I'll never forget a past job where they used a lot of Excel in ways I did not know was possible.
First of all they had an invoicing system in Excel, that pulled in data using VBS, into Excel templates, and at the press of a button in the UI generated invoices from these templates.
And the craziest part was their server inventory system made in Excel, where they had drawn all the rack cabinets, you could click on each, to drill down and show all the servers in that rack. Also a ton of VBS, you could even get monitoring status of each rack.
Excel has been OP for a long time, long before its Python capabilities.
My best Excel trick, which reveals how little I know, and yet Early [0] doesn't use it (or maybe doesn't need it, but that's hard to believe):
1. You can drag down the bottom of the formula bar/field and make it multi-line
2. You can insert arbitrary[*] newlines in an Excel formula
Combining those, you can turn the absurd default format of single-line-of-code functions into something readable and manageable. Here's a simple one from a spreadsheet I have open:
And just think of highly nested functions. Once you know it, writing single-line functions of any complexity is absurd, as absurd as writing 'real' code that way.
> You can drag down the bottom of the formula bar/field and make it multi-line
For folks on LibreOffice (currently v24.2):
* There's an downward-pointing "expand" triangle to the far-right of the formula input line.
* That button toggles the formula input area between 1-line vs 6-lines with scrolling.
* Newlines can inserted by shift-enter.
* If there are additional formula lines lines outside the viewable line(s), then a dashed line on the relevant border will be shown. (Plus the regular scrollbar, in expanded mode.)
It's interesting that the challenges are not business or accounting centred, as is the expectation when using Excel. If this is now general problem solving, are we watching language-specific competitive programming through the lens of a more broadly accessible platform like MS Excel?
It used to be financial modeling but they realized they’d get more attention with the esports audience this way.
It’s gone quite far now - one of the many challenges was a mock terrain map where you’d calculate distances to hike while considering the weight of your pack. Even the way they walk through the tunnel is done for show.
Excel is a general purpose computing environment and has been for quite some time.
When I was in the air force we had a complete aircraft maintenance planning and performance management system entirely in Excel. It can connect to remote workbooks on a shared drive/SharePoint too, so the higher headquarters would tie into our dashboard for their own operational readiness tracking.
It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.
Glad to see not only our financial infrastructure relies on wealth management agents’ skills at writing formulas, but our army also relies on our general commanders’ skills in Excel.
Funnily Excel is the tool of adults born in 1980; The next generation will only know Canva, so I guess we’ll have great infographics about battle fronts.
Any VBA? I help out with an extremely complex 15+ yr old Excel workbook designed for managing school debate tournaments that's still in active use in the PNW debate world but the complexity is 90% from VBA.
It does inject Excel formulas when creating worksheets but also heavily uses UI controls/dialogs made with the VB6 era WYSIWYG designer built into Excel, plus some COM extensions for SMTP emails, with spreadsheets used both as a pseudo database mostly hidden from the user and as the output for rendering data but the actual logic is mostly VBA.
Excel's VBA IDE feels like a time capsule from 2002, and not in a good way (with some of the most comically unhelpful error messages I've ever seen and extremely aggressive syntax checking that constantly interrupts typing in code). Microsoft increasingly makes it very clear they don't want people using VBA but it still works fine in the latest PC versions from O365 after turning off a few security features/approving some prompts.
I wrote some VBA to try to reduce the size of the workbooks (dozens of MB) but originally it was just massive nested lookups and conditionals written by the people who had been there before me.
The problem with VBA or PS is that you'll be posted out in 2-3 years and your successor might not even know what VBA is or how to access it much less how to write it.
I ended up writing a lot of documentation based on my XLSX archaeology.
Nice, that makes sense. I'm always curious when I hear about other giant Excel monoliths still in use if they're truly a huge tangled web of formulas, or more like a VB6 program stapled to some worksheets that can be distributed as a single .xlsm file like ours.
You're definitely right that 99% of Excel users have no idea that an entire IDE is lurking in the background with Alt-F11 and wouldn't even know where to begin to do a simple fix/tweak. Whereas even a complex formula can at least be mentally parsed as a math equation with some strange ALLCAPS() names scattered throughout, or copy/pasted into Google/an LLM to get started, so much more discoverable than VBA.
Not to mention that the VBA IDE is a horrible dev experience in pretty much every way and frozen in time while regular Excel is actively maintained.
I've explored pulling out all the critical business logic currently in VBA and having Claude Code rewrite to VB.NET that can be called from Excel to gradually phase out VBA for maintainability. But unfortunately despite VBA essentially driving everything, it's tightly coupled to the Excel spreadsheet data model. So I'd have to use a .NET library to emulate the Excel worksheet functions, or pretty much do a full rewrite to use modern .NET methods for the in-memory data manipulation stuff.
Without good visibility into the Excel side of the VBA, Claude Code/Gemini CLI were just flailing so I abandoned that idea for now until I can find a solid conversion path.
I could do half-screen nested array formulas when Excel was before the ribbon (and screen resolutions were smaller), out of necessity and because I could. It was in quite demanding uni home calculations and then mostly when working as intern in IB. But then having a life is also important...
The only thing I still enjoy is that any data smaller than 1M rows is sliced and diced almost without thinking. I am sometimes really grateful that MS did not break the shortcuts, while almost breaking the product overall. The muscle memory works perfectly.
I watched the walkthrough video of the solutions and it's genuinely impressive. These aren't just "use VLOOKUP fast" challenges - they're algorithmic puzzles where Excel is the constraint.
What struck me is how similar it is to code golf or competitive programming, just with a different medium. The winner uses array formulas, INDEX/MATCH combinations, and nested functions in ways that most Excel power users would never think of.
The real insight though: Excel is probably the most widely-deployed functional programming environment in the world. Most "business users" are doing functional composition daily without realizing it.
Makes me wonder if we should be teaching programming concepts through Excel first, then moving to traditional languages. The immediate visual feedback is unmatched.
I think you should. But my own experience when learning programming was there were few ways of learning programming that seemed properly tested or pipelined to actually teach programming. You had to hodgepodge your own materials if you were like me and doing self learning, from half a dozen books and online courses and workshops. I felt like programming needs a Montessori - someone who deeply understands human learning and makes it easy for multiple personalities to learn at their own pace. IMO.
Can anyone find the actual challenge files? Not that I would be competitive at all, but the description of last year's World of Warcraft themed one is interesting, and I want to walk through it.
What a garbage way to gate visibility to the sport. You are already looking at a niche audience who would be interested in the idea, and you hope to collect some emails for marketing as well?
People praise MS Word and Excel there, shitting down on Markdown and proper languages.
The thing is, you have RTF covering a 99% of actual office cases. For the rest, a DTP would be far better, or Texmacs which is far superior for academics. The old WordPad with tables (and Ted for Unix once it's properly setup) would enough to do most boring documentation.
On Excel, just look what happened with Genomics. Also, overabusing Access for management (or worse, to handle Covid cases in a shitty XLS table) it's a nightmare.
For tons of cases TCL/Tk + a Sqlite3 backend would perfectly work and it would be accesible to any platform, from GNU/Linux to MacOS, BSD, Windows. You can stick an HTML5 frontend with ease without even needing JS to access the data (plain HTML forms would work really well).
Ah, yes, graphs, charts. Gnuplot would help you in that case, or a fast Tk
package. Reports? TkHTML with some easy CSS. It would cost far more initially? The potential risks on compatibility would be nil in a future. And, as a plus, yo don't have to worry about Macro viruses and whatever.
SQlite it's much easier than Access at the backend. Also, you have tons of experts today everywhere. If you can't properly normalize a database under Access, your company will collapse sooner or later. You can't depend on unstable solutions forever.
On TCL/Tk, it was the quickest and multiplatform example to do a RAD application (or prototyping). You have sqlite3 bindings everywhere.
And now you need to install and learn 10 different programs instead of one. Excel is used a lot because you can do so much with it which is also one of its downsides when people build things with it they really shouldn’t.
RTF works with anything. On XLS and the rest. it should be a common ground like RTF for word processing. And I don't mean CSV/TSV, but a truly open core standard. No, nothing like HTML5 where it grew up organically like a disease, with bloat on top.
Also, input and output shouldn't be allowed to be mixed by design. Data in one sheet, and formulae output in another. And no automatic parsing should be done, ever. Remember Excel with Genomics, or the issues mangling dates. Or worse, locales, which are another issue under Unix.
The descriptions of the problems make it sound a little like algorithmic puzzles but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language… Excel is pretty amazing in what you can do; I’ve regretted having to use Google Sheets for the last few years.
When I worked at a university's tech support, this was a recurring problem. People made grade lists in Excel, then imported them into the digital learning environment, which occasionally was set to a different language. This meant that the decimal point would be disregarded, and e.g. an 8.5/10 would be imported as an 85 (which got clamped to 10). Maximum grades for everyone, confused students and teachers :')
Even better: grades range from 1.0 (best) to 5.0 (failed) with partial grades (.3, .7) in-between.
Caused a few problems when a 1.3 got interpreted as the first May and converted to the number of days between the epoch and the first ofay of that year.
That sounds correct. This issue would be when the decimal separator matches the argument separator. In that situation =IF(A1 > 42.1, B1, C1) would be equivalent to =IF(A1 > 42,1; B1; C1)
The possibility of incorrect parsing of equation with a variadic function that contains a decimal number in the equation.
However, this is a localization as even the functions change names.
It’s just a locale setting as to which is applied. If you use English (US or UK) then your argument separator will be a comma. If you use other languages, then a semi colon will apply. You’ll find most guidance online referring to English language functions and comma separators, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter. If you ship a spreadsheet to me that you wrote in German functions and syntax that contains:
=SVERWEIS(X2;A:C;3;0)
I’ll open that and find
=VLOOKUP(X2,A:C,3,0)
This suggests client localization that is rendered differently with different language settings.
The formulae are indeed stored in the same format, regardless of language. For rendering and parsing in the UI they use translated function names and the field separator (commma in English, but semicolon in many other languages because decimal numbers use a comma there).
It does irk me a bit (though not as much as the translated VBA back in the day). But that's probably because I know English, I often look for solutions to my problems in English, not in my native language, and then would have to mentally translate that back. But that's perhaps a burden for programmers more than for typical users.
A few thoughts:
• it's been that way for decades, at this point. So changing it would annoy a lot of users
• the problem with comma and semicolon would remain unless you want entering numbers normally and within a formula to be different. I'm not sure that's good in a product built around numbers (and often numbers that should be written and formatted like any other number in that country).
• making it configurable might work, but that then requires more testing, although sometimes it's not clear how much testing Microsoft is still doing, so that might not be much of a point. But adding options also has UX limits and not just in the length of the settings screen.
LibreOffice Calc has an option to force English function names regardless of the current localization. I guess Excel should have something similar, too¹.
Fun fact: in European and Brazilian Portuguese, the same function names can refer to different things. European SUBSTITUIR² is REPLACE (Brazilian MUDAR), Brazilian SUBSTITUIR³ is SUBSTITUTE (European SUBST).
A CS grad that ended up in banking/consulting. This was common in my country 10-20 years ago with no FAANGs in the area and Nasdaq hadn't popped off yet. It was the only way to get decent salary and not 40k at a mom and pop IT shop doing network switch configuration.
Doesn't really count in my opinion. I'd rather see finance/business majors stumble upon their version of LeetCode.
I wish more programmers would pay attention to how productive power users in different can be with their tools. Look at CAD competitions. I wonder if there are video editting competitions?
I used to work as technical director for a touring live graphic design, 3D modeling, and animation tournament. It was kind of like iron chef for designers. They worked live in timed rounds with their screens projected overhead. It was sponsored by Adobe, Autodesk, and Wacom. It was pretty impressive to see how power users did their thing for sure.
Programming efficiency isn’t about typing/editing fast - it’s about great decision-making. Although I have seen the combo of both working out very well.
If you focus on fast typing/editing skills to level up, but still have bad decision-making skills, you'll just end up burying yourself (and possibly your team) faster and more decisively. (I have seen that, too.)
I interpreted the original comment totally differently - I thought they were saying that the programmers [who created these tools] should pay more attention to how productive [or not] power users can be with the tools [that they created]. And use that as an important metric for software quality. Which I definitely agree with.
> how productive power users in different [fields] can be with their tools
There are a lot more tools in programming than your text editor. Linters, debuggers, AI assistants, version control, continuous integration, etc.
I personally know I'm terrible at using debuggers. Is this a shortcoming of mine? Probably. But I also feel debuggers could be a lot, lot better than they are right now.
I think for a lot of us reflecting at our workflow and seeing things we do that could be done more efficiently with better (usage of) tooling could pay off.
In high school, I participated in a STEM-based competition. There were a ton of categories like CO2 dragsters (my favorite), architecture, 2D and 3D CAD, GIS, and numerous others I can't remember. Some categories had more of a business focus but most were science/engineering related. The 3D CAD one was pretty fun. I recall two parts. In the first half, you got a hand-drawn sketch of a bushing and had to recreate it in Autodesk Inventor as fast as possible and then generate a 2D drawing properly dimensioned (like what you'd hand to a machinist). The second half involved creating all of the parts for a basic ceiling fan and then making an animated exploded view that also spun the fan. I was really good at that stuff back then but I definitely wasn't the quickest. I'm sure it's a lot different now, so much of CAD now involved CNC and 3D printing that's there's probably aspects that include messing with gcode now.
My GIS competition was fun too. They gave me a bunch of map data and I had to produce a report on Washington DC storm surge flood zones and potential rescue helicopter locations all within a couple hours.
I recall there being a video production category too. I didn't compete in it but you'd be given props and dialogue to turn into a video over the course of a day or two. Very few of the categories were contemporaneous competitions, most were long term project presentations.
Although they do have a category for best editing, it's hard to call it an award for "best film editor" when it doesn't control for the overall quality of the film. For example, with the Oscars, it's extremely common (2/3 of the time) for a film that wins best picture to also win best editing.
Drop 10 hours of footage to the competitors on day 0, assign judges random groups of completed films on day N.
Maybe let each editor request one reshoot in the first week, a committee aggregates similar requests, all editors get all the reshoots once they're finalized.
Maybe include storyboards and a rubrik for what story the film is supposed to share and how we're meant to feel, but maybe not.
I think this may actually be two different things. Much like how being good at coding doesn’t mean it’s fun to watch you code. Though there are “performance” coders where it really is!
Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).
This is obviously 99% marketing. Microsoft/Waggener Edstrom tend to be really good at getting mainstream media to report on the marketing activities.
Example: For many Windows launches since Windows 3/95, there's been this media splash where Microsoft spends x million dollars on marketing and mainstream media then reports this, thereby getting (like) 100x millions worth of exposure.
Excel is not "complete" until they stop forcibly converting long strings of numbers into scientific notation - or at least give me a sheet-specific way to turn it off. I know how to stop it on my machine, but I have shared documents where if any one of the 16+ other users forgets, then it's messed up for everyone.
Let alone the date issues.
At one point I did a deep dive on one or the other of these "quirks", and the earliest request for exactly the fix I want is from nineteen-eighty-fricking-five. Unbelievable.
Yes, there will be edge cases. They need to balance historic compat vs one more fricking setting checkbox. I am thinking that you will never see this solved.
They've now made a change in that at least when you open a csv it now asks you beforehand if you want your data transformed, eg converting strings to numbers where that loses leading zeros.
def 2 decades - 2023 was the best version and it has been downhill ever since
I'll admit, on occasion having more than 65k rows is helpful but generally that's the domain of a database, not excel and it wasn't a good tradeoff IMO
I had no idea this was real. Fascinating. I'm curious: anyone plugged into the scene know if it's organic or if it was created as a marketing thing by Microsoft?
From my understanding it wasn't started or ran by Microsoft. They have Microsoft listed as the first sponsor on their main website, for what it's worth.
Pretty sure it started as a joke and evolved into a real thing. I actually won an Excel spreadsheet in High School quite a long while ago. Makes me wonder if I should try out...
So BBC is quickly turning into an AI slop lake. The article text is stretched so much to fit 10 ads, with the real content tucked away only at the end.
Good to see that AI slop would inundate and suffocate these media houses.
I don’t understand how a Microsoft team that respects its customers (and maintains shortcuts) can co-exist in an org that sees their customer as marks.
I had a negative view of MS when I was young. Then I got jobs at large orgs managing IT for 1000s of people. I don't know how else you'd do it without the Microsoft stack. I'm not saying you can't, but good luck managing whatever custom ball of knots you manage to come up with and also finding people to work on it for you. If you think open office and some kind of custom IAM solution will work, you just don't have the experience to have an opinion on it, IMHO.
My employer has thousands of employees across six countries, runs complex, multi-billion-dollar supply chains, and somehow manages just fine without the Microsoft stack.
> Hang on, what do you complain about if Teams BS isn’t wasting your day?
I've never experienced Teams but Google Chat can be infuriating. Something as basic as showing a notification when a new message arrives does not work reliably. Searching chats is broken in bizzare ways. Add to that the constant UI changes.
Then there is PANW Global Protect which randomly stops working and also the Croud Strike agent that decides to hog CPU. Workday, Concur and annoying in their own ways but it's not too bad because I only have to use them infrequently.
Watch this, where he goes through the questions and explains how he did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mx_xhiIRpw
I'm pretty good with Excel, my main tool at the job for over 20 years. I understand how he did it, but it's just really humbling...
I still think quality of what you do with Excel (idea) is more important than how you do it (skill).
I'll never forget a past job where they used a lot of Excel in ways I did not know was possible.
First of all they had an invoicing system in Excel, that pulled in data using VBS, into Excel templates, and at the press of a button in the UI generated invoices from these templates.
And the craziest part was their server inventory system made in Excel, where they had drawn all the rack cabinets, you could click on each, to drill down and show all the servers in that rack. Also a ton of VBS, you could even get monitoring status of each rack.
Excel has been OP for a long time, long before its Python capabilities.
nowadays, you can even use =WEBSERVICE(...) to access some web apis, if I understand correctly.
Did either of those systems have unit or integration tests?
Do any of the competitive solutions?
My best Excel trick, which reveals how little I know, and yet Early [0] doesn't use it (or maybe doesn't need it, but that's hard to believe):
1. You can drag down the bottom of the formula bar/field and make it multi-line
2. You can insert arbitrary[*] newlines in an Excel formula
Combining those, you can turn the absurd default format of single-line-of-code functions into something readable and manageable. Here's a simple one from a spreadsheet I have open:
And just think of highly nested functions. Once you know it, writing single-line functions of any complexity is absurd, as absurd as writing 'real' code that way.[0] Early shows how it was done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46340638
[*] I think you can do it anywhere but I haven't tested anything crazy; mostly I just use them between expressions.
> You can drag down the bottom of the formula bar/field and make it multi-line
For folks on LibreOffice (currently v24.2):
* There's an downward-pointing "expand" triangle to the far-right of the formula input line.
* That button toggles the formula input area between 1-line vs 6-lines with scrolling.
* Newlines can inserted by shift-enter.
* If there are additional formula lines lines outside the viewable line(s), then a dashed line on the relevant border will be shown. (Plus the regular scrollbar, in expanded mode.)
Terr_'s comment reminds me and I'm too late to edit the parent: In Excel's formula bar/field, insert newlines by pressing Alt+Enter.
It could be that in a competitive context fussing with formatting would cost precious seconds. Great general tip for us mortals though.
Imagine a coding competition: Would you forgo newlines and write everything on one long line? Would that save time?
Perfect style guide format does consume time, but pressing Alt+Enter a few times would seem to reduce errors at essentially no cost.
I think they would also have to resize the field every time using the mouse.
The setting sticks: If you resize it, it stays in the new size when you move to other cells.
You can also use the =LET(...) formula to define named variables:
There must be an odd number 2D + 1 of arguments. The first 2D are D name-expression pairs and the final one is the expression whose value is returned.The end result - as you see - is quite readable.
Oh yes indeed. For example, here's something I was just working on:
=LET(
k))groupAvg, )fyi: if you indent a couple of spaces, you get a <code> block.
No need to drag the bottom of the cell to expand function down. Just double click the bottom of the function cell, it’ll expand down automatically.
They’re referring to the formula bar at the top of the screen (under the ribbon), not the cell itself (which are located within the grid).
It's interesting that the challenges are not business or accounting centred, as is the expectation when using Excel. If this is now general problem solving, are we watching language-specific competitive programming through the lens of a more broadly accessible platform like MS Excel?
I enjoy the idea, and love watching it grow.
It used to be financial modeling but they realized they’d get more attention with the esports audience this way.
It’s gone quite far now - one of the many challenges was a mock terrain map where you’d calculate distances to hike while considering the weight of your pack. Even the way they walk through the tunnel is done for show.
> Even the way they walk through the tunnel is done for show.
Huh, interesting. I thought I’d been working remote so long that offices had done this to make people more excited for work.
Excel is a general purpose computing environment and has been for quite some time.
When I was in the air force we had a complete aircraft maintenance planning and performance management system entirely in Excel. It can connect to remote workbooks on a shared drive/SharePoint too, so the higher headquarters would tie into our dashboard for their own operational readiness tracking.
It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.
Glad to see not only our financial infrastructure relies on wealth management agents’ skills at writing formulas, but our army also relies on our general commanders’ skills in Excel.
Funnily Excel is the tool of adults born in 1980; The next generation will only know Canva, so I guess we’ll have great infographics about battle fronts.
Spreadsheets aren't going anywhere, Google Sheets is widely used by 20-something people at my work.
Was it truly "in excel" or was it also using powershell?
It was entirely in Excel, no powershell.
Any VBA? I help out with an extremely complex 15+ yr old Excel workbook designed for managing school debate tournaments that's still in active use in the PNW debate world but the complexity is 90% from VBA.
It does inject Excel formulas when creating worksheets but also heavily uses UI controls/dialogs made with the VB6 era WYSIWYG designer built into Excel, plus some COM extensions for SMTP emails, with spreadsheets used both as a pseudo database mostly hidden from the user and as the output for rendering data but the actual logic is mostly VBA.
Excel's VBA IDE feels like a time capsule from 2002, and not in a good way (with some of the most comically unhelpful error messages I've ever seen and extremely aggressive syntax checking that constantly interrupts typing in code). Microsoft increasingly makes it very clear they don't want people using VBA but it still works fine in the latest PC versions from O365 after turning off a few security features/approving some prompts.
I wrote some VBA to try to reduce the size of the workbooks (dozens of MB) but originally it was just massive nested lookups and conditionals written by the people who had been there before me.
The problem with VBA or PS is that you'll be posted out in 2-3 years and your successor might not even know what VBA is or how to access it much less how to write it.
I ended up writing a lot of documentation based on my XLSX archaeology.
Nice, that makes sense. I'm always curious when I hear about other giant Excel monoliths still in use if they're truly a huge tangled web of formulas, or more like a VB6 program stapled to some worksheets that can be distributed as a single .xlsm file like ours.
You're definitely right that 99% of Excel users have no idea that an entire IDE is lurking in the background with Alt-F11 and wouldn't even know where to begin to do a simple fix/tweak. Whereas even a complex formula can at least be mentally parsed as a math equation with some strange ALLCAPS() names scattered throughout, or copy/pasted into Google/an LLM to get started, so much more discoverable than VBA.
Not to mention that the VBA IDE is a horrible dev experience in pretty much every way and frozen in time while regular Excel is actively maintained.
I've explored pulling out all the critical business logic currently in VBA and having Claude Code rewrite to VB.NET that can be called from Excel to gradually phase out VBA for maintainability. But unfortunately despite VBA essentially driving everything, it's tightly coupled to the Excel spreadsheet data model. So I'd have to use a .NET library to emulate the Excel worksheet functions, or pretty much do a full rewrite to use modern .NET methods for the in-memory data manipulation stuff.
Without good visibility into the Excel side of the VBA, Claude Code/Gemini CLI were just flailing so I abandoned that idea for now until I can find a solid conversion path.
I could do half-screen nested array formulas when Excel was before the ribbon (and screen resolutions were smaller), out of necessity and because I could. It was in quite demanding uni home calculations and then mostly when working as intern in IB. But then having a life is also important...
The only thing I still enjoy is that any data smaller than 1M rows is sliced and diced almost without thinking. I am sometimes really grateful that MS did not break the shortcuts, while almost breaking the product overall. The muscle memory works perfectly.
I watched the walkthrough video of the solutions and it's genuinely impressive. These aren't just "use VLOOKUP fast" challenges - they're algorithmic puzzles where Excel is the constraint.
What struck me is how similar it is to code golf or competitive programming, just with a different medium. The winner uses array formulas, INDEX/MATCH combinations, and nested functions in ways that most Excel power users would never think of.
The real insight though: Excel is probably the most widely-deployed functional programming environment in the world. Most "business users" are doing functional composition daily without realizing it.
Makes me wonder if we should be teaching programming concepts through Excel first, then moving to traditional languages. The immediate visual feedback is unmatched.
I think you should. But my own experience when learning programming was there were few ways of learning programming that seemed properly tested or pipelined to actually teach programming. You had to hodgepodge your own materials if you were like me and doing self learning, from half a dozen books and online courses and workshops. I felt like programming needs a Montessori - someone who deeply understands human learning and makes it easy for multiple personalities to learn at their own pace. IMO.
Can anyone find the actual challenge files? Not that I would be competitive at all, but the description of last year's World of Warcraft themed one is interesting, and I want to walk through it.
Here: https://excel-esports.com/product/world-of-warcraft-mewc-202...
You're supposed to do a $0 checkout for some reason and then download them
What a garbage way to gate visibility to the sport. You are already looking at a niche audience who would be interested in the idea, and you hope to collect some emails for marketing as well?
There is also the mocumentary flick of the Excel eTournament scene with "Makro"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
Don’t forget part two
https://youtu.be/ICp2-EUKQAI
I’ll always think of my fellow excel wizards as sheet heads thanks to this video
Because of Krazam it took me a minute or two to accept that this now exists for real
Life imitates art.
This is too good.
Not unlikely it inspired the whole pro excel scene to exist.
I'm really wondering whether this is true, but haven't found anything definitive on the matter...
Should be 'Michael Jordan of spreadsheets'
Did he retired spreadsheets to become a professional baseball player?
The Spiderman would be better. If anyone used formulas' precedents/dependents that would be instantly visual.
People praise MS Word and Excel there, shitting down on Markdown and proper languages.
The thing is, you have RTF covering a 99% of actual office cases. For the rest, a DTP would be far better, or Texmacs which is far superior for academics. The old WordPad with tables (and Ted for Unix once it's properly setup) would enough to do most boring documentation.
On Excel, just look what happened with Genomics. Also, overabusing Access for management (or worse, to handle Covid cases in a shitty XLS table) it's a nightmare.
For tons of cases TCL/Tk + a Sqlite3 backend would perfectly work and it would be accesible to any platform, from GNU/Linux to MacOS, BSD, Windows. You can stick an HTML5 frontend with ease without even needing JS to access the data (plain HTML forms would work really well).
Ah, yes, graphs, charts. Gnuplot would help you in that case, or a fast Tk package. Reports? TkHTML with some easy CSS. It would cost far more initially? The potential risks on compatibility would be nil in a future. And, as a plus, yo don't have to worry about Macro viruses and whatever.
Now only the fifty people who know TCL/Tk and SQL can maintain your system. Not an improvement.
SQlite it's much easier than Access at the backend. Also, you have tons of experts today everywhere. If you can't properly normalize a database under Access, your company will collapse sooner or later. You can't depend on unstable solutions forever.
On TCL/Tk, it was the quickest and multiplatform example to do a RAD application (or prototyping). You have sqlite3 bindings everywhere.
And now you need to install and learn 10 different programs instead of one. Excel is used a lot because you can do so much with it which is also one of its downsides when people build things with it they really shouldn’t.
RTF works with anything. On XLS and the rest. it should be a common ground like RTF for word processing. And I don't mean CSV/TSV, but a truly open core standard. No, nothing like HTML5 where it grew up organically like a disease, with bloat on top.
Also, input and output shouldn't be allowed to be mixed by design. Data in one sheet, and formulae output in another. And no automatic parsing should be done, ever. Remember Excel with Genomics, or the issues mangling dates. Or worse, locales, which are another issue under Unix.
The descriptions of the problems make it sound a little like algorithmic puzzles but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language… Excel is pretty amazing in what you can do; I’ve regretted having to use Google Sheets for the last few years.
> but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language
There is little difference between (if (> a b) c d) and =IF((A1 > B1), C1, D1)
Excel is the most widely installed functional programming language IDE.
Change the language of your Windows system to anything but English and then open your Excel file with formulas again.
When I worked at a university's tech support, this was a recurring problem. People made grade lists in Excel, then imported them into the digital learning environment, which occasionally was set to a different language. This meant that the decimal point would be disregarded, and e.g. an 8.5/10 would be imported as an 85 (which got clamped to 10). Maximum grades for everyone, confused students and teachers :')
Even better: grades range from 1.0 (best) to 5.0 (failed) with partial grades (.3, .7) in-between. Caused a few problems when a 1.3 got interpreted as the first May and converted to the number of days between the epoch and the first ofay of that year.
I don't get your point
programming languages aren't allowed to be in non-english somehow?
ok, what happens? (I'm not messing around on my system right now ...)
Localization of formulas. On my system, all parameter-separating commas have to be replaced with semicolons.
That is shocking. Excel is used by every international organization, probably. How do they manage the localization?
Maybe the files store the formulas in an intermediate format that can be localized by the client
That sounds correct. This issue would be when the decimal separator matches the argument separator. In that situation =IF(A1 > 42.1, B1, C1) would be equivalent to =IF(A1 > 42,1; B1; C1)
The possibility of incorrect parsing of equation with a variadic function that contains a decimal number in the equation.
However, this is a localization as even the functions change names.
https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/1flsvyu/separator_co...
This suggests client localization that is rendered differently with different language settings.The GGP says,
> On my system, all parameter-separating commas have to be replaced with semicolons.
That implies the user has to manually change the syntax.
The formulae are indeed stored in the same format, regardless of language. For rendering and parsing in the UI they use translated function names and the field separator (commma in English, but semicolon in many other languages because decimal numbers use a comma there).
It does irk me a bit (though not as much as the translated VBA back in the day). But that's probably because I know English, I often look for solutions to my problems in English, not in my native language, and then would have to mentally translate that back. But that's perhaps a burden for programmers more than for typical users.
A few thoughts:
• it's been that way for decades, at this point. So changing it would annoy a lot of users
• the problem with comma and semicolon would remain unless you want entering numbers normally and within a formula to be different. I'm not sure that's good in a product built around numbers (and often numbers that should be written and formatted like any other number in that country).
• making it configurable might work, but that then requires more testing, although sometimes it's not clear how much testing Microsoft is still doing, so that might not be much of a point. But adding options also has UX limits and not just in the length of the settings screen.
LibreOffice Calc has an option to force English function names regardless of the current localization. I guess Excel should have something similar, too¹.
Fun fact: in European and Brazilian Portuguese, the same function names can refer to different things. European SUBSTITUIR² is REPLACE (Brazilian MUDAR), Brazilian SUBSTITUIR³ is SUBSTITUTE (European SUBST).
¹ I've found this solution https://superuser.com/questions/1908516/how-to-change-the-la... but I haven't tested it since I don't have MS Excel at hand to check
² https://support.microsoft.com/pt-pt/office/fun%C3%A7%C3%A3o-...
³ https://support.microsoft.com/pt-br/office/substituir-fun%C3...
Classic one++ (-:
It even has LAMBDA now: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lambda-function-b...
Yup. Not too long ago they added Python scripting. Definitely beats the weird cloud scripting you have to do with Google Sheets.
Excel Python runs in the cloud. It is nicely integrated though.
I wish they had gone for embedding .Net locally instead.
A CS grad that ended up in banking/consulting. This was common in my country 10-20 years ago with no FAANGs in the area and Nasdaq hadn't popped off yet. It was the only way to get decent salary and not 40k at a mom and pop IT shop doing network switch configuration.
Doesn't really count in my opinion. I'd rather see finance/business majors stumble upon their version of LeetCode.
I wish more programmers would pay attention to how productive power users in different can be with their tools. Look at CAD competitions. I wonder if there are video editting competitions?
I used to work as technical director for a touring live graphic design, 3D modeling, and animation tournament. It was kind of like iron chef for designers. They worked live in timed rounds with their screens projected overhead. It was sponsored by Adobe, Autodesk, and Wacom. It was pretty impressive to see how power users did their thing for sure.
Hi! Do you remember the name of that competition? Super interested in that.
I've seen your work at Hard Work Party before, by the way! Really cool stuff, glad to see you've also got the startup going as well.
Thanks! It was called Cut&Paste
Programming efficiency isn’t about typing/editing fast - it’s about great decision-making. Although I have seen the combo of both working out very well.
If you focus on fast typing/editing skills to level up, but still have bad decision-making skills, you'll just end up burying yourself (and possibly your team) faster and more decisively. (I have seen that, too.)
I interpreted the original comment totally differently - I thought they were saying that the programmers [who created these tools] should pay more attention to how productive [or not] power users can be with the tools [that they created]. And use that as an important metric for software quality. Which I definitely agree with.
The person you replied to stated:
> how productive power users in different [fields] can be with their tools
There are a lot more tools in programming than your text editor. Linters, debuggers, AI assistants, version control, continuous integration, etc.
I personally know I'm terrible at using debuggers. Is this a shortcoming of mine? Probably. But I also feel debuggers could be a lot, lot better than they are right now.
I think for a lot of us reflecting at our workflow and seeing things we do that could be done more efficiently with better (usage of) tooling could pay off.
In high school, I participated in a STEM-based competition. There were a ton of categories like CO2 dragsters (my favorite), architecture, 2D and 3D CAD, GIS, and numerous others I can't remember. Some categories had more of a business focus but most were science/engineering related. The 3D CAD one was pretty fun. I recall two parts. In the first half, you got a hand-drawn sketch of a bushing and had to recreate it in Autodesk Inventor as fast as possible and then generate a 2D drawing properly dimensioned (like what you'd hand to a machinist). The second half involved creating all of the parts for a basic ceiling fan and then making an animated exploded view that also spun the fan. I was really good at that stuff back then but I definitely wasn't the quickest. I'm sure it's a lot different now, so much of CAD now involved CNC and 3D printing that's there's probably aspects that include messing with gcode now.
My GIS competition was fun too. They gave me a bunch of map data and I had to produce a report on Washington DC storm surge flood zones and potential rescue helicopter locations all within a couple hours.
I recall there being a video production category too. I didn't compete in it but you'd be given props and dialogue to turn into a video over the course of a day or two. Very few of the categories were contemporaneous competitions, most were long term project presentations.
The Oscars, The Golden Globes, the Emmys, just a few!
Although they do have a category for best editing, it's hard to call it an award for "best film editor" when it doesn't control for the overall quality of the film. For example, with the Oscars, it's extremely common (2/3 of the time) for a film that wins best picture to also win best editing.
Perhaps that’s because Best Picture isn’t controlling for the effect that good editing has on the film.
I wonder how you could construct a reasonably controlled competition for film editing.
Drop 10 hours of footage to the competitors on day 0, assign judges random groups of completed films on day N.
Maybe let each editor request one reshoot in the first week, a committee aggregates similar requests, all editors get all the reshoots once they're finalized.
Maybe include storyboards and a rubrik for what story the film is supposed to share and how we're meant to feel, but maybe not.
You never get to see the action there. Just the finished product.
I think this may actually be two different things. Much like how being good at coding doesn’t mean it’s fun to watch you code. Though there are “performance” coders where it really is!
These reward the artistry of the output of the edits, not the productivity of the editors.
> wonder if there are video editting competitions?
Yes - but they've turned into something I'd really rather not watch: https://www.opus.pro/agent/human-creator-vs-ai
Or any users for that matter. The familiar "I can't see how anybody can stand to use Excel" is too widespread to be dismissed as a fluke.
There is a head to head CAD guy on Youtube. I wish I could remember his name, I’ll look it up and update this post.
Does Microsoft gain useful information about product UX from this? Wondering if any Excel PMs watch this and see where micro-optimizations are made.
Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).
This is obviously 99% marketing. Microsoft/Waggener Edstrom tend to be really good at getting mainstream media to report on the marketing activities.
Example: For many Windows launches since Windows 3/95, there's been this media splash where Microsoft spends x million dollars on marketing and mainstream media then reports this, thereby getting (like) 100x millions worth of exposure.
Excel is not "complete" until they stop forcibly converting long strings of numbers into scientific notation - or at least give me a sheet-specific way to turn it off. I know how to stop it on my machine, but I have shared documents where if any one of the 16+ other users forgets, then it's messed up for everyone.
Let alone the date issues.
At one point I did a deep dive on one or the other of these "quirks", and the earliest request for exactly the fix I want is from nineteen-eighty-fricking-five. Unbelievable.
Yes, there will be edge cases. They need to balance historic compat vs one more fricking setting checkbox. I am thinking that you will never see this solved.
From 2020: "Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385)
Exactly. They couldn't really change it even if they wanted to. The implementation with all of its warts and quirks is now the standard.
They've now made a change in that at least when you open a csv it now asks you beforehand if you want your data transformed, eg converting strings to numbers where that loses leading zeros.
> Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).
What does that mean? Microsoft stopped developing new features? You think it was feature-complete?
The entire Microsoft Office suite pretty much had every feature that users need by 1997. It's just been UI refreshes ever since.
Wrong.
Excel has had huge changes that made it much more powerful a lot more recently than that.
def 2 decades - 2023 was the best version and it has been downhill ever since
I'll admit, on occasion having more than 65k rows is helpful but generally that's the domain of a database, not excel and it wasn't a good tradeoff IMO
*2003, probably?
not OP, but yes - the limit was raised long time ago
Looks a bit like vimgolfing [0]
[0] https://www.vimgolf.com/
I had no idea this was real. Fascinating. I'm curious: anyone plugged into the scene know if it's organic or if it was created as a marketing thing by Microsoft?
Obligatory Krazam sketch: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY?si=h6QR2gzac48R6kca
From my understanding it wasn't started or ran by Microsoft. They have Microsoft listed as the first sponsor on their main website, for what it's worth.
https://fmworldcup.com/
Pretty sure it started as a joke and evolved into a real thing. I actually won an Excel spreadsheet in High School quite a long while ago. Makes me wonder if I should try out...
I envy the programmers of Excel. What a beautiful coding task to work on.
Any link to the problems that were being solved?
why is it important to mention where he is from?
You know what they say about the Irish and spreadsheets…
If you want to know what God thinks of spreadsheets, just look at the company He let build them.
So BBC is quickly turning into an AI slop lake. The article text is stretched so much to fit 10 ads, with the real content tucked away only at the end.
Good to see that AI slop would inundate and suffocate these media houses.
Prove AI was involved.
If AI was not involved, it is even worse. Then a human author is teasing the reader with a low density content stretched to accommodate 10 ads.
Come Feel The Heat With These Great Feats of Spreadsheets lol
Edit: Of course, they changed the title! [1]
[1] https://share.google/qJYSGYMKihkjh7bql
I don’t understand how a Microsoft team that respects its customers (and maintains shortcuts) can co-exist in an org that sees their customer as marks.
Possibly messing with the guys who handle the money make for the loudest complaints
It's almost as though organizations are made of human beings who have complicated relationships, differing opinions, and nuanced thinking.
I had a negative view of MS when I was young. Then I got jobs at large orgs managing IT for 1000s of people. I don't know how else you'd do it without the Microsoft stack. I'm not saying you can't, but good luck managing whatever custom ball of knots you manage to come up with and also finding people to work on it for you. If you think open office and some kind of custom IAM solution will work, you just don't have the experience to have an opinion on it, IMHO.
My employer has thousands of employees across six countries, runs complex, multi-billion-dollar supply chains, and somehow manages just fine without the Microsoft stack.
How big is the IT department and budget?
Hang on, what do you complain about if Teams BS isn’t wasting your day?
> I don't know how else you'd do it without the Microsoft stack
Just fine. Maybe better.
> Hang on, what do you complain about if Teams BS isn’t wasting your day?
I've never experienced Teams but Google Chat can be infuriating. Something as basic as showing a notification when a new message arrives does not work reliably. Searching chats is broken in bizzare ways. Add to that the constant UI changes.
Then there is PANW Global Protect which randomly stops working and also the Croud Strike agent that decides to hog CPU. Workday, Concur and annoying in their own ways but it's not too bad because I only have to use them infrequently.
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