generating per-team, per-owner, per-week, matchup, aggregate, and other stats.
I was once at my at-the-time in-laws’ house to watch a movie, and my father-in-law (head high school football coach) lamented the fact he’d lost his stats spreadsheet in a data corruption incident. That sounded like more fun than the movie, so after a few minutes of talking and taking notes, I spent about two hours making a user-friendly (even color-coded) set of sheets to track all the useful stats for a football team, including per-player and per-game aggregates and comparisons. He said it was far superior to the one he had been using.
I recently created a spreadsheet to determine what TV show to watch next.
I don’t know some of the most esoteric functions of Excel/Google Sheets, but I sure use the more common/semi-common ones a lot. I love data.
Graphpad baby
I’ve always thought a relational database was a better choice for the types of things that people tend to use ‘advanced’ excel for. I guess google sheets now has their neat little hybrid where you can write psudo sql queries against our data sets. Well so long as its less than a couple million things.
I prefer R with ggplot…
Mediocre.