Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by enitihas on Friday December 20, 2019 @05:10PM
(#21847824)
This is the best Excel tutorial I have ever found. Even if you don't remember much about Excel, the following from this video allows me to basically get started with any data very quickly:
1. Ctrl A : Select all the data
2. Insert table : This will allow you to be able to filter or sort on any column, provide a row for stats if you want, and will auto format and color the table. You can also choose to go to a pivot table easily from here.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by Analemma_ on Friday December 20, 2019 @05:34PM
(#21847969)
Those two suggestions, plus “always work in R1C1 mode”, are enough to supercharge most inexperienced users of Excel. If you take nothing else away from Joel’s video, get those three.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by e12e on Friday December 20, 2019 @06:29PM
(#21848312)
Hm, so that's using integers for rows and columns, rather than integer/letter (a1 vs r1c1). Is there a way to do indirect/computed references? Because if not, I'm not sure I see how it's much better (saner/easier maybe..)? What's the elevator pitch for r1c1?
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by iudqnolq on Sunday December 22, 2019 @02:43PM
(#21859177)
In one sentence: Excel seems magic because when you copy and paste cells the references change to still work, but you can understand in less than a minute exactly how and why that happens if you learn R1C1.
In two more sentences: Specifically if you're in cell A1 and you enter =B1 what is actually stored is =RC[1] (same row, one column more relative to this cell). So if you copy that into cell H50 it will still be RC[1] and now evaluate to I50.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by vermilingua on Friday December 20, 2019 @08:52PM
(#21849044)
Did anyone archive the Martin Shkreli video where he shows his Excel workflow? Think what you will of the guy, but that was one of the most info-dense videos I've seen, and it's a shame that YT saw fit to remove it.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by 1337biz on Friday December 20, 2019 @09:04PM
(#21849090)
His tutorials were amongst the best I have seen on financial analysis. Problematic character but genius level skills and talents that he was willing to share.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by getlawgdon on Saturday December 21, 2019 @07:21AM
(#21850933)
Why do you say this? I'm close to people in finance and they derided the videos and said they were the equivalent of showing off how fast he could parse filings into Excel when real pro have scads of solutions that automate it at scale. The view is that he's a criminal with a folk hero reputation for people who were dazzled by his attitude and his facility with Excel.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by B1FF_PSUVM on Saturday December 21, 2019 @04:41PM
(#21853502)
> I'm close to people in finance and they derided the videos
Living among the gentry with good private performers is fine, but the peasants have to amuse themselves with the traveling minstrels in the fair ... their technique may not be the best.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by AdamGibbins on Saturday December 21, 2019 @03:14PM
(#21853124)
Doesn't look to be the one, its analysing eBay in Excel, he navigates Excel well but its in no way a tutorial, there's no description to how he's doing anything. Nor is it particularly advanced.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by phn on Friday December 20, 2019 @06:50PM
(#21848438)
The video is amazing if you're a coder and might need to use excel at some point (access columns by name?! sign me up!).
However, what I love about excel is to see what it enables people without formal programming training to do with data, and using functional programming on top of that!
Is there any tool that comes even close in terms of power, accessibility and ubiquity? What would such a tool even look like?
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by Enginerrrd on Friday December 20, 2019 @08:20PM
(#21848906)
I'd love to see excel running python under the hood with easy integrations to numpy and matplotlib and all that. There actually are a couple such projects I've been meaning to check out.
In essence, I've spent a lot of my career modeling things in excel. For quick, easily shareable prototypes(to pseudo-technical people), excel is great. But add any real complexity and I rapidly find myself using some UGLY hacks to get the functionality that would be trivial if I could just iterate over the data more explicitly. If I could just click a cell and set the output equal to a python function return value, man would that be a tool. THE tool even. I don't really want to learn VBA or something clunky and not very useful outside of that niche context. I already keep too many programming languages in my head between python, c++, FORTRAN, and some bash scripts.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by jrumbut on Friday December 20, 2019 @08:11PM
(#21848867)
I wish the Excel developers would bring some of the UI in line with other apps.
The #1 thing here is the lack of smooth scrolling, scrolling by row actually gives me motion sickness whenever I use Excel (and that's not a problem I have with anything else I use).
If anyone from MS is reading this, this seems like such a tiny change but it would really make a lot of people happy. In the meantime, could anyone recommend a smooth scrolling spreadsheet program? I haven't used the alternatives too much.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by DonHopkins on Friday December 20, 2019 @08:19PM
(#21848902)
It would be nice if the mouse wheel clutch (i.e. Logitech Master 3) controlled that, so you could feel each row snap by individually when you wanted to, or toggle the clutch button or spin the wheel fast to scroll smoothly.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by clausok on Saturday December 21, 2019 @01:05AM
(#21849892)
Maybe not the same thing, but Excel's row scrolling with the arrow keys was driving me nuts until I discovered this setting: Options -> Advanced -> Display -> 'Disable hardware graphics acceleration'. After I checked that box to disable it, scrolling was much better.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by clausok on Saturday December 21, 2019 @01:46AM
(#21850010)
The worst Excel user I've ever seen was my brother. At film school he was producing a student film. He did the budget in Excel. One day I came home from work and he had some questions waiting for me. Looking through his sheet, I noticed that his summation row at the bottom had hard-coded values rather than the =SUM(...) formulas I was expecting. Thinking he had inadvertently done a 'copy -> paste values', I said, "Look, you killed your formulas here." He asked, "What are formulas?". Turns out, he had been using a calculator to tally up all the columns and was typing the total into the cell at the bottom.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by heavenlyblue on Saturday December 21, 2019 @05:14AM
(#21850619)
It may not be relates to your brother, but I often find that the smarter people consider themselves to be, the more often they never open the manual for the tools they are using.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by juped on Friday December 20, 2019 @05:57PM
(#21848120)
The fact that the GUI button to make a table is called "Format as Table" and placed next to purely visual formatting options (and makes you pick a color scheme!) has been the roadblock for countless Excel users graduating to power users, I imagine.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by unexaminedlife on Friday December 20, 2019 @08:45PM
(#21849021)
I noticed that too. But then I thought: What if, before he started his presentation, he told the audience to save questions for after the presentation.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by enitihas on Friday December 20, 2019 @06:16PM
(#21848241)
Excel allows you to do interactive analysis though, which SQL simply comes no where near close. For example, after creating an Excel table, you add a filter, see the changed data. You can Ctrl-Z for undo. Add another filter and see changed data instantaneously, undo/redo, sort on many columns, create derived columns and sort on those, and all of this interactively.
Also, excel supports far more mathematical functions.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by nwallin on Friday December 20, 2019 @10:10PM
(#21849347)
No offense, but you sounds like someone who doesn't 'get' SQL.
I'm reasonable at Excel. I've been using it in anger for close to 20 years. My most serious dressing down I've every received at work was related to a column of incorrect data in Excel. (I built a spreadsheet based on incorrect data. Management expected me to build correct spreadsheets from incorrect data.) I'm reasonable at SQL. I've been using it casually for 10 years. My cutoff at this point is that I'll use Excel if I expect my analysis to take less than five minutes. I'll use pandas or SQL for anything more complicated than that, because it's that much more powerful.
Excel stops scaling at about a million rows. SQL stops scaling when your indices no longer fit in RAM.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by enitihas on Saturday December 21, 2019 @02:48AM
(#21850221)
I have written a lot of SQL over the years, and consider myself to be reasonably well versed with SQL and relational databases. SQL doesn't allow you to act on your data while seeing it. The interaction modes are totally different.
In SQL:
Type query -> See some results -> Repeat
Excel:
Everything in front of your eyes. You are manipulating live data. That is not something you do in SQL. (SQL doesn't mean much though, as it is a standard and not a tool. Maybe you had some specific SQL based tooling in mind)
> Excel stops scaling at about a million rows.
A large amount of real world data has less than a million rows. Every tool will stop at some point. At that point the benefits of Excel fade away, even if it could handle the data, as 1M rows are too large for our brain to make a sense of live.
>My cutoff at this point is that I'll use Excel if I expect my analysis to take less than five minutes
A lot of real world analysis takes 5 minutes.
Of course, Excel is not perfect, and I too will never use Excel for anything that has to be done repeatedly (pandas or similar solutions are perfect here), but for quick and dirty data exploration, Excel is very good.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by liamwestray on Friday December 20, 2019 @10:56PM
(#21849498)
Excel is hands down the best financial analysis and modeling tool ever made. SQL is not really comparable here.
Any attempt to use it as a database or for data analysis should be met with extreme caution. As soon as someone suggests a VB macro for anything they should be shot. Excel is not the right tool for those kids of jobs.
Python and R have just destroyed excel for data analysis and statistics (and most visualizations now) and are free. You can’t go back once getting used to that flexibility.
Jupyter Notebooks reproducibility and traceability put the nail in the coffin for excel as a data analysis tool.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by ALittleLight on Friday December 20, 2019 @06:41PM
(#21848381)
Earlier today I was looking at data from two different sources about the same thing. I wanted to see how similar the reports were. I grepped my logs, got columns of data, copied and pasted into Excel, created a line chart, copied and pasted the line chart into an email to a colleague. How would SQL let me do the same thing? With Excel this was probably less than a minute end to end. Would SQL be as fast? Keeping in mind that I wouldn't have a database for any of the data I was looking at.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by hoistbypetard on Friday December 20, 2019 @07:16PM
(#21848598)
Concur. For whacking out a quick analysis like that, it's hard to beat a spreadsheet. (I do like Excel, but no longer think it's all that far ahead of LibreOffice for most things I tend to use it for.)
It's also good for creating what amounts to a quick interactive form.
But I've lost count of how many times I've run across a spreadsheet being misused as a shitty, ad-hoc database where it'd be less work (and less error-prone) to just use sqlite (or even postgres, honestly), so I have some empathy for GP's perspective.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by DonHopkins on Friday December 20, 2019 @08:02PM
(#21848821)
Why "learn SQL instead" and not "learn both"?
SQL is a language. Excel (and Google Sheets) is a tool (that also supports SQL, the language). Why wouldn't you want a sleek Excel-like user interface to SQL data and queries?
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by Nullabillity on Friday December 20, 2019 @08:28PM
(#21848949)
Because Excel's flexibility encourages bad behaviour that will come back to bite you.
Input data should be separate from your calculations, and you should never deal with single cells in your results (fix your formula or input data instead).
Yes, Excel actually has a mode that supports that workflow: the Unified Get & Transform Experience[0] (just rolls off the tongue, right?). And it's basically drag-and-drop Pandas.
But I've only ever seen one person use it (after repeatedly bugging him about how we will need to repeat this analysis and how surely there must be a better way). And even then it's very easy to screw up and introduce bugs whenever the input data is replaced. Wanted to make a graph and only included the populated data region? Referred to the aggregation row somewhere in some stats sheet? Too bad!
Also, Colin's post ends up recommending SQL Workbench/J, which seems to be much closer to MySQL Workbench than Excel.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by Exuma on Friday December 20, 2019 @09:31PM
(#21849211)
Ah yes, the old "please learn this entirely different thing even though it completely doent fit your use case, just because I'm good at it and makes me feel better about myself to make blanket suggestions that validate my skill"
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by mobjack on Friday December 20, 2019 @08:38PM
(#21848985)
Try copying a pivot table in SQL.
A lot of simple functions in Excel are incredibly complex in SQL. You might technically can pull most off put then you end up with a lot of ugly SQL.
Also each time you make a change with SQL, you have to query the database again which can be slow and inefficient.
I use both tools together, exporting SQL results and opening in Excel for further clean up. That way you can take advantage of the strengths of each one.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by kristianp on Saturday December 21, 2019 @11:15PM
(#21855148)
A Pivot table can be replicated using GROUP BY in sql. Not too hard, but not beginner-level sql either. Not just a few clicks either, it takes some code.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by slowhand09 on Saturday December 21, 2019 @11:56AM
(#21852107)
As a DB engineer/developer/architect/modeler... SQL is great. But Excel is great also. Its awesome to show a usr how to pull what they need from the database to populate a spreadsheet, and vice versa. We have multiple tools for a reason. And the Swiss Army knife is a perfect example of a non-optimal implementation.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by hoistbypetard on Friday December 20, 2019 @07:24PM
(#21848632)
If you're accustomed to windows/office you can just set up a CSV as an ODBC data source and use access.
Otherwise [csvkit](https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) gives a pretty good command line interface to make sql queries against a CSV or dump the CSV into a database so you can use any standard database tool to query.
Re:You Suck at Excel (2015) [video]
by andyreed on Saturday December 21, 2019 @03:59AM
(#21850414)
I don’t get it, he seems to use his mouse to navigate. Day 1 in finance you remove the mouse. Video was boring/slow for such a drastic title. Should read “snarky guy slowly uses different functions in excel and is proud of himself”. I got my hopes up for nothing :/.
1. Ctrl A : Select all the data
2. Insert table : This will allow you to be able to filter or sort on any column, provide a row for stats if you want, and will auto format and color the table. You can also choose to go to a pivot table easily from here.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...
Ed: ok, apparently the video starts with r1c1 - so I guess I've found my elevator pitch...
In two more sentences: Specifically if you're in cell A1 and you enter =B1 what is actually stored is =RC[1] (same row, one column more relative to this cell). So if you copy that into cell H50 it will still be RC[1] and now evaluate to I50.
A1 users, please explain what the expression "$A$1 - A1" means in twenty-five words or less.
Living among the gentry with good private performers is fine, but the peasants have to amuse themselves with the traveling minstrels in the fair ... their technique may not be the best.
However, what I love about excel is to see what it enables people without formal programming training to do with data, and using functional programming on top of that!
Is there any tool that comes even close in terms of power, accessibility and ubiquity? What would such a tool even look like?
In essence, I've spent a lot of my career modeling things in excel. For quick, easily shareable prototypes(to pseudo-technical people), excel is great. But add any real complexity and I rapidly find myself using some UGLY hacks to get the functionality that would be trivial if I could just iterate over the data more explicitly. If I could just click a cell and set the output equal to a python function return value, man would that be a tool. THE tool even. I don't really want to learn VBA or something clunky and not very useful outside of that niche context. I already keep too many programming languages in my head between python, c++, FORTRAN, and some bash scripts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fASInVKShnM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poyf3Cnb-MQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SysRS3lZm98&feature=emb_logo
The #1 thing here is the lack of smooth scrolling, scrolling by row actually gives me motion sickness whenever I use Excel (and that's not a problem I have with anything else I use).
You can find a legion of people begging for at least a setting to end snapping to rows here: https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-...
If anyone from MS is reading this, this seems like such a tiny change but it would really make a lot of people happy. In the meantime, could anyone recommend a smooth scrolling spreadsheet program? I haven't used the alternatives too much.
I hate how Excel breaks the concept of Alt-Tab.
I hate how Excel breaks your clipboard on any action.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/top-10...
https://youtu.be/1SNxaJlicEU?t=216
"It's going take me a hell of a lot longer to code that than it took him/her to show me it working in Excel...."
Also, excel supports far more mathematical functions.
I'm reasonable at Excel. I've been using it in anger for close to 20 years. My most serious dressing down I've every received at work was related to a column of incorrect data in Excel. (I built a spreadsheet based on incorrect data. Management expected me to build correct spreadsheets from incorrect data.) I'm reasonable at SQL. I've been using it casually for 10 years. My cutoff at this point is that I'll use Excel if I expect my analysis to take less than five minutes. I'll use pandas or SQL for anything more complicated than that, because it's that much more powerful.
Excel stops scaling at about a million rows. SQL stops scaling when your indices no longer fit in RAM.
In SQL: Type query -> See some results -> Repeat
Excel: Everything in front of your eyes. You are manipulating live data. That is not something you do in SQL. (SQL doesn't mean much though, as it is a standard and not a tool. Maybe you had some specific SQL based tooling in mind)
> Excel stops scaling at about a million rows.
A large amount of real world data has less than a million rows. Every tool will stop at some point. At that point the benefits of Excel fade away, even if it could handle the data, as 1M rows are too large for our brain to make a sense of live.
>My cutoff at this point is that I'll use Excel if I expect my analysis to take less than five minutes
A lot of real world analysis takes 5 minutes.
Of course, Excel is not perfect, and I too will never use Excel for anything that has to be done repeatedly (pandas or similar solutions are perfect here), but for quick and dirty data exploration, Excel is very good.
Any attempt to use it as a database or for data analysis should be met with extreme caution. As soon as someone suggests a VB macro for anything they should be shot. Excel is not the right tool for those kids of jobs.
Python and R have just destroyed excel for data analysis and statistics (and most visualizations now) and are free. You can’t go back once getting used to that flexibility.
Jupyter Notebooks reproducibility and traceability put the nail in the coffin for excel as a data analysis tool.
Add a WHERE.
> You can Ctrl-Z for undo.
Drop the WHERE. Hell, ctrl+z will work fine here too!
> sort on many columns
ORDER BY supports multiple columns too.
> create derived columns and sort on those
You can have arbitrary expressions in your SELECT clause.
> and all of this interactively.
Destructively*.
And SQL makes it clear exactly what you've done to the source data in order to get there.
> Also, excel supports far more mathematical functions.
Surely that's what extensions are for!
It's also good for creating what amounts to a quick interactive form.
But I've lost count of how many times I've run across a spreadsheet being misused as a shitty, ad-hoc database where it'd be less work (and less error-prone) to just use sqlite (or even postgres, honestly), so I have some empathy for GP's perspective.
SQL is a language. Excel (and Google Sheets) is a tool (that also supports SQL, the language). Why wouldn't you want a sleek Excel-like user interface to SQL data and queries?
https://www.lifewire.com/excel-front-end-to-sql-server-24953...
https://www.benlcollins.com/spreadsheets/google-sheets-query...
And no I don't mean like the steaming piece of shit called MySQLWorkbench (or PHPMyAdmin for that matter).
https://devrant.com/rants/1342177/mysql-workbench-user-frien...
http://www.colinpistell.com/tutorial/mysql-workbench/
Input data should be separate from your calculations, and you should never deal with single cells in your results (fix your formula or input data instead).
Yes, Excel actually has a mode that supports that workflow: the Unified Get & Transform Experience[0] (just rolls off the tongue, right?). And it's basically drag-and-drop Pandas.
But I've only ever seen one person use it (after repeatedly bugging him about how we will need to repeat this analysis and how surely there must be a better way). And even then it's very easy to screw up and introduce bugs whenever the input data is replaced. Wanted to make a graph and only included the populated data region? Referred to the aggregation row somewhere in some stats sheet? Too bad!
Also, Colin's post ends up recommending SQL Workbench/J, which seems to be much closer to MySQL Workbench than Excel.
[0]: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/unified-get-transfo...
A lot of simple functions in Excel are incredibly complex in SQL. You might technically can pull most off put then you end up with a lot of ugly SQL.
Also each time you make a change with SQL, you have to query the database again which can be slow and inefficient.
I use both tools together, exporting SQL results and opening in Excel for further clean up. That way you can take advantage of the strengths of each one.
https://modern-sql.com/use-case/pivot
Absolutely, it's amazing the things you can do in Access!
Otherwise [csvkit](https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) gives a pretty good command line interface to make sql queries against a CSV or dump the CSV into a database so you can use any standard database tool to query.