Are you an Excel guru?

[MaryPoppins]

I can get the little fella to do things you've only dreamed off.

I'd heard that.

[mudskipper]

Yes. I am an Excel guru. I can get the little fella to do things you've only dreamed off. I used to train advanced techniques to data analysts & VBA. I've hooked the Google maps Geocode web service up to an Excel function to clean account data & provide lat/longitude for an internal map system. All good fun.

Why don''t you just go and pivot?

[Mich the Tester]

Ours are excellent. Little background in the industry but have a real insight beyond running test scripts to indicate where the workflow will fall down due to poor design.

Ah! you have proper testers. Congratulations!

[Old Greg]

Ah! you have proper testers. Congratulations!

Exactly! They're great.

[doodab]

I love spreadsheets. Alt + F11 is my favourite keyboard shortcut.

[mudskipper]

Ah! you have proper testers. Congratulations!

Testing doesn't have to be testing.

[BoredBloke]

Its amazing how many trading firms and insurance companies till use Excel for all the calculation stuff.

Its because its quick. You can say what you like about Excel and Access, but these dirty little spreadsheets and databases only come about because IT departments can't service the needs of their users. Often they can't wait the 6 months it would take to get that SQL Server & c# based tool out to the users when they can knock something together in Excel in a few days.

I've made a fairly good living out of Excel and Access. One of the probelms I find is that people are too quick go down the VBA route rather than actually use the product. Excel can do some very impressive stuff without the need for VBA is you know what formuals to use. With Excel you get

1 - People who have just started to use it who only know about a few formulas and think vlookup is the most complex thing in the world

2 - They then start using VBA and eventually will write reams of code to essentially do what many of the more obscure formulas do

3 - Sick of writing code they then actually go back to looking at what the product can do and researching many of the less used formulas eg Choose which is like a select case statement

I'm not an Excel gunu but I'd say that I know more than most and in many cases I'm loathed to put VBA in as I can often get the spreadsheet to do what I need using a few dynamic named ranges etc

[Pogle]

Been a bane of my career. I have found, many little offices, have a go to person, and the person who knows a bit about developing and he’s been building little spreadsheets for years that make his life easier. Then the department becomes reliant on these little spreadsheets, and the tech guys adds a little bit more functionality here and there, then the organisation starts relying on it to automate some of its processes. Then work out, some of these orgs I work for, have 100 branches, each with their little go to person doing their own little thing.

You have 100’s, sometimes thousands, of stupid little spreadsheets, or worse, access databases, holding their own versions of central data. Then, you have the political nightmare, of getting the departments to agree to give these little tools up, so you can centralise the applications using a properly designed, specc’d and built application. Also, then you have to agree a common data model...

Earlier in my career, I would have to understand complex spreadsheets, so I knew what they were getting up to, and some of the code....

I still actually come across this sometimes, current client has many departments who operate on their own, different, versions of centralised data; nightmare.

Ah yes, that takes me back to when I worked with Bae Systems

[Platypus]

I thought I was, until I saw some of the spreadsheets this project uses

Written once by someone clever, now forgotten. Recycled endlessly by others who change the raw data and show you the impressive results.

[Old Greg]

Maybe when I finish this contract, I should leave them a simple project portfolio reporting tool that in one column always returns an error message of 'User error, please enter data within defined parameters'. They'll be ages working that out.