Are you an Excel guru?

[Mich the Tester]

Exactly, what could be better than a grid of rectangles each of which contains tragic?

ftfy

[Mich the Tester]

A few weeks ago in NL, a Russian asylum seeker committed suicide. He'd been politically active in Russia and ended up on the wrong side of Putin's chums, and had fled to NL. He was going through the whole asylum procedure and it turns out now that he probably had the right to asylum, but somehow an error in an Access database meant that the GUI showed a checkbox filled with the tag 'Deportable', so he was locked in solitary at the airport holding facility to be put on a plane to Russia. Killed himself instead of returning to Putinland.

This is exactly what I mean by people building amateurish systems and then blindly believing what it says on the screen. Systems and data have real consequences for real people; I wish more people would bear that in mind when building and using them.

[zharrt]

I believe in the principle of style over subsistence, an extremely pretty looking excel spreadsheet with conditional formatting that does not really do much goes a long way on a new clients site

[Old Greg]

I believe in the principle of style over subsistence, an extremely pretty looking excel spreadsheet with conditional formatting that does not really do much goes a long way on a new clients site

Freudian slip there.

[vetran]

Following on from the Agencies to Avoid thread, I thought this was an interesting off-topic thought.

Sadly I'm a 'No'. Google is my friend though so I'm familiar with conditional formatting, auto-filtering, creating drop-down lists, splitting cell data, linking between work sheets (and work books if needs be) and can do useful thing with that bastard-child VLOOKUP, and that kind of stuff. Sadly INDEX eludes me and I wish I could do more regarding serious data management.

Still, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, and I was in much demand in my previous contract for my 'expert' Excel knowledge (by Marketing though, who can barely recognise a laptop from an Etch-a-Sketch)

Match is Vlookup's hunky younger brother and this time the parents were married, my users love Vlookup, it took forever to open their spreadsheets, 30 minutes with Match & Index and the sheets are sprinting.

VLOOKUP | Excel VLOOKUP | Excel Index & Match Functions

Key thing is you use Match to compare a variable with a list, this returns the row number, then you use the row number and a user supplied column number to identify a cell in a range.

If you are comparing two rows then Match / Index can be roughly N-1 times faster than multiple vlookups.

[Scrag Meister]

Basic and VBA since 1987!!!!!

Kept my mortgage and bills paid.

And still is.

[xoggoth]

Excel has to be the most brilliant all purpose tool ever. I use it to create webpages, scrape webpages, various "databases" (ie lots of numbers for identifying bugs), checking code indenting/format/layout, checking my lottery numbers, showing important dates, file backups, bulk renaming of files, bulk showing of image dimensions, encoded passwords list, comparing files/directories, checking spammer ISP numbers, email archives, bloggy stuff etc etc ramble, ramble, drone, bore.

[doodab]

Excel has to be the most brilliant all purpose tool ever. I use it to create webpages, scrape webpages, various "databases" (ie lots of numbers for identifying bugs), checking code indenting/format/layout, checking my lottery numbers, showing important dates, file backups, bulk renaming of files, bulk showing of image dimensions, encoded passwords list, comparing files/directories, checking spammer ISP numbers, email archives, bloggy stuff etc etc ramble, ramble, drone, bore.

Exactly. In the olden days computers came with programming tools. In the modern business world, excel is that tool.

[BoredBloke]

A few weeks ago in NL, a Russian asylum seeker committed suicide. He'd been politically active in Russia and ended up on the wrong side of Putin's chums, and had fled to NL. He was going through the whole asylum procedure and it turns out now that he probably had the right to asylum, but somehow an error in an Access database meant that the GUI showed a checkbox filled with the tag 'Deportable', so he was locked in solitary at the airport holding facility to be put on a plane to Russia. Killed himself instead of returning to Putinland.

This is exactly what I mean by people building amateurish systems and then blindly believing what it says on the screen. Systems and data have real consequences for real people; I wish more people would bear that in mind when building and using them.

That's just bad design and bad testing. Its only doing what it was told to do. If it had been built in SQL server it could still have been built with that logic error in there

[Mich the Tester]

Exactly. In the olden days computers came with programming tools. In the modern business world, excel is that tool.

Just a shame when the user's a tool too.