1. Someone who knows how to use two dimensional TABLE()s and vector functions. 2. Someone who can implement an imperative convergence (such as Newton/Raphson or non-plug-in goal seek) 3. Someone who can audit their dependencies and not shit out dozens of unused vars 4. Someone who knows the limit is 10 sheets and 20MB. :)

Visual Basic and shortcuts do not a pro make. VB makes Excel =less= usable, IMHO because now there is an extra dimension to debugging that requires understand each Macro and what it touches: it breaks the entire philosophy of show formulas + auditing.

Yes, this sounds like /r/iamverysmart and /r/gatekeeping, but I'll own that.

Hahaha. Isn’t that the truth.

It’s come to a point that there is only one true workflow for actual business excel work.

1) Back up your source data and then never touch it.

2) Clean source data, make sure you use tables.

3) As soon as possible, separate data from calculation.

All work, will probably be used more than once. So there is never really anything like “scratch work”. So when you open excel make it a point for it to be readable.

I’ve taken To ensuring calculated fields are at the end of the table. With a column header indicating that this is not native to the original data set.

Document your weird steps.

Short answer:

- Corporate inertia + familiarity + fear

Very long answer (rant warning):

- The XLS was used by multiple teams, from multiple sites, from multiple projects. It drove project-level decision making at the VP level. The person who wrote it was a genius, but there was no documentation or commenting, and over the decade after he left, it bloated Akira-style: many grubby hands had perverted it beyond its original use.

[Imagine if someone had written the most beautiful C++ & Boost (or C & GLib) numerical methods code, and then some boner noob came along and inserted their own bubblesort because they didn't understand Boost ... yeah, that kind of perversion.]

But because it was so important, and fed so many OTHER spreadsheets, it remains like a brain tumor pressing up against a spot so vital it could not be removed. I did a partial conversion to JavaScript and a MongoDB, but that was roundly shat upon because the main users weren't programmers and refused.

This is how very large companies work. (Most of the time.)

All the simple formula stuff and basic data handling (using Pandas) would be incredibly easy to learn for pros at Excel.

Excel can now deal with many gigs of data thanks to PowerPivot and the addition of an in-memory database.

"Excel THINKS IT CAN DEAL with many gigs of data thanks to PowerPivot and the addition of an in-memory database."

It's so cute when I hit ctrl-downarrow on a blank sheet and Excel sends me to row 1,048,576. Wishful thinking because if I ever filled 1M cells with functions, well... lololololol... time to use JMP...

What's it called and how is it different than sheets, and when was it introduced? I was using Excel2013 up until I left the project in 2014.

Microsoft is a sleeping giant in BI self-service right now, and the things they've been "quietly" adding (only if you don't follow them) are actually very compelling. I actually run a Windows VM on my MBP just so I can run Power BI.

But yeah, it’s very powerful. It’s very sql like in the way you have to treat actions and data.

In the Power BI desktop app you can connect to standard RDBMS' like MySQL, Postgres, or SQL Server and basically it works like Tableau. The really interesting part is you can export these data sources and hook them into Excel (local or via the cloud).

> It’s very sql like

It should be, this is essentially using Excel as an GUI on top of technology designed to run an analytics RDBMS. It actually is an entirely separate interface from Excel and feels bolted on after-the-fact.

Here's an example of the PowerPivot Excel add-on screens:

https://i2.wp.com/www.kasperonbi.com/wp-content/uploads/2010... https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NDO6MpT70PM/maxresdefault.jpg

http://www.decisionmodels.com/calcsecrets.htm

Straight from the 90s (which is cool, functionally excel hasn’t really evolved since)!

Steal money from poor people? No problem, just a small fine. Steal money from rich people? Off to jail you go. I'm not saying that what Martin Shkreli did was right, i.e. he did not go to jail for raising the prices on medicine (for which he had good reasons). He went to jail for lying to investors in a sort of Ponzi scheme using new investments to pay off old debts.

The price hike was rent seeking, not stealing, it didn’t depend on any lies, and it was legal. Plus, the goal was to get the money from insurance companies, not from patients. The investment fraud required lying, it was stealing, and it was illegal.

The drug price hike may have been justified with lies, I’m not claiming there weren’t any lies, but buying the rights, hiking the price, and getting the money didn’t require any lying, and it was done in full public view.

He is a seriously misunderstood figure. Have watched his YouTube videos too, not just the investment class but also his working sessions. Sure his excel skills are legendary.

But I learned a lot from him about skills, learning and mastery. Merely watching him work not only motivated me. But gave me tremendous perspective on time, its utility to life and how skills and knowledge need to work in general.

This guy has legendary skills in investing world. But apart from that he was always reading a book or two. He was doing organic chemistry, chess, playing guitar, learning programming and interests in wide variety of topics in economics.

He was first genuine example of 10k hour practice I have watched live in practice.

You also get to look into the mind of this guy, and see what's at the core of it, and you see most is basically 'knowledge and practice'.

No, he doesn’t. He seems clever, but is clearly a sociopath. He has very few winners on his books, all of which were high-vol high-beta bets in a bull market, and almost wiped out his fund in a short period of time. There are so many better investing role models than Shkreli.

There was no way this guy could have survived, in fact Martin should have spent time learning a little politics too.

If you have the kind of skills, motivated enough, have ability to take initiatives and overall quality of human enterprise that this guy has you are bound to attract envy, spite and more importantly people just want to see the end of you for being a live anti thesis to their lives.

I have a feeling that people won't relax until they see Elon Musk meeting the same fate too.

No way. I don't know anyone that thinks that. What is your basis for thinking that?

And BTW, he's not that good at excel either.

And his ethics...

He is fast typing but I've seen spreadsheet jockeys do a lot more work much faster. They know all the shortcuts. They know all the obscure functions.

Real missed opportunity.

Or maybe he did make an error, but didn’t want to admit it to avoid damaging his “l33t excel skillz” rep. That would be the stuff of legend.

There's no reason to couch your comment like this. He's not a heartless douchebag, and the claims of him causing medicine shortages were greatly exaggerated.

You mean the guy who wrote this? Clearly, he's a diamond in the rough /s.

'Then a letter from Mr. Shkreli came to his home, addressed to his wife.

“Your husband has stolen $1.6 million from me,” it read.

“Your pathetic excuse of a husband,” the letter added, “needs to get a real job that does not depend on fraud to succeed.”

“I hope to see you and your four children homeless,” the letter said. “I will do whatever I can to assure this. Your husband’s arrogance is infuriating, and making an enemy out of me is a mistake.”'

-NYTimes, 18 July 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/business/dealbook/former-...

Why not just say X?

And before anybody downvotes me- please inform yourself- not a single person had to pay a penny more than what they had to pay before the price increase, except the insurance firms.

Here’s vanity fair, with their profile on him.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/martin-shkreli-pharm...

He went to jail for securities fraud. If he is as smart as he and others say he is, then his culpability is absolute.

I can be sympathetic, but not willfully blind to actual fault.

There's no world in which adding a middleman for a regular and ongoing service lowers the overall cost of that service.

HN is the only place I find people defending that guy. I suspect it's because this forum is full of douchebags who identify with him.

Generalizing people or groups of people over shallow associations says more about the commenter than those commented on.

Here's a fun question for you as an HN'er: what was the name of Shkreli's pharmaceutical company?

Shkreli was one of many finance types who have fully drunk the koolaid. He is not alone, and the others too would be prosecuted if people had the time and awareness to be incensed with the culture.

In his defense, shkrelli didn’t know he was a tool. On the one hand singing praises of the free market and on the other taking advantage of every loophole someone could find.

I mean the argument that “no body has to pay a dime more.” Is so patently ludicrous for someone who works in finance, that it can only be called disingenuous.

The difference between HN and New York is that finance thinks it’s ok. HN was founded by people/culture who saw Wall Street as everything they didn’t want to be. (And now a sad reminder of how money changes perception)

BTW, I could similarly make ridiculous statements about technologists or scientists.

I’ve worked number of places and can’t think of a single person out of hundreds that would think this behavior is OK.

The defense on this issue is pretty clear cut, raising the price is not illegal. If there is something illegal, then it should be in a regulation somewhere.

If he is doing something the market is open to, then it’s not a problem and he is doing a service by forcing the market or regulators to respond.

Maybe he was a douche about it, but that’s a stylistic issue, not a practical one.

He did get dinged for securities fraud, not price gouging as I recall.

No. Starts with T. Turing Pharmaceuticals.

That firm later sued him.

Turing was his second pharma firm. Made soon after his ouster/leaving.