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St Evan Echoes posted:excel is actually really good when used as intended but lol that never happens It's good for small tables of data and simple charts, anything else and it's just the best of a bad lot
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Aug 19, 2015 16:27
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by best you mean easiest for non-technical women and children
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Aug 19, 2015 16:33
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fart simpson posted:by best you mean easiest for non-technical women and children lol do you even pivot table
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Aug 19, 2015 16:37
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there was a woman in our office in los angeles that was an excel magician. she did things i never knew were possible
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Aug 19, 2015 16:38
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I worked a job doing some audio for one of the metroid primes. Whenever the japanese production team would send us instructions it would always be in the form of an excel spreadsheet. The best one I ever got was a document about how to script the music transitions. Rather than just sending me a chart with room names on the columns transition points on the rows and instructions in the middle of the matrix, they shrunk the cells down to their smallest size and then changed their background color to draw a map of the levels, they then left instructions for the music on little comment flags on the cells.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:49
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fart simpson posted:there was a woman in our office in los angeles that was an excel magician. she did things i never knew were possible i had an entire class a year or two ago that was just "crazy poo poo you can do with excel that your boss will probably want you to do"
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Aug 19, 2015 16:53
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excel is really good and if you're having issues you might be trying to use it in a retarded way it falls apart when you try to use it as a large db, but then again you should really be using it as a db front end on top of something proper i am curious though, what are specific gripes you guys have with it?
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Aug 19, 2015 17:03
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surebet posted:excel is really good and if you're having issues you might be trying to use it in a retarded way such as Microsoft Access for example
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Aug 19, 2015 17:04
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Luigi Thirty posted:such as Microsoft Access for example (tm)
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Aug 19, 2015 17:10
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Luigi Thirty posted:such as Microsoft Access for example *checks thread title* yepe
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Aug 19, 2015 17:16
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Excel doesn't follow the same behavior of other Office products. You have to deliberately open another instance of the program if you want to view two spreadsheets side by side.
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Aug 19, 2015 18:28
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I gave a conference talk on why excel is bad* * To use as a programming language
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Aug 19, 2015 18:42
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well yeah use vba
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Aug 19, 2015 18:42
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hobbesmaster posted:well yeah use vba Literally what I argued. I mean I also said to try looking at other langs like pythons and R too, but in the meantime for the love of god please stop implementing your code in excel. It was a conference for phd students from all disciplines and so I figured that that'd be a really approachable introduction to a topic in computer science. I had quotes, studies, and multi-million-dollar-mistake cade studies.
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Aug 19, 2015 18:50
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I'd listen to that talk
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Aug 19, 2015 19:17
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Phone posted:Excel doesn't follow the same behavior of other Office products. You have to deliberately open another instance of the program if you want to view two spreadsheets side by side.  view > window > new window (if you want multiple views of the same file) view > window > arrange all (you get a couple ways to arrange everything open within that instance of excel) or yeah, open multiple instances of excel works too
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Aug 19, 2015 19:37
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gonadic io posted:Literally what I argued. I mean I also said to try looking at other langs like pythons and R too, but in the meantime for the love of god please stop implementing your code in excel. nesting formulas more than a few deep is just bad juju, especially if you have some of the more complex or conditional filled functions in there if you have any kind of decent excel function knowledge you might as well make the jump into vba, most of the excel functions are 1:1 in vba with a slightly different format, maybe you also have the huge advantage of basically not have to work in minified code all the time, reading nested stuff is much easier vertical and tabbed versus as a single line of continuous spaghetti logic especially when you're looking someone else's code plus you get a nice extended set of tools to work with vba is poo poo for many reasons but if you're going to spend a while excel'ing stuff you really want to get into vba VikingofRock posted:I'd listen to that talk seriously post your deck if you still have it (or a video if it exists) Luigi Thirty posted:such as Microsoft Access for example i just spent a month monkey wrenching a legacy foxbase 2.0 back-end to hook it up with excel and web stuff, i would've loved an access db instead  client didn't want to move forward to something made in this millennium, hell, the 1990s
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Aug 19, 2015 19:57
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sorry, best i can do is my abstract:quote:As computers become more and more central to our lives, the problems that can be caused by buggy or incorrect software grow also. There have been a number of high-profile incidents involving fatalities including problems with brake control systems in cars, flight control system in planes and even the navigation software in missiles. This will likely only get worse in the future - implanted blood sugar monitors for diabetics and electronic pacemakers could cause major problems if they acted incorrectly. The reasons why software errors occur are complex and many. the paper talking about the mistake that Reinhart and Rogoff made is http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_301-350/WP322.pdf
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Aug 19, 2015 20:26
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gonadic io posted:sorry, best i can do is my abstract: an actual valid & widespread issue indeed personally i use named ranges a lot (and extend that to a dynamic named range when i'm not working with static data) and i encourage my colleagues to do the same, it takes out a lot of addressing fuckery once you get the hang of it also making calls over odbc to a proper db helps a ton when you're working on a larger data set, but yeah i see people jamming in thousands and thousands of lines of records in an excel sheet because they're too  to learn something other than excel and that's a huge freakin' issue (both for accuracy & performance)
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Aug 19, 2015 20:44
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my first introduction to programming was googling how to overcome excel's limit of 7 levels of recursion e: other than flowchart logic stuff as a kid
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Aug 19, 2015 20:51
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Soricidus posted:i've used things written with it. they were better than web apps, and have consequently been replaced with web apps as part of the race to the javascripted bottom Shaggar posted:rcp is what eclipse is written in. its also what the sametime client is written in. its aslo technically what lotus notes is written in, but the reality is that theres also a notes 7 emulation layer running on top of rcp in that case so its not rcps fault notes is bad. rcp is kind of dumb though and is trapped in java 1.4 cool, so outdated but not terrible. ill be on a team maintaining a spring backend and rpc frontend
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Aug 19, 2015 20:59
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how does this happen? copy pasted from word into ??? (those '<' and '>' have been escaped as < and > somehow)
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Aug 19, 2015 21:26
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gonadic io posted:my first introduction to programming was googling how to overcome excel's limit of 7 levels of recursion it goes up to 64 for ifs now, because microsoft is an enabler of bad things it's actually p common for me to have to pull a formula from a sheet, beautify it and then try to figure out just what the poo poo the guy was trying to do with 20 levels of recursive conditionals when i audit existing sheets i understand the need to not have a pile of intermediary cells from data to result because that looks like amateur hour, but past a couple layers you really want to just say gently caress it & make a custom function
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Aug 19, 2015 21:29
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pointsofdata posted:how does this happen? most of the time it's an encoding issue, word uses something else than utf-8 by default 99% of the time so depending on how you move content around you might conflict, escape or scramble stuff if you throw it in a utf-8 html doc if your editor doesn't do the conversion on the fly
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Aug 19, 2015 21:35
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surebet posted:most of the time it's an encoding issue, word uses something else than utf-8 by default 99% of the time so depending on how you move content around you might conflict, escape or scramble stuff if you throw it in a utf-8 html doc if your editor doesn't do the conversion on the fly you'd think that someone would have checked it before they made the website live though
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Aug 19, 2015 21:42
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Valeyard posted:cool, so outdated but not terrible. ill be on a team maintaining a spring backend and rpc frontend that's weird as hell but w/e. asp.net backend wpf frontend would be far more sane.
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Aug 19, 2015 21:48
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surebet posted:it goes up to 64 for ifs now, because microsoft is an enabler of bad things you're a spreadsheet auditor? they came up in my talk, basically talking about how large finance firms consistently lose huge amounts of money because of their sheets. even had a quote by a compliance or regulation or something guy about how he'd literally never seen a correct large spreadsheet gonadic io fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Aug 19, 2015 |
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Aug 19, 2015 21:52
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Zaxxon posted:I worked a job doing some audio for one of the metroid primes. Whenever the japanese production team would send us instructions it would always be in the form of an excel spreadsheet. The best one I ever got was a document about how to script the music transitions. Rather than just sending me a chart with room names on the columns transition points on the rows and instructions in the middle of the matrix, they shrunk the cells down to their smallest size and then changed their background color to draw a map of the levels, they then left instructions for the music on little comment flags on the cells. this fell through the cracks but its actually kinda cool
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Aug 19, 2015 22:01
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gonadic io posted:you're a spreadsheet auditor? they came up in my talk, basically talking about how large finance firms consistently lose huge amounts of money because of their sheets. even had a quote by a compliance or regulation or something guy about how he'd literally never seen a correct large spreadsheet this is completely true. The excitingly named European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group has a list of some public ones
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Aug 19, 2015 22:02
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i wish i'd had that for my talk
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Aug 19, 2015 22:32
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speaking of spreadsheets, it reminds me of this dumb thing I made so I could unit test my calculations against a spreadsheet, for a project where I was implementing analysis on observation data. https://bitbucket.org/MalucoMarinero/cellacceptance turns out the algorithms they gave me were wrong and they're having real trouble replicating old results they got from fortran and compiled code. science!
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Aug 19, 2015 23:59
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gonadic io posted:you're a spreadsheet auditor? they came up in my talk, basically talking about how large finance firms consistently lose huge amounts of money because of their sheets. even had a quote by a compliance or regulation or something guy about how he'd literally never seen a correct large spreadsheet not specifically, when i'm in audit mode my main concerns are accounting and process related, but that does spill over into spreadsheets a whole lot and i'll usually take the first crack at understanding what kind of complete madness manages the information infrastructure of a place might as well seriouspost about a couple things single-user self-designed sheets tend to be more or less ok, although they vary wildly in terms of code and usage efficiency. usually a person will make a thing because [use case], check it once or twice and unless it grows significantly larger or more complex, they tend to work just as well down the line. problem is there's a lot of user dependence on excel being smart about appending data. pivot tables used to keep you on your feet about escaped cells, but the (admittedly neat) 2007+ tables reinforced user expectations wrt excel just knowing what you're doing. if you're at the last line of those tables and you tab to a new line or add content directly below it excel should just extend the table to it. it would be an interesting alternative to dynamic ranges, but addressing to specific cells in a table is hit or miss, especially if you start moving stuff around with filters. they work well if you intend on working on the entire data set all the time though. same goes with addressing and formulas, if your formula targets A1:A8 and you insert a line/cell anywhere except above A1 or below A8 the formula will see what you did and change the range to A1:A9 automatically people who learned to rely on all that (ie a lot of managers who have a functional knowledge of excel but don't have the training or experience to know about the poo poo ton of ways data can escape ranges) will start to have more and more data corruption as time passes and more data goes in because of loving course those people don't add checksums and other controls and yeah i've seen quite a few sheets that should be simple enough (like a p/l statement) go hilariously wrong you can fix most issues with a bit of periodic qa and auditing, teaching people to build in checksums and generally show people how to move their data to more efficient stores and use odbc multi-user single designer sheets are a total crapshoot, but they tend to go really bad, really fast especially if you allow concurrent editing. that later part works okay-ish if your users are only adding data in, not editing it, if you expect a bunch of users to edit data at the same time and you decide to run that on an excel infrastructure you're being incredibly negligent at least when you're at that stage it kinda implies there's someone who knows enough about excel to build the drat thing (and that should know better), and problems with data integrity go exponential if you go the full retard route of having users self-host files on their machines & make inter file calls worst i've seen was a company with offices in a dozen locations running a home grown erp system on excel. the home office was hosting most of the files on a bunch of end user computers and of course out of the hundreds of files a decent amount were calling data from one another. at some point the well-meaning manager who maintained everything got tired of the circular references errors that crept up more and more so they added a bunch of iferror() escapes and once that was in play entire sets of data were blacked out, which led to stuff like the automatic order system to blindly requisition 6 figures worth of supplies before someone red flagged it (because poo poo couldn't physically fit in the warehouse), at which point we were called in for a complete overhaul of their internal controls, processes & erp backend multi-user multi designer sheets are the spawn of satan and i've seen it work exactly once, because every single participant had high level knowledge of everything, were versioning nazis and ran everything on a dedicated box with the large data stores in proper dbs. otherwise it's a complete clusterfuck, full stop. bottom line is that spreadsheets are awesome but the training us accounting/finance/management types receive from the first college class onwards is 100% concerned with how to manipulate data, never about making sure the data has integrity. I had to fight day in day out in college my my teachers because i was the idiot hellfucker that always used vba & access/sql/whatever and i can count on one hand the number of teachers & students who even knew about the developer menu in excel. worse, in the end it didn't even really matter because for most classes the department policy was literally that only the output data was graded, not how you got it. also, training pretty much stops at the level of vlookups, after that it shifts towards running financial/management simulations with excel as a tool. a frankly uncomfortable amount of people out there have access to programming-like tools but are never encouraged to explore the entire feature set and are never looped in to programming best practices. stuff like source controlling excel files is never done, even though with a bit of finagling you can git diff them. speaking of git, if your company uses a thing like the canadian sr&ed tax credit program you really, really want to show your accountant how to use git so he'll be able to navigate your git commit histories tl;dr everything's broken because your company has a department staffed with pseudo developers who no one thought relevant to teach codding 101. good news, you can help fix it.
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Aug 20, 2015 00:12
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oh, and google sheets? terrible.
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Aug 20, 2015 00:13
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pointsofdata posted:this is completely true. The excitingly named European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group has a list of some public ones neat, this is going to be my public transit reading for the foreseeable future
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Aug 20, 2015 00:14
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there is a wide world of spreadsheets that i'm mildly intrigued by
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Aug 20, 2015 00:16
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Zaxxon posted:I worked a job doing some audio for one of the metroid primes. Whenever the japanese production team would send us instructions it would always be in the form of an excel spreadsheet. The best one I ever got was a document about how to script the music transitions. Rather than just sending me a chart with room names on the columns transition points on the rows and instructions in the middle of the matrix, they shrunk the cells down to their smallest size and then changed their background color to draw a map of the levels, they then left instructions for the music on little comment flags on the cells. Japan teaches people that Execl is a drawing tool or something because i once got sent a map of how to find my taxi at the airport in the form of a map drawn in excel by shading cells wtf
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Aug 20, 2015 00:39
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also we got a mail stating that IT were explicitly banned from enabling users to use excel based poo poo and that anyone that was doing it had to have it registered in a departmental list and sign off that IT were not responsible for whatever fuckups may occur. cue hundreds of requests for system s to generate whatever batshit macro based reports people had been using. I denied all their requests to prove a point.
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Aug 20, 2015 00:45
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surebet posted:if you have any kind of decent excel function knowledge you might as well make the jump into vba, most of the excel functions are 1:1 in vba with a slightly different format, maybe yeah sure like how TEXT()/WorksheetFunction.Text() has the differently-named VBA-equivalent Format() that doesn't always give the same output for the same format string (something with percentages, I don't remember), or how ROUND()/WorksheetFunction.Round() and the VBA Round() don't use the same tie-breaking rule. gonadic io posted:the paper talking about the mistake that Reinhart and Rogoff made is http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_301-350/WP322.pdf pretty sure everyone knows that R&R isn't actually an "Excel mistake" but purposeful hiding of information contrary to their conclusion (i.e. the countries/periods that didn't fit the relationship or w/e) and just straight-up, outright intellectual fraud. there was some bullshit about the weighting scheme being bogus too, I don't recall the details.
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Aug 20, 2015 01:27
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ShimaTetsuo posted:pretty sure everyone knows that R&R isn't actually an "Excel mistake" but purposeful hiding of information contrary to their conclusion (i.e. the countries/periods that didn't fit the relationship or w/e) and just straight-up, outright intellectual fraud. there was some bullshit about the weighting scheme being bogus too, I don't recall the details. well yeah, but that information was contrary to my conclusion so i just didn't mention it in my talk
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Aug 20, 2015 06:43
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I managed to make a program in java that could record, delete, display and rearrange (local) data. So basically I'm the programming messiah now
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Aug 20, 2015 07:16
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