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- cross-posted to:
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If the earliest sports were a way to practice skills needed for hunting or warfare, then making an e-sport out of spreadsheets is going back to the roots of sports. It’s practicing skills needed for your daily job.
Excel: a tool to make an ignored case that the data should be handled in a database
In many cases you’re right. I manage some spreadsheets at work that are relatively small, have little/no automation, and are really just inventory lists with some notes on each item. Could be a CSV.
The other day I couldn’t get my VLOOKUP function to work because the table I was trying to query hadn’t been designated “Table2” but “Table14” because…? Company laptop was dangerously close to putting a small dent in the closest brick wall. Doing this for fun? What?
I think at certain point you’re kind of expected to switch to INDEX & MATCH. I did plenty of Excel macros for work back in the day and at similar point I just switched to doing things in Python.
Xlookup
At that point you should just use a database.
There are environments where Excel is used as glue that does faux-ETL for very unpredictable data which is so small in volume you don’t even consider a database. Also, database would mean MS Access which is just icky so it was used only when necessary.
I just cannot imagine any task you can do in excel that isn’t easier to do with Python/Pandas. The simplest manipulations of an excel sheet pretty much require you to chain an ungodly list of arcane commands that are completely unreadable, and god forbid you need to work with data from several workbooks at the same time…
If you’re reliant on third party add-ons you don’t have a choice. Bloomberg and Eikon are two examples that didn’t have a good Python API back then. Even after I started to use Python more sometimes I had to script opening up Excel itself, forcing formula refresh and exporting that.
You also need to consider that average Joe at a big financial corporation knows Excel so he uses that for everything. People that know Python are more expensive.
Oh, I definitely get that the major appeal of excel is a close to non-existent barrier to entry. I mean, an elementary school kid can learn the basics(1) of using excel within a day. And yes, there are definitely programs out there that have excel as their only interface :/ I was really referring to the case where you have the option to do something “from scratch”, i.e. not relying on previously developed programs in the excel sheet.
(1) I’m aware that you can do complex stuff in excel, the point is that the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, which is a compliment.
Didn’t know they were having an Eve Online event.
The fact that Eve was a sponsor was perfect
Hah sorry, former redditor here, posting on title alone. That is truly wild but also makes perfect sense.
Nice post but I almost get blind reading that.
There is a button to change the color scheme to B&W
I started but then I noticed the scrollbar and realised it’s a lot longer read than I have the attention for right now - to the “read later (yeah right)” pile with you!
FWIW they did a pretty good job covering an Excel competition and actually making it interesting/readable.
Here’s a great video by People Male Games about this!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
