I thought I was barely competent at excel. Then co-workers started saying how great I am at it, and I realized ...wow, a ton of people have no idea how to use Excel even though it's an essential part of their job.
I was conducting job interviews once and someone claimed they were advanced at excel. I asked, partly of curiosity and partly to amuse myself what types of advanced functions they are familiar with. I wasn’t impressed lol
I’m decent with it, good enough for what I need for my job but I know there’s a level above me.
When I was interviewing people to work in my group I would ask the question, "What is your favorite Excel function or formula?"
It's an odd question that I know they wouldn't be prepared for / have some stupid canned response for, but would also provide some insight into how knowledgeable they were.
When I interview people for roles that require advanced Excel skills I ask them to rate themselves 1-10.
Anyone who says 8 or higher just told they don't know very much about excel. If you think you've mastered excel more than likely you have been swimming in a small tributary of a massive river and never even understood how deep things can go.
I will sometimes follow up with something like ' when would you use hlookup instead of vlookup? '. Only one person has given the best answer - "never, use xlookup. It doesn't require the index to be left or above the data you want to find."
Almost no one who rates themselves an 8 or higher has heard of hlookup. If I try to give a hint like "the v stands for vertical" I get a blank stare while they try to contemplate a paradigm in which records can be stored horizontally.
Anyone who says 8 or higher just told they don't know very much about excel. If you think you've mastered excel more than likely you have been swimming in a small tributary of a massive river and never even understood how deep things can go.
In fairness every once in a while you do meet someone who has a pretty solid understanding of VBA, and by extension, can make excel do crazy things.
Anyway, it also depends on what you want to use excel for. People who know how to use it for database purposes and people who know how to use it for, say, financial modeling tend to have wildly different skillsets.
Yup, that's me - I would be an 8 or a 9 based on what I was doing when I was using Excel. The thing is, anyone who is an 8 or a 9 and doing complicated ETL, Power Query or M language or VBA UDFs also very quickly realizes that by the time they reach that level, that there's a 99% chance that there are much, much better tools to use other than Excel at that point.
There are, but the executives will never let us get them and instead implement there own version of excel thst is web based and "user friendly" which is code for dumbed down.
I would love to be able to use SAP scripting instead of exporting reports to use VBA, but the tech wizards refuse.
So now I have to manually request an entire separate computer to do something that SAP can already do because 'reasons'.
But hey, as long as no one unplugs the special pc, Excel VBA can press many buttons on SAP and they get to call it 'Automation', as long as the screen dimensions dont change, or SAP doesn't lag, or no one changes the SAP layouts, or, or, or...
Seriously, I can't ever remember the syntax for VLOOKUP or whatever without looking at docs, but I can sure as shit come in swinging with some PQ lol
We have one weird workflow where we load some data into a PBI dataflow, which is then brought into an Excel workbook via PQ, which then has some additional transforms done. Then the workbook is set to auto-refresh when opened. It's pretty straightforward on our end, but when we showed it to the end user his head damn near exploded.
I have no clue why it HAD to be an Excel file, but whatever 🤷♂️
Hah, that's not weird, that's my janky ass trying to dodge paying more $$ while dragging our npo out of the stone age. I'm trying to teach my coworkers how to refresh data themselves at least so we don't have workbooks trying to refresh on open like that. No success so far, but I can dream...
Discovering Power Query during COVID was a game changer for us. Of course then I discovered how bad it is when used with Sharepoint - loading ALL the files in a document library before filtering down to the folder is… a choice. But it’s still magical, finally solving the issue of importing CSV files with phone numbers without removing the 0 prefixes alone was worthwhile (I used to use VBA to do it).
I've used Excel for HR documentation checklists, for mail merge Christmas card labels, for payroll, audits, and discovering things in number theory. Those are just the ones I can recall off the top of my head; it's my favorite video game at this point, after Morrowind.
I used the solver to build consecutive seating charts at an offsite so that people sat with a mixed group and not the same people as the session before. I’ve also used solver to win my F1 fantasy league the last three years.
If you need multiple columns, Index-Xmatch is much more efficient because you can place the Xmatch into a helper column and reference it multiple times.
Depends on the size and complexity of the dataset you need to do the lookup. Xlookup is syntactically and operationally very easy to use, but it incurrs quite the computational overhead. I think in testing it requires something like double the computation time as index/match. For a couple thousand lines, the time difference is negligible. But once you get into multiple tens of thousands of lines, with multiple lookups, or worse, multi-variable boolean lookups, index/match becomes much more attractive just to keep your workbook from chugging after every click.
If I'm doing something that big and need to stay in Excel, that's when I use power query and just tell people to "hit the refresh button, no, not the Essbase refresh button, the other one."
Works to do things like pick the nth item in a list. Use filter() to get an array of all of the items that match your criteria, and then use index to select the nth item.
i do the same when interviewing people. People claim to be an 8 who can't even pivot or use xlookup. I rank myself a 7.5 and i use powerpivot, powerquery, can datamine an erp directly into excel etc. I've built complex formulas that are 10 rows deep on the formula bar that automate most of my accounting activities. Excel is 100% the program that defines 'the more you know, the less you know'
It becomes a case of you are forgetting functions of Excel about as fast as you learn about new functions. A function that you found to solve a specific problem three years ago is now completely lost, besides the nagging sensation that you definitely know there is something, but you cannot, for the life of you, remember how to do it.
Yeh, been there on that one too. Anyone who says they're an 8 or higher is actually a 2. If they say they're a 4 or 5, then they're actually better than 96% of people, and understand the true vastness of data wizardry you can do in Excel.
But if your a 6 or 7, you stop using Excel and start doing real data wizardry. At the very least a touch of Python and use a real database.
I’m curious if you further define the range with a statement like 1-Minimal Experience and 10-Fully Mastered. I’ve gotten pretty good at Excel over the last couple years. Probably better than most of the people I have worked with at my current job, and I’m not sure how I’d answer that question in an interview (def not 10). Like a five for you might signify having a good grasp of it, but others might interpret it as average, and the average users in my experience don’t have that great a grasp of what it can do and how to use it.
MMULT()! You can use Excel to do some really wild stuff. Just don't ask me to do any of that VB or database stuff with it, I pretty strictly use it as a calculator.
And oddly i'm not joking. Appscript and bigquery destroy anything you can build in excel. You just cant use it the way people use excel. Its really shit at that.
When the lookup is horizontal instead of vertical?
The one that always got me is the array formulas that required a magic key combination. Like conceptually simple but damn, I'd always screw something up and have to look it up.
I'd hate that question though. Compared to normal people? I'm like a 35. Compared to that one dude in accounting who writes custom macros just because he can? maybe a 6. I mean, I don't flinch at pivot tables or anything, but I know what a 10 actually looks like. The problem is I don't know whether YOU know what a 10 looks like.
The best/most useful and time saving feature of excel are the Tables, which elevate any formula assuming you understand how to work with data sets rather than just data points.
Within the context of Tables, the [AGGREGATE]IFS set of functions become the workhorses.
Pivot tables are only for summarising an existing dataset. The real work is in building the underlying dataset so it can be easily expanded as new data arrives, in an obvious and maintainable way. Structured datasets with calculated columns that can be referenced via a sensible, configurable naming convention that auto expand with new rows are a fantastic tool for this.
Unless you're directly ingesting some ugly external data into your workbook, Power Query in Excel is usually monumental overkill. Also makes for much harder to maintain workbooks for anyone that doesn't want to deal with the point and click interface or learn M code.
Did you interview me because I got that question once in an interview and loved it. I had to think about it for a few seconds, gave an answer and was able to explain why it was my favourite, how I use it currently, etc. didn’t get the job but it was a good question to weed out pretenders!
Is save as csv an acceptable answer? Excel is great for simple shit since it's WYSIWYG, but for actual (non-accounting) work, python is so much better. Or r, though I'm a noob at r.
It's an odd question that I know they wouldn't be prepared for / have some stupid canned response for, but would also provide some insight into how knowledgeable they were.
And here I'd be, if that was sprung on me, going "hm well good old QUOTIENT() and MOD() sure are handy! You never know when a bit of simple math can save the day!" and failing the interview because that doesn't impress anybody, but they sure are my favorites, and when you ask me unexpected questions you get fucking weird answers. Everything else is situational depending on what kind of spreadsheet I need, but those are evergreen.
It's simple, but the number of times I've saved somebody else's day with a simple function and a few table references and some ifs is shocking.
Llamdas are too infrequently used, and suffer from excel's horrid inability to process a filtered subset of a range in many of its more useful functions makes most things you'd want a llamda for to be more flexible as a macro.
It's not really specific functions but rather how to craft well built excel files. Understanding of how to take advantage of properly structured data or how to use excel to clean up and use poorly constructed but consistent data.
Also, how quickly they can navigate an excel sheet without ever touching mouse.
I think a lot of it is being efficient and knowing how to identify and solve problems quickly. I spend a lot of my working time coding in Excel VBA, and I find it's sometimes difficult for me to try to articulate in interviews when asked about my Excel level, because while it's my strongest skill, most jobs are not explicitly looking for this skillset. I usually tell them that I can write macros to automate basically any manual, routine thing needed to be done in excel. Validating/cleaning/auditing data, nested formulas, importing or exporting files, and - if they ask for it - pivot tables can all be automated into a click of a button if I first understand the manual walkthrough of their process and the rules/logic involved. My value proposition is to get a team past the busywork of downloading and cleaning data and getting to the part which requires the human work, which is the analyzing.
In my limited experience, pivot tables are super overrated and hardly used, but everyone likes knowing that you know what they are and how to use them.
A lot of job descriptions will mentioned VLookup, which I like to use as an opportunity to show off that I know Xlookup, which basically obsolesces VLookup. It kind of proves that I know what I'm talking about, that I'm comfortable with formulas, and that I keep up with the regular Excel 360 updates.
The quiet part about being "Advanced" is really just knowing how to look up an answer when you don't know it. For example, let's say you have a column of data that was formatted as "[Last Name], [First Name]". We need to split that into two separate columns, a First Name and a Last Name. Nowadays we have Textbefore and Textafter, but back then I had to look up "excel cell text before string", find the clever trick that solves my problem, and copy the formula. I think it was a mix of using LEFT or RIGHT and FIND, which searched for the position of ", " as the delimiter. I never remembered that formula by heart, but I know how to quickly access that information should I ever need it.
Edit: The quieter part about being "Advanced" is automating so much of your job that you hardly do anything. Shh!
Advanced, to me, would be people who have shortcuts memorized to the point that their hands never leave the keyboard to touch the mouse because that would simply be inefficient for them.
Mind you, I am not in any way advanced at all - shortcuts or VBA coding.
I would consider myself good enough. Able to use V and X Lookups, do nested If statements, cell value conditionals for color coding, etc. Nothing too crazy and would still require me to spend a decent bit of time on it because it's just not something I do all the time or even that frequently.
Ugh.. I had an entry level finance interview like that years ago. The interviewer asked me to write out a macro or lookup on a whiteboard. I didn’t claim to be a good excel user and I did know how to do those but I’d have to play around with the formulas on the computer in Excel. But to write it down? It was brutal and the look of pleasure on the interviewer’s face as I stumbled through made me incredibly nervous. Of course I didn’t get the job which ended up being fine because the investment firm collapsed in 2008.
Instead of promoting me, my old boss hired someone outside of the company to be my lead that I had to train. One out of several issues with this person that became clear very soon, her resume said she was efficient in excel. She didn't know how to copy and paste.
I would teach excel at work and it took a while to get the lessons basic enough that folks who claimed they were good with computers knew what to do. Something as basic as “selects cell A1” would be met with blank stares. “Highlight column F”. Crickets. “Oooooooh, so this right here is called a ‘cell’ and if you look here, this is a column…”. These were “professionals” with college degrees…
I once had a coworker who was definitely paid more than me manage to accidentally turn every cell in the worksheet he was editing into a hyperlink. All the same hyperlink, to one of our internal operations sites. He absolutely panicked and couldn't tell me what he'd done, just that he needed me to undo it. He'd only been working on the file for about five minutes before this happened, so I had him close it without saving and start over. This is tied for first with another coworker as instances of men roughly my age at work being absolutely floored by me providing a very obvious "technical" solution.
We started there. In trying to fix it, he had done a bunch of other stuff before calling me over, and I didnt want to stand there for ten minutes watching him hit ctrl+z over and over again.
The neat bit is that, in excel, it’s a global function. So short of using console magic to force multiple instances of excel, it will undo everything you did in order across multiple different workbooks.
So delete a column in book 1, clear a cell in book 2, overwrite a cell in book 1, format a url as a hyperlink in book 2. Hitting ctrl + z twice in book 2 won’t undo hyperlink, undo clear. It will undo hyperlink, undo overwrite. Because it’s awful.
There are also some changes that undo will simply not find. Forgot what exactly, it's not particularly common, but it can happen. And of course macros are beyond the capabilities of the undo function.
I did that and hit undo. I’m not stupid. Whatever icon I accidentally selected literally changed all the document settings including new ones I created.
It did not work lol whatever I did changed the document entirely. I even started a new document and it was apparently something I selected that changed all the documents primary settings.
You're getting downvoted but I can confirm that there's a lot of things you can do in word that undo does not fix. That function can save a lot of ass, but not all the ass. And it's usually the global setting like styles that are resistant to being reverted, and will haunt you until you manage to figure out what arcane key combination you accidentally hit to cause the trouble.
I had a job where I was known as the "Excel guy" in my department because I knew and taught coworkers things like VLOOKUP and other different things you could do with that software. A year ago I then experienced a major career jump into an analyst type of job at a different company and I'm now known as the guy whose Excel skills are "not the best." The opinion is understandable from their hardcore data analysis vantage point and the fact that I'm still relatively junior in this role, but that reality check brought me some real whip lash.
I have actually taken excel classes, and I would typically say that I am okay at excel. Now it’s been a few years, and it’s very rare for me to need excel, so maybe a little less than okay. But someone at work said they were amazing with excel and then didn’t know how to do something and I had to explain it. I’m not sure they’re aware it’s for more than making charts with numbers/words in rows and columns. I’m sure everyone’s amazing at it if that’s the criteria!
I’m not sure they’re aware it’s for more than making charts with numbers/words in rows and columns. I’m sure everyone’s amazing at it if that’s the criteria!
I'll be honest, even if that's your criteria, i'm dogshit at excel.
I've never had to use it professionally, and was exposed to it a few times in college, but that's about it.
I'm aware that it can do nifty shit, but I'd have to look up some tutorials to use it as anything more than a fancy calculator.
There's just so much to Excel. I used to make all kinds of fancy spreadsheets for probability analysis with tons of layers of equations and functions and conditional formatting as well as writing macros. I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what Excel can do.
Years ago I lied about knowing excel to land a job. I spent the weekend watching YouTube tutorials and hoped I’d be able to fake my way while I continued learning in the evenings; so scared I’d be caught out.
Two weeks in I was the go-to excel expert in my department.
I always say intermediate. Mostly because my coworkers look like I sacrificed a live cat in front of them when I show them any of the basic things I use to make our sheets easier.
Yeah, I think I’m pretty decent. Definitely competent but totally not an expert. But when I see how even my competent coworkers use (or underutilize) spreadsheets, I wonder if I’m maybe actually kind of significantly better than average??
i feel like the average excel user doesnt realize its anything more than digital graph paper. Every job I've ever had that required me to use excel asked me how good I am with excel and I told them I either know or know how to quickly find basic formulas and do basic formatting and that has been more than I have ever needed. Entire businesses have been run on spreadsheets formatted on as-needed vibes and they have the nerve to require excel proficiency for a job created before they even discovered excel can do math.
I considered myself average. Apparently, in terms of the curve, I was told I was way above the average. Of knowledge itself though I was definitely average.
I have met advanced people. They told me they weren’t even the best they knew. I asked the person about those people, she told me they were the 1%ers in the company.
I tried to hire internally for a position, I said please show me strong excel and some other Microsoft skill. I literally did 1 3 9 in an excel sheet. Show me what that outcome would be using autosum. (Auto corrected to autism buy I won't touch that). Out of 6 candidates only one hardworking Mexican kid figured it out. I allowed AI, google. Idc I want to see a result.
Didn't end up hiring the guy but he got promoted in another area.
But 5 out of 6 just added up and did not provide a formula. I was somewhat shocked
Same. Most people at work come to me for help with their excel files, and sometimes it is something as simple as copying and pasting.
A lot of people where I work don't know ctrlC ctrlV exists. And I think no one here knows about ctrlX..
Did you know that there is an annual event called the Microsoft Excel World Championship? They treat it like it's an e-sport, complete with commentators and a row of dudes at computers on a stage.
Here is an article about the most recent winner. The grand prize was $5000, which it says he donated to charity. He also mentions that competitors come from a surprising variety of backgrounds. That being said, it doesn't seem like the type of thing anyone does for the glamorous career opportunities it brings.
Maybe, but from my understanding a lot of the really fancy Excel data wizardry is just comparable to a solidly competent SQL sysadmin in practice. And SQL databases are much, much more robust for handling enterprise levels of data.
I think what makes Excel stand out from database software is how accessible and flexible it is. Anybody can open an Excel file to look at the results or enter data, and it's really easy to create ad-hoc summaries of that data for various purposes, right there in the file.
When used properly, Excel files and databases complement rather than compete with each other imo, especially in larger enterprises. DBAs handle the overall datasets and can mostly focus on how the data is stored and accessed, whereas other employees can pull subsets of the data into Excel and mostly focus on what it actually means.
A DBA usually isn't a replacement for an Excel wizard because the latter isn't just expected to be good at handling data in general. Either they're expected to be educated or experienced in a particular field where they simply use Excel as a tool to do their job, or they're expected to be experts at Excel, specifically, so they can be brought in as consultants/contractors to untangle particularly complex files (or create new complex files that someone else will eventually be brought in to untangle).
I think that's what makes it so good at being the jack of all trades. It's flexible enough to be used for marketing's quick and dirty party budget plan, and for IT's database-that-isn't-really-a-database, but an excel file is just that: a collection of cells laid out alphabetically and numerically that just happen to contain data.
During my undergad we were required to use Matlab for various classes, and I could see the depth and craziness that you can do with such a thing but it always felt like bringing a nuclear weapon to a water gun fight.
During my PhD I pretty much exclusively used Excel for data wrangling and qtiplot for actually making graphs. Excel is just really good at data manipulation for people who aren't CS experts. I'm a chemist with computer skills, and my Python is extremely basic. My C is... one of my only failed courses, but Excel is a tool I can use effectively to do what I need.
I'm not in academia any more, and now work in education, and I still use Excel all the time. The functions I lean on have just changed a little.
In practice they also tend to go hand in hand with subject-matter expertise within a given field. The job market for someone who is only an Excel expert is pretty small afaik, but if you're an Excel expert within a field where that lets you work faster or do things your colleagues can't, it can be a huge benefit.
I have sometimes wondered how one gets on this. They published a bunch of thr challenges a while back and I could do some of them pretty easily but quite slow on others.
Anyone who says they're an excel expert is almost always barely intermediate. People who actually know excel know that they have just scratched the surface.
when I was 17 I took a Office extracurricular and got a bunch of certificates. My teacher thought it was enough to get me into a serious event. Got teamed with a couple guys that I never met and we randomly decided what to do between Excel, Power Point and World. We later found out that every member of the other teams coordinated and only studied one of the three in depth, we just winged it. I had to do Power Point, scored something like 550/1000 while the well prepared teams were up in the 900-975 range. The poor guy from our team who had to do Excel scored ~400. It was humiliating to say the least. The three of us got extremely high grades in the certification exams but the knowledge required to compete in such events was 1000 levels above whatever we thought we knew
There an organization called the Financial Modeling World Cup, which hosts events that are based around using Excel to answer increasingly complex questions regarding some kind of dataset. Competitors have a time limit and earn points for each correct answer that they produce. One of the events they run is called the Microsoft Excel World Championship.
Well that's just your opinion. There's was a time where Visual Basic was the only means of extending Excel's functionality beyond the program. Those days are done. Flowing data into and out of Excel have many methods now, and security and version control has made VBA add-in much less desirable.
Excel is awful for version control in general, this isn't isolated to VBA.
And for a long time, VBA has been the only real option if you want scripting inside an Excel workbook. Of course you can script from outside the workbook, e.g. Python, but at that point you probably should be considering a database instead of Excel anyway.
By the time your Excel workbook needs vba, you should probably be doing something else for that report.
Most of the scenarios I've seen could be solved through Power Query, using another tool like PBI, or just straight up getting better at writing functions. ESPECIALLY if you're trying to use Excel itself as a database....
The real skill test is how effective they can work without a mouse.
I automated away an entire third of my responsibilities with VB macros through Excel at an old job.
I had to generate weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports. How it was explained to me was "Oh, grab these metrics, make this graph, set these settings, align it so that it's perfect with last month's graph, do 200 other steps, etc. Should take you about 2 hours per report."
Yeah I just had it do all of that in VB. It took like 3 seconds to run once I pasted the data into the sheet. I'd submit like 2-3 of them per day and my boss was like "Wow! You're really good at these reports!" but in reality I was copy-pasting data from one program, running the macro, and then watching two episodes of Breaking Bad on my phone.
I am advanced enough to code in vba but avoid it at all costs. There is almost no good reason to do vba 99% of the time. If you need to code, you are better off having a proper IT department automate the function behind the scenes.
I agree, but would take that one step further. If someone says they’re an expert in anything, they usually aren’t. Real experts have been around long enough to be humbled.
I’ve met one true excel expert in my life - my first boss in my first engineering internship back in 2006.
He had regular calls with excel devs at Microsoft to discuss all the bugs he’d find over the course of a week. He didn’t care about getting paid/credit… he just needed it to work.
Anyone who says they're an excel expert is almost always barely intermediate
A part of me thinks one of the root causes of this is how HR works. HR doesn't want intermediate excel users, they want Advanced Users, to do data entry.
Just like they want 5 years of experience in the latest technology that came out 2 years ago.
People who are experts at Excel keep their damn mouths shut. If they don't, they are now responsible for maintaining every report and VBA script in the department for free.
As someone who has worked in IT for over 20 years, I wish no one was good at Excel. If you are "good at excel" the chances that you're using it for something that excel should absolutely not be used for is almost 100%. You'd be amazed how many companies are operating on a ludicrously bloated excel workbook that takes 20 minutes to load and should have been converted into a real DB-driven app 15 years ago, all because one guy in the office is "good at excel". Everything in excel that's considered "advanced" is shit nobody should do in excel. Learn a real programming language and a real database instead.
I think it's less about using it as a solution to every problem and more about it being the best tool available to a given user base. I've worked at multiple companies in various roles over the last 20 years. One thing is consistent - IT roadblocks.
When I worked in Operations, we would use Excel because IT wouldn't prioritize our requests and by the time they got around to it (usually 6-9mo later), we would have a new process in place and battle tested using Excel. And then IT would say "well, you have a solution already, so we'll continue to deprioritize" or cancel the request all together.
In other roles, you'd ask IT for something and they would either ignore you or flat out deny your request. I currently sit in a hybrid role between IT and Ops, so I get to help push them away from Excel (since I have access to better tools), while also building new Excel files for them because it's honestly easier and better than building a custom app for a single task.
I have seen it multiple times where a guy had hacked up multiple spreadsheets. Ugly but it worked and could be updated in minutes. Then IT came in and suddenly they had to write requirements, issue tickets and pray that the IT gods get to it eventually. Suddenly every change takes 3 months, costs boatloads of money or will just be ignored. But life moves on and things need to be done, so what's the solution to do your job? Hack up a spreadsheet
Yeah this is pretty accurate. Excel's strength is that it's on everyone's computer already and so long as IT hasn't blocked macros it lets you write (slow ugly) scripts to interrogate a database and process the data or whatever, and run it anywhere without the nightmare of installing new apps in a controlled environment.
My problem is I inherited a workbook that my entire team depends on and it really is so bad I have to turn the calcs to manual. My processes are so slow because all of our workbooks were built by idiots and since my processes are so slow I don’t have time to fix them. It’s a nightmare and anytime I make progress they say I need to add more dumbass exceptions to the data.
It’s such a shit show spread over multiple files I don’t know where to start.
I was so happy about a year and a half ago when, to start FY 2025 reporting, they gave me 7 business days to just rebuild as much as I can from the ground up (I pitched a comprehensive plan to them and got approved).
I know your pain.
The only reason I was allowed to do that was because somebody handling a mission critical report for investors quit and when I took over to roll it forward I noticed he was missing material amounts of revenue reporting due to formula errors and I had to present that to the board of directors and explain to the very not-tech-literate CEO what happened.
There's threshold cases where it didn't make sense to be a DB 10 years ago, but it's not worth the tooling to fix now because it's not a value add to do so even if it takes a minute to load.
The alternative to Excel is letting some "professionals" setting up something that costs 50 times as much and every change takes 3 months and more money instead of doing it in 5 minutes.
You're also assuming the business is big / slow moving enough for you to spend more than a half a day finding answers to questions that haven't been asked before
agreed with this. By the time i explain the requirements, test and retest, i could've done it myself in 1/3 the time and make a workable permanent solution. Not to mention if the data set changes at all, i then have to call up a "professional", wait for their availability, redo the requirements etc. All the while the big boss needed an answer a week ago.
as the guy who was that "professional" (was given that responsability, it wasnt my job) i rarely had time to fix the stuff you needed, as i had my own job to do beside being that professional lol.
our complience guys are still in excel after 2 years
This is the crunch that I kept running into. I started working with a new team and their data was... well I wouldn't even call it data. They had a lot of information stored in a lot of spreadsheets. There was no one complete and correct source for anything. I have no idea how they were operating that way.
I started pulling together some unified data resources and it was immediately clear that they needed a proper database/CRM system. Just working off of two or three master spreadsheets was so precarious.
I work for a big international company so nothing is straightforward. I enquire about what would need to happen to get this working and an amalgamation of the answers I got was "it will take ay least 2 years, it will require licenses to be bought - but we don't know which ones - and we won't know how much the whole thing will cost until after we have committed to the project. Somewhere between £500 and £12.5K."
And it was immediately clear that I was not even close to being senior enough to make any decisions, or even take part in the conversations about all this... but also that absolutely everyone who WAS senior enough had no clue whatsoever what I was talking about.
So after 6 months I just gave up. There has been a LOT of meetings and all they had generated was more meetings.
And I just built something that combined excel and Alteryx in ways which are hard for low level users to permanently fuck up. Is it good? No. It's a cardboard-and-tape version of the spaceship I would like to fly. But it's better than just sitting on the carpet eating paste, which is where we were at before.
We did end up engaging an internal tech facilitation team to build us a couple of tools in PowerAutomate (because I'm not allowed to have a licence to do that myself at this place) but both cost quite a lot, neither tool worked, and everyone who built them had left within 6 months so we just went back to doing the tasks manually.
Such a massive, massive waste of time and money. So tiring. I have got to get a different job.
Don't forget the part where the suggested "proper" solutions has to come with feature cuts left and right because "that's not how we do things".
I get that Excel is a somewhat amateurish approach to this whole programming thing, but good god is it impossible to get the average IT person to understand that sometimes amateurish is good enough and that sometimes you don't need to turn every gimmick into a full blown companywide project, involving 20 people and taking half a year to finish - and in the end no one's using the damn thing because they can no longer just easily get a sum across 3 random numbers like they could in Excel for the last 50 years. But hey, at least you done dided the proper programming thing.
I'm good enough to know that we should not be using excel for the things we are using it for....
But I also know that management is never going to a)pay for b)deal with switching to a proper database or tracking system. "But Excel has always worked fine?"
So I do what I can to fix the formulas and macros of those before me, and slowly move certain aspects to different tools, and implement as much data validation as I can.
You shouldn't do this if you're going to be fired for it, but most Microsoft machines come with an extremely outdated[1] C# compiler in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET. I may or may not have taken advantage of this to write a few thousand lines of code in undergrad (in Notepad... couldn't install any other text editors, lol) to automate my technician job and spend my shifts doing homework.
Unfortunately it doesn't have a SQLite DLL included in it, so you don't get a database. But you can get pretty far with plain old data structures.
[1] v4.0.30319 on my machine, predating all of .NET Core. It's still good enough for government work!
This is me. Made a big ol complex excel "tool". I also made a power bi tool that interfaces with it and other databases and allows inputs and all that which performs the same function.
Problem is nobody else on my team knows how to use and update the power bi tool and they are just functional enough in excel to keep the excel tool going. So that's what we are stuck with unless I want ro do everything (and I dont).
VBA is part of Excel and is very much a 'real' programming language, it just doesn't include a full compiler and linker- but you can copy/paste into an environment that does. Not to mention the Excel C API is still around so you can use a long list of programming languages in Excel for a back end.
Yep and if you try use it anywhere I work you'll find it is blocked so hard.
It's a huge security risk and universally not the right tool for what you're doing for a great many IT reasons. If you are using Excel as any kind of "back end" you have fucked up beyond words and businesses have died over less.
My employer doesnt allow any VBA in shared excel files due to security reasons. You can use it for yourself but if anyone else tries to use it all the VBA functions are blocked. Basically makes Access useless, too.
You'd be amazed how many companies are operating on a ludicrously bloated excel workbook that takes 20 minutes to load and should have been converted into a real DB-driven app 15 years ago, all because one guy in the office is "good at excel".
The fight I am having with my manager. Especially frustrating because previously the company had been running off a giant excel sheet. It finally got turned into a proper database and everything improved by leaps and bounds. But my manager wants to put everything back into excel because he knows how to open an excel document.
I translate it in my head to “unwilling to use the right tool for the job”
In my experience, it's because excel is on every computer in a company, and the software they should be using isn't.
It's easier to cram excel into a square shaped hole than it is to get the appropriate software through the byzantine proper channels.
Unfortunately, this has been my experience. We don't always have the luxury of long term solutions, and Excel tends to be the path of least resistance, or at the very least a band-aid solution while waiting.
I used to work at a hospital, and their entire financial info was kept on series of excel spreadsheets all linked to eachother. Then they always complained their computers were so slow because it took like 30 minutes to open the spreadsheets. It made me so scared knowing 1 corrupted excel file would bring down the whole hospital.
This was me. Back in the mid-90s I automated the underwriting/quoting function of a small insurance company using Excel. Incorporated all the pricing/data tables, data input, calculations, and whatever else (it's been a while) and exported a printable and faxable (it's been a while) estimate. We did it because the actual underwriting software was too slow for all the quotes that sales was generating.
I came here to say this. When I was working, I made some pivot tables and my boss was impressed. I thought to myself, please don’t ask me to do anything sophisticated, then you’ll know how very, very little I know.
You know what is the other main benefit? I can make an Excel pivot table presentable to a senior executive in seconds.
Trying to clean up formatting in Power BI just sucks so, so much. Just endless clunky formatting menus, with options buried in the absolute most unintuitive places.
I've moved to power query and creating Power BI dashboards to make the data more 'user friendly' to digest as they were still confused by pivot tables.
What's crazy about this is my boss will tell me I am The Excel wizard. She buys me Excel gifts. I mean, I live and love Excel, but I KNOW there is a lot more for me to learn. That gap is interesting. When you know more, you learn how much more there is to learn. I think that's life.
Learning Excel is a bit like climbing a mountain. You eventually get high up enough to see that there is actually a second, much bigger mountain behind the one that you've been climbing. It gives you a new perspective of just how far you have to go yet everyone below you still thinks you're really close to the top.
It can make interviews a bit awkward when you have to puzzle out if "advanced" Excel user really does mean advanced, or if it just means... VLOOKUPS
i’m a graphic designer and feel this way about indesign, which is basically the excel of the design world.
i’d consider myself pretty solidly in the top quarter of users, maybe 10/15%, in terms of general knowledge, but jesus christ the users who are in the top 1-5% are literal wizards.
This was my instant response. I thought I was an Excel God. I ran circles around everyone in Excel, all the time, in every company i worked for. Got hired into a Fortune 100 and met Excel Jesus in my own unit of 180ish people. Buddy ran circles around me without even trying. Turns out, he was the #1 Excel guy in our whole ass division.
I used to tell people proudly I knew about half of Excel, now I tell people I know around 9% of it. And that’s after apprenticing with Excel Jesus for 5 years. I would literally go and sit in his office and we would talk Excel for hours on end.
I took a whole Excel class in college (was an aspiring administrative assistant), and I use it for all kinds of stuff that baffles my coworkers, but honestly most of the time I'm googling how to do the thing I want and tailoring it to my needs.
You’d be amazed. My org uses copilot extensively and actively promotes it. I use it myself on stuff I’ve done but cbf remembering and endlessly on VBA now.
Yet still we run manual reports, and format manually. What good is a copilot output if you can’t interpret the formula it gives you at all. I get asked why the numbers became hashes ffs.
I agree entire jobs would go if anyone had half a clue.
I have the dreaded 'Excel wizard' reputation at work. They all act like I'm some sort of all-knowing God, when in reality I know XLOOKUP, Pivot Tables, conditional formatting, and some very basic Power Query stuff. I'm clueless about macros, VBA, and all the other stuff Excel can do. Hell, I can't even remember the syntax for most formulas - I just use the function button to fill it out for me.
Then I saw my coworker trying to calculate something in Excel by pulling her phone out and typing the numbers in her calculator, then typing the result into Excel. The average person really does know next to nothing about it.
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u/ThreeJax 1d ago
Excel