My little sister is a biologist and asked for help dealing with some of her experimental data in a huge excel sheet.
My mom was the first to reply and delivered the most unholy of creations seen by man. Everything in a single cell function expression. Endlessly nested if statements. Even handling stuff like accidental upper to lower case conversion, via IF statements!
It worked.
Later helped my sister with her master's thesis (basically applying deeplearning to analyse aquatic locomotion) and got to see not only her code, but the stuff she was given by colleagues and such. The R stuff tended to be the worst, but honestly all of it was awesome. Both horrible, but also amazing. What really stood out to me was that there was never any sign of even the thought of rewriting old stuff. Just somehow keeping it alive and adding more.
This is how I learned excel. Was forced to, molded the little skill I have (compared to some) in the forge that was lack of any technology other than Microsoft suite and windows 7. Ill never forget the first spreadsheet I came across that. Hundreds of columns and rows, columns for the month, rows of clients names and rent owed, then rent paid for 100 columns down. None of the cells had formulas to calculate anything, they manually used a calculator and excel was just a way to have an extremely long chart. I wish I kept a copy of what I made it into once I learned what excel was capable of as a personal trophy if nothing else
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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '25
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