- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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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?
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.
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.
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.
What if I like it? Is there something wrong with me?
Not at all. You just haven’t gotten deep enough into the beast to see the horror.
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.
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.
I guess you really…excel at it!
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 😭
Excel is one of the few things copilot has actually been able to help me with. Apparantly microsofts shitty programs understand each other.
It’s a niche where AI helps because there’s just decades of so many forums and videos full of how to do stuff in excel and with AI you get the right answer quicker with less noise around it. I use ai assistance for excel formulas all the time, works pretty good for that.
