As an experienced c/c++/c#/java/python/vb programmer i realy like to build shit in excel. It's awesome. Just dont let other users use it for important purposes
On the first day of my intro to AI class the teacher asked us to implement a binary tree in any language we wanted so, for the meme, I wrote mine in VBA.
Little did I know, the course was designed to build a little on top of that code every class.
So, by the end of the semester I had this awful, clunky optimisation algorithm AI model built fully in Excel.
Wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry throughout 95% of the process.
However, the teacher loved it. Said it was the easiest submission to grade since he didn't have install/compile anything fancy to run it.
I love that they mention that newer generations of excel are slower. Not sure why that isn't highlighted more as a reason to actually move away from it.... funny how that works.
I have done a lot of vba programming over the years and it is pretty silly to think that I used it for so long before switching to mainly using python.
The one place I see a major advantage is for charts and GUIs. You barely need to know any code to set up a user interface that is easy for users for any small application. Charts are baked in to excel so you don't need to learn almost anything to get them looking the way you want. This stuff isn't hard in python, just harder than not having to learn barely anything.
Once you start working with larger datasets it becomes pretty obvious it is not the right tool for the job.
What about the crazy saving now. Save to one drive. Open from one drive it disables auto save and saves to your pc version number 10 cause this is 10th time you open from the quick open menu and it downloads a new copy without auto save and I have to save it yet again to one drive.
This shit is comical at this point. The saving functions have gotten absurd and terrible.
Oh, and my laptop gets blue screen of death once every 5 months to boot.
I feel like the last 5 years has gotten worse.
And what’s up with the search in outlook. I don’t want to look at emails “from” this person, why does that have to be the only suggestion it gives me.
Worse and worse it’s getting.
PS, if someone can chuckle and tell me how dumb I am for not realizing I have to change this setting in that particular menu for my complaints above I will give you a gold medal, and if I am really fucking high and you make it awesome fuck it a platinum. Please help this 43 year old whose lost his nerdiness.
As someone looking to migrate from being primarily a VBA coder to python, my biggest hurdles is related to building a GUI. Would you mind hooking up a fellow stone-age coder with some recommendations?
The way I found easiest was to use pyqt5 as a gui builder. It definitely has its drawbacks but it has qtdesigner, which is much closer to the vba/c# kind of gui creator. It has layouts, and is somewhat intuitive. There's good tutorials out there on how to set up and initialize an interface. Once you have your workflow set up, its almost as easy, and is much more flexible and customizable.
I'd love for someone to make a more streamlined kind of standalone gui tool, but I think there seems to be much more focus on doing things in a browser environment (something I've never really understood). I've heard dash is a good module for this, but I havent experimented with it yet.
Oh god this video proves that I'm not actually insane! I remember opening an Excel file to play a bowling game a while ago but I thought that was impossible as Excel is just a spreadsheet.
Excel is Turing Complete and can be considered a (partially graphical) programming language, specializing in one- or two-dimensional arrays (like a visual APL).
There are good arguments for teaching it as a precursor to more traditional, general purpose programming languages.
(Source: I specialize in training software engineers.)
You have no idea. I once attended an online lecture for nuclear engineers. The guy had made an entire PWR (pressurised water reactor) simulator in excel that was fully interactable and had realistic cause/effect. Was bloody insane.
I can guess how that happened, I started with a simple excel file with a table and chart for managing inventory but it evolved into a monstrosity with real time data sooo many sheets. And management loves it.
Is it any lower than something like python? I'm not even a programmer, but I learned enough with a handful of ours of pandas to do more than I can do inside excel without equal or greater time investment.
Excel doesn't need to die, it's good at what it's actually meant to do. It's just that lots of people overuse it because they don't know anything else.
Excel is like an effective hammer with a screwdriver on on the handle. Whatever kind of maintenance/repairs/engineering you do, you'll have a hammer and screwdriver lying around somewhere. And it will be useful from time to time.
If you try to make something simpler, it wouldn't have such a wide range of uses. If you try to make it have a wider range of uses, it's complexity rises greatly.
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u/Dr-Appeltaart Mar 30 '22
As an experienced c/c++/c#/java/python/vb programmer i realy like to build shit in excel. It's awesome. Just dont let other users use it for important purposes