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.
What's next? Word or Powerpoint nerds?
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.
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.
See their 27” LED displays. Anyone know what brand they are? I can only see the large diamond shape on the back of them. I had Acer displays fail on me. HP displays have been solid for me.
I cut my spreadsheet teeth on VisiCalc loaded from 5 1/4” floppies back in the day. Then along came Lotus 123. Excel after that.
As one who uses Excel a lot in my work, I might actually enjoy this.
I consider Excel to be the most useful program ever written and I use it at home all the time, but I realize I only scratch the surface of what it can do.
I had a job working for a 3rd party benefits administrator in the early to mid 2000’s. I had some what I though were good Excel skills but had to take it to a much higher level.
This company offered employers semi-customized websites for their employees to sign up for benefits (new hires or at open enrollment) and for their HR department to update enrollments electronically through our portal and we then in turn sent electronic files to the various insurance companies (EDI – electronic date interfaces) and provided some employers with custom reports and self-billing reports.
My job was managing the department in charge of providing the custom billing and self-billing reports and auditing the enrolment data the insurance companies had vs. our enrollment as we were supposed to be the authoritative enrollment source.
I learned many Excel skills there that have served me well over the years - V-lookups, H-lookups, pivot tables, data modeling, VBA and macros, and various formulas to format data. And also importing data into a MS Access database base and running customs queries I had written for custom reports and auditing.
When performing enrollment audits, the insurance company might send me a coma delimited txt file or an Excel file, but their data often did not match the data I was able to extract from our system - SSNs without dashes, full names in one field vs last name, first name, etc., dates of birth as a text field vs a date field. So would have to use various formulas such as CONCATENATE and TEXTJOIN an TRIM and such to format the data I received to match our data output so I could then perform v-lookups or other Excel data functions to determine if the insurance company’s enrollment data matched ours.
And if it didn’t match, I would research why – a deep diving into the insurance company’s EDI requirements and testing to determine if the files we were sending met the insurance company’s requirements and looking for things like why a terminated employee was still being billed on the company’s insurance and why – were we sending a termination date or should have the insurance company stopped billing when that ee was no longer on the enrollment file – an actual term with a term date vs an implicit term, i.e. dropping off the next file and working with our EDI team and or the insurance company to rectify.
In my job doing audits I often worked closely with our programmers, those writing the EDI scripts and the programmers were amazed at what I could do in Excel, and I became the company’s go to for all their Excel questions.
We also took on a new client, a large government/ military DHS contractor who had very specific reports they wanted. Our sales department told them, without consulting me first, that we could provide these reports.
I was given only some sample report outputs and had to reverse engineer and write custom scripts in both Excel and Access to give them what they needed. But even with as much automation as I could come up with, their reports still took me a full 3 days of formatting and data crunching to get to the end results.
Before I left this job, I wrote up documentation and trained my replacement on how to provide the reports but kept getting emails and phone calls for many months after asking for help because it was so complicated.
The good thing about Excel is it can work in the most simple way possible, or the most complex imaginable, depending on what someone wants to achieve.
Most never uncover all its power.
Back in the late 1990s we worked with different finance and accounting persons in our company and moved some of the most complex things they needed done from cumbersome mainframe programs that were under constant modification to Excel spreadheets and workbooks they could modify themselves. We also created a bridge from the main accounting and finance programs and database files down to their desktops. My programming staff was unburdoned and the finance and accounting folks had the results they wanted and with more control of their own. It also meant that mistakes became most often mistakes the finance and accounting people made themselves and not mistakes in the main computer programs and data files. Distriibuted computing = distributed accountability.
UH OH. No black transexuals...
I’ve been a fan of databases since Apple Works on our first computer...an Apple IIc. And Excel is great. Of course, I just do simple things...our ledger, various lists. Great tool.
How, if someone could tell me what MS Access does.
