Posted on 12/15/2023 5:19:47 AM PST by DoodleBob
LAS VEGAS—In a flashy hotel on the famous Strip on Saturday night, Andrew “the Annihilator” Ngai ran down an arena walkway with hands in the air, and burst onstage to screaming fans. His two-time world championship was on the line.
The Australian didn’t know it, but within minutes, victory would seemingly be snatched away from him, all because of a computer glitch. This seems appropriate, since Ngai was playing to be the best at competitive Excel, which is an actual thing.
Don’t blame Clippy For many, Excel is something to be avoided after work hours. But the omnipresent office spreadsheet software has spawned ranks of data geeks who see Excel as a sport. And here they were at the biggest table of them all: the Microsoft Excel World Championship, held at the HyperX Arena Las Vegas in the Luxor Hotel & Casino. (One floor down from a show by the comedian Carrot Top.)
The bean counters of the world finally got the respect they deserve, with a crowd of financial-modeling nerds blowing off mundane Vegas distractions such as a U2 concert, an NBA game, and the rodeo, to watch Excel athletes sit before computers onstage and “spreadsheet” like there’s no tomorrow.
“The passion, the energy, the excitement that you bring to spreadsheeting. You are legends,” said Microsoft’s Johnnie Thomas at the beginning of the face-off. “I hope your calculation engines are on full throttle and your fingers are feeling nimble.”
The team running the event expertly merged both razzle and dazzle, featuring an onstage “are-you-ready-to-rumble” style announcer, Stephen Rose—a consultant and former Microsoft employee—and color commentary by Jon Acampora and Oz du Soleil, both Excel trainers.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
I work my excel spreadsheet every day. I plug my numbers in every day. Its a complicated beast but it shows me whether I’m making money short term, medium term and long term.
I’m a complete slouch. I know only the tiniest fraction of what excel has available
I’ll bet the guys who really know their stuff can do some amazing things.
Great ad for that chair.
Excel is great! I only do the most simple things with it.
BTW, you need a subscription to read WSJ.
Excel has come a long way since version 2.0. For a decade I supported our family and self-funded mission trips doing Excel consulting. I still support a client who runs his business using software created in 1993. Some of the original XLM code still runs, but much has been updated to VBA.
I’m considered an Excel Guru at work. These guys would probably put me in my place.
There was likely vote theft in Virginia. It was THE ONLY state where late results went pro-Clinton and were from urban rather than rural areas.
I knew then if Trump didn’t make vote integrity his #1 issue he would be cheated in 2020.
What do they do? How is the contest scored?
I was the “Lotus 1-2-3 guru” and self-taught myself Excel, XLM, and later VBA. I once wrote the VBA chapters in an “Excel Secrets” book. The most complex topic, which wasn’t my area, was user-defined arrays.
What's next? Word or Powerpoint nerds?
I thought there was vote theft in Virginia in 2020 in the district just east of richmond. They had big batches of democrat votes show about 5 am on the morning after after election night
I was considered a Lotus 1 2 3 “guru” in the day. And then when we migrated to EXCEL, converted all the Lotus data in our office into EXCEL.
when I went back to college, my professors paid me to convert their data as well. I got pretty skookem at EXCEL, but as I moved up in management and had to teach my assistants how to create the spreadsheets that we used, my skills began to fade. It finally reached the point where I no longer created spreadsheets and had to go to my assistants to do it for.
I can still prepare basic ones but noyhing elaborate.
I have various nicknames regarding Excel. The sanitized one is Excel God, the NSFW one is Excel Porn Star
If ESPN can turn Corn Hole and Texas hold-em into a televised sport, they can do it with spreadsheeting......LOL!
In 15 years at Microsoft, I knew one guy who was better than me at Excel.
It’s funny, I would learn something new and my coworkers would look at me as if I were a wizard.
These guys are really amazing.
“I’m a complete slouch. I know only the tiniest fraction of what excel has available”
I used to test clerical applicants on Office as part of the hiring process. I would ask them what they thought their level was. No one I tested came close to their perceived level. They had no idea what the programs could actually do. I have respect for the few who know what they don’t know.
When it gets to that point I always import it into a SQL Server database (free as long as your DB is no larger than 1 GB) and build views and SQL scripts to perform the calculations. So budgeting and most investing is still tracked mainly in Excel. But the 5% of my portfolio where I do swing trading, it's all tracked in SQL Server with most of my buy and sell decisions (call it my crude AI) derived by complex views and SQL statements.
The same with my energy project (making my house more energy efficient, installing solar, when it was time to replace my wife's car I replaced it with an EV). Each month when I get a power bill I use Excel to record the kWh bought from the grid that month, the kWh sold to the grid (been doing that only 2 months), the amount of the power bill and other data fields from the power statement, odometer reading from the EV (to track miles driven that month), how much gas cost at nearby gas stations (to track how much I would have spent in gas had I gotten her an ICE), etc. But to really know what's going on intimately enough to optimize my configuration settings in my solar inverters as the seasons change, I import telemetry from my inverters (which export as Excel spreadsheet .xlsx files with rows in 5-minute candles) into a SQL Server database and go to town on the data. In the past 365 days I pulled only 18.8% of our power from the grid (81.2% was provided by solar and battery storage). I think at this point I've about maxed out how optimized it can be -- only have to wait a year to see what the results will be, which I expect to be about 85% free power average through the year. It'd probably be closer to 75% free power if I didn't do that extra analysis (which now is no work because the complex views and .sql script for the reports are written, I just run them and look at the output). Without using Excel or SQL, I probably would be only about 60% or so free power.
Anyone remember Multiplan? I think I used every function in that software and knew it pretty well. Excel blew me away when it came out and I never caught up. I only scratched the surface of Excel by the time I retired but it could do amazing things in the hands of a competent user. BTW - I saw people use Excel when a database (Access) would have been more appropriate.
I miss visicalc.
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