I shall wrap myself in a spreadsheet.

[Perd Hapley]

Because I've been really interested in computers lately, and because I need more electives for my BA anyhow, I took a couple of classes which involved, among other things, Excel. 

I never thought this would happen to me, but I actually really like making spreadsheets. I actually enjoy manually editing my macros.  What a dork am I. 

Do people actually make/maintain spreadsheets as a full-time job?  'Cause I don't think I would mind that.  At least for a while.

[drewtam]

I find writing good spreadsheets and macros to be one of the most under appreciated job skills a person learns. Its not something that is sexy on a resume, but it certainly helps teams communicate better (Pugh Matrix) or write bill-of materials or all sorts of other really important stuff quicker and more efficiently.

[RocketMan]

If you like editing macros, try some VBA in Excel.

[Brad Johnson]

What a dork am I. 

Yeah, we've known for a while. Just goes to show it takes some folks longer to catch on than others...

Brad

[roo_ster]

fistful:

There is no job classification, MS Excel Spreadsheet & Visual Basic for Applications (Macros) Guru, but many folks' jobs are exactly that.  

MS Excel is a very useful tool, one that has a lot of potential to exhaust before needing to move on to other, more difficult to use and less common tools.

For instance, after you've taken managerial accounting and finance, MS Excel is the tool of choice for any entrepreneurial classes where business cases are analyzed.  It also hleps to have some basic statistics under your belt (appendix of Charles Murray's The Bell Curve being the best primer for laymen I have yet found).

I use MS Excel all the time in my engineering job.  As-is it is a great tool and some add-on packages make it more flexible.  An example being DOE KISS (http://www.sigmazone.com/doekiss.htm).  Some things require a jump to a more robust tool like Matlab.

Some data is not "real" to managers until it is in Excel or Powerpoint.  It is as if plain text files are somehow less substantive.

[Standing Wolf]

Do people actually make/maintain spreadsheets as a full-time job?

Yep. I did back in the 1980s.

The irony is I've always been mathephobic.

I was working as a glorified secretary for a company that made parts for printing presses. A person gave me a bogus copy of Lotus 1-2-3 so I could transmit sales data to headquarters by modem every day instead of mailing in typed lists. I figured out how to do that much; the rest of the program, however, made less than no sense whatever, so I bought a book.

I got laid off, (grow the business by cutting costs,) and went to work for a combination construction company and real estate development operation. By and bye, one of the self-style "architects" asked me for a "little help" with his cost estimating "grid."

I dug down and dug down and dug down, referred to the book I'd bought, and dug down some more. In some while, I ended up with a huge work sheet that did, indeed, let the user toss in lots of individual item costs to estimate totals. As soon as I realized he was adding and subtracting 2.5% increments, it occurred to me to add formulæ to take care of that, and some fraction of a moment later, it occurred to me to add variant formulæ to the whole work sheet. It went from huge to governmental.

Enter macros, which I'd read about, but didn't understand. By and bye, I ended up with a much more compact work sheet with dozens, then hundreds of recirculating, brachiating self-modifying macros that not only handled variables, but paused, generated and printed graphs, reset the work sheet, and fooled around with sub-totals and totals all over again. It was definitely challenging, not in the least because I had to set aside my lifelong mathephobia.

By and bye, I wandered back into marketing and advertising for quite a bit more money, and have done virtually nothing with work sheets since: figured out how to generate halfway presentable graphs with Wingz, (which Microsoft promptly bought and garbaged up and renamed "Excel,") and clean them up with Adobe Illustrator. If it need be said, my mathephobia soon reasserted itself. I can't even do simple ratios today without writing them down on paper. Oh, well!

[Brad Johnson]

Only problem with spreadsheets is they aren't very warm in winter and the patterns don't match my decor.

Brad

[Waitone]

Problem with spreadsheets is they convey a sense of certainty that doesn't exist.  A wall of numbers will never replace solid analysis of underlying factors.  Problem is visual representation of analysis is not as  convenient as a spreadsheet. 

Curse and blessing.

[Hawkmoon]

There is also the issue of choosing an appropriate graph (or "chart," in Excel terminology) type to use. I recently was asked to come up with a way to show graphically the results of concrete compressive strength test results for a large construction project. It was of interest because a significant number of the tests were coming up quite a bit short of the required minimum strength.

So I entered the data into Excel, hit the button for Chart, and out came a graph. Looked all nicey-nice, very professional. I added a heavy horizontal line representing the minimum allowable strength and it was obvious how many sample were okay and how many weren't up to snuff.

Except --

The default "chart" style is a line graph. Each data point is connected by a line to the one before it and the one after it. That's a appropriate if you are showing a trend, or if the data are such that you can interpolate between two data points and obtain a valid value. In the case of concrete break tests, there is no progression. Each test is an item unto itself, and there is no linear interpolation possible between adjacent tests. So I had to poke around and figure out how to change the chart type from a line graph to a scatter graph. That simply plots each data point, making no attempt to connect them and, therefore, no false assumption that interpolation is possible.

I love graphs, when they are done properly. But they are rarely done properly. The "media" are, as usual, prime offenders in this. Watch the news and you'll see all sorts of graphs that appear to show dire comparisons. Bar graphs are favored. You'll see a graph that shows a line 1/4 of an inch high for group A and 3/4 of an inch high for Group B, and the implication is obviously that Group B is three times better (or worse, depending on what's being measured) than Group A.

Until you look at the range. If they're using percentages, they may set the bottom at 80 percent. Group A might be 82 percent, and Group B might be 86 percent. When you drop out the values below 80 percent, the difference looks huge. If you show the entire graph, with zero percent as the base, the difference between 82 percent and 86 percent appears rather insignificant. But the media can't make a big deal out of a graph that doesn't show a compelling case, so they conveniently omit enough of the data range to make the portion they show look more impressive.

Which, of course, is intellectual and journalistic dishonesty, but that's what we expect from the media today anyway, so nobody is even surprised. The sad thing is that a majority of the populace isn't bright enough to notice, so they buy right into it.

[Perd Hapley]

If you like editing macros, try some VBA in Excel.

That's kinda what I was talking about.  I don't know the first thing about Vis. Basic, but once the macro maker generates the code for me, I can figure out how to edit it a little bit, if I need to change something later.


Hey, let's say you made the mistake of formatting as table, to get those pretty alternating colors on your rows.  Then you want to insert a column in the middle of things, and it won't let you.  Whaddya do? 

[Standing Wolf]

Hey, let's say you made the mistake of formatting as table, to get those pretty alternating colors on your rows.  Then you want to insert a column in the middle of things, and it won't let you.  Whaddya do?

Now you know how come it's always a good idea to work on numerous multiple iterations of anything digital. My current novel is numbered 09.238, which is to say: the 238th successive version of the ninth draught. Do I ever have to discard and back up? Yep. My page lay out program accepts Microshaft Word documents. Do I ever have to back up and copy and paste? Yep.

[Perd Hapley]

CopyPaste fail.    (Look at your last post, SW.)

[Standing Wolf]

Yo, fistful!

Thanks, eh? Neither my browser, my mouse, nor my hands work right all the time.

[Perd Hapley]

Oh, I forgot about the cry for help there.  I was looking all around on Google, and didn't find anything.

Turns out it was an easy fix.  There's a sort of fill handle on the bottom right corner of the table.  I just dragged that out to cover an extra column, then cut and pasted everything over one space.  Adjusted formatting, and made sure my formulas made the transition OK.  Good to go. 

[MechAg94]

My first official engineering class at A&M was a lab class in a room full of Intell 386 machines with Windows, Word, and Excel.  I had never used Windows at all before that.  My skills with the Dos version of Word Perfect were limited.  They walked us through basic Word and Excel which I ended up using for reports and such all through school and there after.  The main thing for me is being nosy when working with other people and asking questions when you see them doing something you have never done or doing it in a different way. 

[mellestad]

Because I've been really interested in computers lately, and because I need more electives for my BA anyhow, I took a couple of classes which involved, among other things, Excel. 

I never thought this would happen to me, but I actually really like making spreadsheets. I actually enjoy manually editing my macros.  What a dork am I. 

Do people actually make/maintain spreadsheets as a full-time job?  'Cause I don't think I would mind that.  At least for a while.

Once most companies get large enough to need that kind of full time Excel work they will have some sort of MRP (Microsoft Dynamics,SAP, etc.) software set up and migrate to that for whatever they were using Excel for.  Pure reporting/business intelligence stuff usually ends up on something else as well like Crystal Reports or SQL reporting services.

Certainly looks great on a resume though, Excel is heavily used by most companies for everything from basic tracking to fancy pivot tables and even database reporting.

If that kind of thing is attractive to you take classes in business reporting, business intelligence and database reporting.

[Hawkmoon]

If that kind of thing is attractive to you take classes in business reporting, business intelligence and database reporting.

Looking at the state of the world economy, wouldn't you sort of think that "business intelligence" is somewhat of an oxymoron?

[Perd Hapley]

No, but Congressional intelligence would seem to be.  And voter intelligence.  And media intelligence.  And so on.

[mellestad]

Looking at the state of the world economy, wouldn't you sort of think that "business intelligence" is somewhat of an oxymoron?

In case you were curious, Business Intelligence is one of the current buzz words for data mining and reporting on business data that is usually pulled from databases.

[MicroBalrog]

Some data is not "real" to managers until it is in Excel or Powerpoint.  It is as if plain text files are somehow less substantive.

It is very much the same with military officers, in my experience.

[Tallpine]

I did my first programming in macros in Lotus 123.

I was having so much fun at that, that I decided to take a real programming class.  I found the same logic worked in Pascal but it was much easier.  So I took another CS class, and another, and another....

You might as well just skip ahead to a really useful language like C++ 

[roo_ster]

I did my first programming in macros in Lotus 123.

I was having so much fun at that, that I decided to take a real programming class.  I found the same logic worked in Pascal but it was much easier.  So I took another CS class, and another, and another....

You might as well just skip ahead to a really useful language like C++ 

Oh, now you done it...

fistful:

There is a philosophy in the software coding world to the effect that, "If it's worth coding, it's worth coding in C/C++/Java/FORTRAN/<insert heavy-lifting programming language of choice>."

Another philosophy is, "Match the tool to the problem."  I hew to this philosophy.  Which is why I can code in C/C++/Java/FORTRAN77, I usually accomplish what I need to with faster-to-write shell scripts, awk, sed, (& perl if I need a powerful tool).  Most of my problems include text-parsing.  Using C would be like breaking out my CZ550 in .375H&H Mag to deal with a pesky squirrel.

[Tallpine]

Using C would be like breaking out my CZ550 in .375H&H Mag to deal with a pesky squirrel.

But you have to admit that the result is a blast!   

[roo_ster]

But you have to admit that the result is a blast!   

Oh, yeah.  I do have a thought for a mouse-fart .375H&H load with a round lead ball and some Trail Boss.  I can see myself in teh woods explaining to folk how I am hunting small game with my Safari Magnum.

One of my colleagues would text parse with C.  He did it to maintain proficiency in the language and didn't mind the productivity hit.  I was just too impatient and had to work on too many platforms to use a compiled language.

[Doggy Daddy]

Fortran 77 ?!?

When I was in college, I was introduced to programming with Fortran G.  Does that date me a little?

DD