• HexesofVexes
    49•6 days ago

    I’ve done things in excel that are an abomination in the eyes of the divine.

    I have absolutely 0 regret.

    • @[email protected]
      2•4 days ago

      i once used an excel sheet to emulated a von Newman architecture ALU+RAM

      fun and useless, but very (un)efficient way to calculate Fibonacci numbers

    • @[email protected]
      3•6 days ago

      Generate localization strings in all requested languages with the “translate” macro without proof checking because you don’t speak Finnish or Japanese?

      • HexesofVexes
        12•6 days ago

        Worse - pulling data from a web page, then using the power of pure jank to parse this input, and then invoking a sheet of reference string builders to construct formulae and execute them using too damn many @indirects nested into vlookups before finally adding in date aware data reveals, because no excel abomination is complete without trying to parse dates.

  • @[email protected]English
    298•6 days ago

    It depends on how long you use it:

    Year 1: Ok, this is kinda cool, but why does it keep fucking breaking?

    Year 2: How is it still fucking breaking?

    Year 3: I just don’t fucking care why it keeps breaking. I think I hate this program.

    Year 4: I hate this program

    Year 5: Let the hate flow through you, consume you. Feel the dark side flowing through your fingertips. Yes. Good. Why is it breaking? It’s the end users. Yes… they’ve been plotting against you from the beginning - hiding columns, erasing formulas and even…

    merging cells

    Que heavy breathing through a respirator.

    Year 6: It’s a board meeting. They ask you if you can average all the moving averages of average sales per month and provide an exponential trendline to forecast growth on five million rows of data.

    You say “sure, boss, I can knock that for you in Excel in about an hour or two.”

    Your team leader interjects “I believe what he was trying to say was we’ll use Tableau and it will take about a month.”

    You turn to him with a steely glare.

    “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

    Year 7: Your team leader is gone after you pointed out he fucked up one of your sheets that run the business by merging a cell. All data flows through you and the holy spreadsheet, and the board is terrified of firing you because no one knows how your sheets work but you and their entire inventory system would collapse if you leave.

    But then the inevitable happens. Dissension in the ranks. The juniors talk of python, R, Tableau, Power BI - anything to release your dark hold upon the holy data. You could crush them all with a xlookup chain faster than they can type a SELECT statement. The Rebellion is coming, but you’re ready. You’ve discovered the Data Model, capable of building a relational database behind the hidden moons of Power Pivot, parsing tens of millions of rows - and your Death Star is almost complete.

    You’re ready to unleash your dark fury when the fucking spreadsheet breaks again.

    Year 8: New company. They ask if you know Excel. You just start cackling with a addictive gleam in your eye as tears start streaming down your face.

    They hire you on the spot.

    All they use is Excel. And Access.

    You think, ok, this is kinda cool, but why does it keep fucking breaking?

    • @[email protected]
      67•6 days ago

      We need a /c/MuseumOfLemmy to preserve this treasure in so that it may be cherished and studied by our children and our children’s children and many generations beyond.

    • @[email protected]
      4•6 days ago

      Damn as somebody with very little coding or IT background whatsoever but had to learn excel on my last 5 year of work, I understood it all.

      Especially the cell merging… Spawn of the devil itself…

      Still power query is quite addictive, the main reason why moving to OpenOffice is hard.

    • @[email protected]
      2•4 days ago

      Just started a new job two weeks ago, all they use is Excel and Access. Now you’ve got me scared, first job out of uni and feels like a lot of pressure.

    • snooggumsEnglish
      23•6 days ago

      Year 7: Your team leader is gone after you pointed out he fucked up one of your sheets that run the business by merging a cell.

      I am laughing about how after 7 years nobody has locked the sheets that run the business to avoid this specific thing.

      Or maybe they were kocked and the team leader unlocked it so they could break it without saving a backup.

    • @[email protected]English
      15•6 days ago

      There’s no way they’re using xlookup at year 7. You can pry my index match from my cold dead hands.

      • @[email protected]
        6•6 days ago

        Xlookup works fine for like 90% of cases, I save index match mainly for when I need to return multiple lookup values. In which case I load into BI because I always forget how index match works 😫

        • @[email protected]English
          5•6 days ago

          I should probably learn how BI works, but I’m mostly torturing excel to do things it was never intended to do.

          Also I do a lot of lookups and xlookup will slow my sheet down.

          • @[email protected]
            3•6 days ago

            Yeah if its something ad hoc I’ll paste values but for sheets meant to be maintained I’ll do it in PQ through merges or calculated columns. Lookups get the job done but they are expensive ;)

    • Owl
      4•4 days ago

      This comment should be UNESCO world heritage

  • setVeryLoud(true);
    47•6 days ago

    Excel is a hammer.

    When holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

    Stop using Excel for anything more than simple data extraction and pivot tables, get a custom solution tailored to your needs rather than a monstrous Excel document that consumes 14 GB of RAM to run.

    • @[email protected]
      9•6 days ago

      The bad thing is, they’ve attached a mediocre screwdriver to the hammer because everybody keeps using the hammer as a screwdriver. But now, everybody STILL uses the hammer as a screwdriver. The screwdriver part used to be a separate tool, but people didn’t know how to use it, and now they still don’t, even though it comes with instructions.

      They really should have kept things separate.

    • @[email protected]
      37•6 days ago

      We support a financial institution that uses ~30MB Excel sheets with thousands of calculations and they wonder why they can’t send it via email or why it has issues when 10 people edit it at once

      Just use a goddamn database

    • @[email protected]English
      9•6 days ago

      Create a table in Libre Office, I’ll wait…

      (Hint,the devs have flat out stated they will never add tables to Calc, as it’s wrong to do).

      99% of Excel usage includes a table in the first, or second, sheet. Without tables a spreadsheet app is useless, in my opinion, regardless of how “wrong” it is (and I agree that it’s wrong).

    • sihaEnglish
      18•6 days ago

      Libreoffice calc is pretty hurrendous tbh

    • @[email protected]
      4•6 days ago

      It’s been a while since I’ve used it, how good is it compared to office and Google sheets now?

        • @[email protected]
          7•6 days ago

          I don’t know if that’s good or bad

          The only two innovations in spreadsheets in 20 years that I’ve liked are connecting them to databases directly (which still sucks) and being able to collaboratively edit them.

          • @[email protected]
            4•6 days ago

            Some of it is just familiarity but I found Google sheets to be a breath of fresh air and still find Excel just painful.

            Although Google has really gotten pretty cluttered lately as they add features and slap them in whatever menu they pick at random.

            • @[email protected]
              8•6 days ago

              100%.

              what the hell is going on with “Tables” vs filter views vs slices vs named ranges.

              That should all be one properly thought out feature. And tables are so fragile. Nobody knows how to use filters because they default to global. The row groupings feature is entirely broken and forgotten about… they recently updated the filter views UI to be fragile all e s as f throw error messages about whether you’ve saved the change or not (nobody ever cared about this, we’re just trying to filter without breaking the sheet)

              The little pills you get for validated entries are nice though, but even that has like 3 different versions and ways to do it.

              Then there’s things like checkboxes, I know there’s an option for it somewhere, but I have never once found the menu it lives in.

              Oh and the paste style menu item that tells you the shortcut but doesn’t copy stole for you. That is the most written by an engineer feature I’ve ever seen. “You’re doing it wrong, do it my way now or don’t do it all”.

              • @[email protected]
                1•6 days ago

                I love filter views, no real complaints there except that other people can’t manage to figure out the difference between filtering the whole sheet and setting up a filter view.

                Tables seem kind of pointless but better than a separate database app I guess?

                Not sure about “little pills”, do you mean the drop downs? That’s in validation, and it’s a little odd but better both in interface and function than Excel. There’s really only one version and two ways to do it: “data validation” and “insert drop-down” (the latter is just a shortcut to the former, but with relevant options selected). Checkboxes are the same (both live in the insert menu).

                I’ve never known the “paste style” menu, I mostly use keyboard shortcuts when pasting. I might be misunderstanding what you’re describing there.

  • @[email protected]
    21•6 days ago

    When I did first line IT support I really loved how it stopped automatically calculating formulas for everyone in HR at the same time

  • BappityEnglish
    6•6 days ago

    I did a GCSE course on Excel, I learned to get irrationally angry every time a class was scheduled

  • @[email protected]
    3•4 days ago

    I got a job recently and they asked me if I know excel. I said yes, but I dont even know how to use formulas

    Pray for me 😭

    • Rhaedas
      29•6 days ago

      Not at all. You just haven’t gotten deep enough into the beast to see the horror.

      • @[email protected]
        5•6 days ago

        But what about those of us in R1C1 mode using lambdas to do recursive cell operations across data pulled from multiple sheets? Am I anywhere near the kinda of Eldritch horrors discussed? I’ve also written indirect references based on Sheet name to populate filters from web scraped tables. I just don’t know how deep the pit goes at this point.

        • Rhaedas
          4•6 days ago

          I will give it to you, when it works, it does some magical stuff. But try designing such complex things that are miracles in coding and then it have to run on a half-ass computer. I want to say terminal, it’s not that, but it’s those small fake computers that companies seem to think are better to get than an actual desktop because they’re cheap. I know that’s hardware, not Excel, but Excel does not run well on that, so…

          Or worse, you get moved to 365 which doesn’t do most scripting and breaks all that was working. That cloud shit is a problem.

          • @[email protected]
            2•6 days ago

            Oh yeah, the 365 version is terrible. And post of the time, it could have been a Python Gradio interface or similar simple implementation without having to fight so much to make basic things work. Most of what I want Excel to do it just isn’t efficient enough for; particularly with lets and lambdas, it’s gotten quite powerful as a programming paradigm where you can visualize and manipulate your data spatially in a kind of Logo / NetLogo style way which is really interesting, but the second you reference a few thousand cells a few times even a solid CPU starts screaming.

            I use Excel for a decent number of tasks and can do some magic with it, but only ever really for work where it’s easier to share a weird Excel sheet than it is to pass around a Python script (which given I teach Python, isn’t actually as often as most people experience).

    • AreaSIX
      3•6 days ago

      I think it’s one of my all time favorites. I think people here live in the tech literate bubble who know how to use specialized software for the different things excel does, albeit clunkily. But average people are intimidated by those more advanced tools, and there are a lot of average people in decision making positions who benefit greatly from being able to use excel.

    • snooggumsEnglish
      10•6 days ago

      You are probably using it for its intended purpose, which it Excels at.

  • @[email protected]
    2•6 days ago

    My life right here. "Ok it looks like it is an issue with the sheet itself, do you know who owns it? Alright reach out to them.: