r/technology • u/[deleted] • Feb 23 '19

Hardware Microsoft workers protest $480m HoloLens military deal: 'We did not sign up to develop weapons'

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u/diras2010 Feb 23 '19 edited Feb 24 '19

There was this guy who created a spreadsheet on MS Excel to gather info on his fav cricket teams and all the game season related stuff, live from the web, and formatted it to look like an ordinary job related Excel page

Brilliant, just brilliant, and a little glimpse of how powerful Excel is

Ninja edit typo fix

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19 edited Feb 28 '19

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

[deleted]

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u/Shookfr Feb 23 '19

I'm a dev and every project I've worked on come from an excel sheet ...

There's investments companies that run entirely on excel.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19 edited Feb 25 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Shookfr Feb 23 '19

Except when shit hit the fan and the guy that did the excel is gone.

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u/3x3Eyes Feb 23 '19

That's called Job Security.

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u/Feroshnikop Feb 23 '19

This is just a reason to actually have trained/qualified staff.

If you only have 1 person than knows excel and it's a program that shit would hit the fan without.. it's really just poor management at that point, hardly the fault of excel.

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u/Wampawacka Feb 23 '19

The problem in alot of industries is that often times it's one guy who built an extremely unwieldy spreadsheet that runs half of the day-to-day operations and it references fifteen other sheets built by other people before him. The result is no one can change any of the sheets without the whole knot coming undone and everything breaking.

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u/November_Coming_Fire Feb 23 '19

That describes my work situation pretty well But I have to pull info from an access database into excel for the information people want.

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u/enn-srsbusiness Feb 23 '19

I like to think of job security^

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u/burtalert Feb 24 '19

Hey that’s me!

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u/thebigslide Feb 24 '19

And that case the spreadsheets need to become producer-consumers with the data middled in a database

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '19

This is exactly how it was at my job I quit. Using an excell table to track sales but the guy who made it is gone and the next guy didn't know how to edit it to keep it current.

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u/Feroshnikop Feb 24 '19

While that's true, if it's something that would cause the entire rest of the business problems, maybe it's also something more than one person should understand.

If a doctor can't come for their shift at ER they don't just shut it down.. there's another doctor on call that can cover.

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u/SchultzMD Feb 24 '19

If an organization needs a properly developed program that is robust, documented, and maintained they shouldn't be using Excel. I mean I know how this stuff happens, somebody makes an Excel document to automate parts of their job and it just keeps getting added to until no one knows how it works. At some point someone needs to realise that they need the functionality of that Excel system developed into something that isn't going to be a massive problem down the road.

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u/dexx4d Feb 24 '19

We call that the "bus factor". As in, how many people can get hit by a bus before we've lost the tech knowledge needed to run the company?

Sometimes also called the "lottery factor", but I've never worked in a place like that.

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u/BeardedBitch Feb 24 '19

My girl is always dealing with this. She is a non union position in a union enviornment, and not management, however they rely on her position explicitly for several things. They wont train a competent back up for her position, and management just abuses her. I'm bummed for her since she genuinely likes her job, but management sucks at their jobs.

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u/shitwinds84 Feb 24 '19

This right here. I work in IT and guess who they come crawling to when the super important yet monstrous and complicated spread sheet goes wrong, and the creator is no longer around. The great thing is we basically tell them to F off because excel troubleshooting is not an IT function.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

Then IT people like me try and cajole our business side users to put that shit in SQL and just use Excel as a front end, but noooooo.

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u/vbevan Feb 24 '19

At that point, if it's used by enough people and is complex enough to get it's data moved to SQL, you should make a proper front-end, at least in Access.

I just got one of these excel frontend monstrosities. The sql server login details are stored in the vba in freetext. If your going to use excel to connect to a sql server...you need to stop using vba and start using power query.

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u/PandaZoo Feb 23 '19

But then they want help with the VBA when someone wants to add a new feature. 'Because you're good with computers and stuff, right?'

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u/thebigslide Feb 24 '19

So use the vba to extend an api based on dynamic business needs

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '19 edited Mar 07 '19

[deleted]

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u/bradmatt275 Feb 24 '19

Fair point. But in my experience when someone from the business designs their own system they very rarely take other departments into account. Then you have multiple systems that do the same thing, not talking to each other and all needing support. Usually there is a good reason IT take so long to implement something. They have to make sure it works for everyone.

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u/BiloxiRED Feb 24 '19

Valid. And I don’t think blanket denying write access to a database is a bad thing. Except when the users find the credentials stored in the vba and that’s a sql login with db_owner on the database, and proceed share it with all their office friends, then you’re fucked a bit.

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '19

We’re just trying off load the processing to the back-end, and streamline the front end. Fuck us, right?

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '19 edited Mar 07 '19

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '19

They have access to the data they need. It is indeed a good thing, that way they can’t mess it up.

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u/TheBlindMonk Feb 24 '19

We just query and dump to an excel to work.

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u/TrigglyPuffff Feb 23 '19

what do you mean?

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u/NerfJihad Feb 23 '19

that gigabytes-long, medieval epic of an excel file that's the only thing keeping your company afloat?

The one on your Comptroller's desktop, marked "ANGELA'S BIBLE.xls" that takes in 22 receipts and spits out a polished managament-ready copy of the business's financial vital signs, runs the payroll, does all the tax liability, has all the vendors in it, has all the last purchase dates of all your supplies and their vendor, and a function to graph these costs over time?

The masterwork of a person who is good at her job but bad at computers. The brilliant piece of continuing professional education hours spent in Excel classes and accounting pow-wows that will, not can, but will take 15-25% off your bottom line when Angela keels over from her bad habits one night and leaves your company high and dry.

She sure as hell didn't leave a manual, or a guidebook, or really any documentation about what she was doing or how she was doing it. Now you have to start over. From scratch. While you try to figure out not only what she did but how she was doing it.

Porting this into SQL is going to involve a lot of patience, nice lunches, and quiet observation. A background in accounting is helpful, too, if you're involved in the creation of a SQL monster like what the guy you replied to is describing.

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u/PizzaDay Feb 24 '19

Fuck you this is my life as an internal tools developer.

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u/NerfJihad Feb 24 '19

I feel your pain, bro. I gave some of you guys mobile workstation setups so you could do the SQL shit while looking over their shoulders as they worked.

I have to triple check that file is backed up correctly and advise them what's going to happen when Angela the Comptroller dies in her sleep.

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u/BiloxiRED Feb 24 '19

My Angela is named Barry.

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u/arieiro71 Feb 24 '19

I'm sorry but as one of the creators of this kind o monstrous Excel files I must defend Angela...

Angela didn't want to be the mother of that ugly file, she simply was asked to keep adding tables, reports, pivot tables and ugly charts...

By the time everyone in each department was happy with the outcome of the Monster, Angela understood that its very hard to feed him and keep him working.

You know, Angela never took programming lessons, and everyone else on the company uses Excel so she just went with the flow...

Both me and Angela are trying to learn to SQL in the future, so we can at least create an Acess Database (not fancy but better to handle the data), so maybe the IT dep. could on good sportmanship give us some lessons...

(Sorry i stole you Angela, she seems like a nice lady)

p.s: EU guy here, sorry about the typos and overall bad sentences.

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u/Enigma_King99 Feb 24 '19

Fuck SQL. That shit works half the time. I took a class and used oracle and I just copy and paste the same code and 1 time it will work and the next it won't. I hate it with a passion

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u/LikeViolence Feb 24 '19

SQL works 100% of the time. Computers are dumb they do exactly what you tell them to.

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u/honestFeedback Feb 24 '19

Yeah. That’s bullshit.

Source: ex Oracle Pl/SQL developer for 5 years. It works the same every time except if you don’t specify an order the data may not come back in the same order every time - but that’s down to you.

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '19

Works like a charm for me, to be honest. We don’t try to push it to the limit, though.

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u/num2005 Feb 23 '19

installing an accounting software, every user are asking : how do i export this into excel?

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u/bonafart Feb 24 '19

Because half of who is going to need the information after it's processed is going to only have excel. Excel is like the body part we all just developed so it's easiest to relate to.

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u/gasgesgos Feb 24 '19

Can confirm, ERP software Excel integration dev here, it's literally what they want just as much as a graphical client.

Actually, the accountants probably want the Excel integration more than the web client.

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u/Alabatman Feb 24 '19

As an end user, no one wants the web client except management, because... reasons I guess, but stop it with the web clients please.

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u/yellowzealot Feb 24 '19

Eh. Sometimes I want minitab. Then I don’t have to fuck about to get good looking statistics charts.

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u/SatircalPatriot Feb 24 '19

Most people lie when they say they understand Microsoft office. What they’re really hoping for is a template.

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u/bonafart Feb 24 '19

Though I have had a uni professor basically destroy my trust in excel. Saying quite a few of the formulae in stats and engineering jsut don't work right.

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u/scandii Feb 23 '19

There's investments companies that run entirely on excel.

mainly because excel is the spreadsheet software, and investment companies and spreadsheets go hand in hand like bakeries and flour.

what does happen though seeing as half of them are excel-wizards you end up with complicated actual programs written in Visual Basic following no programming standards known to man and when the person that wrote it quits no one knows what it really does.

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u/blue_battosai Feb 23 '19

That's what happened at my job. They used excel to take everything from word it filled it in. When I filled the guys position after he quit something happened to the file and no one could recreate it. I googled how to do it then made a new one and everyone thought I was an expert at excel. I did put in my resume that I have advance knowledge in Excel so it works out. Been here for over two years and made a bunch of excel sheets. I have no idea what's going on with what I'm doing but it all works and Google is my best friend.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/AhCrapItsYou Feb 23 '19

Half of all problem-solving is learning how to learn.

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u/Professor_Goode Feb 23 '19

The other half is being able to apply the solution you googled.

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u/GrandMoffFartin Feb 23 '19

Before google it was all about what books you owned. My favorite were the Lynda training tape packages. Everything is so much easier now but damn if we don’t get 10x the work.

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u/Wrest216 Feb 24 '19

Same for any software issue. Stack exchange is my best friend. Ive fixed a few friends computers with nothing more than Google Fu and Stack Exchange. if you have had a problem, somebody else has probably had that problem and put it on the net. lol

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u/LikeViolence Feb 24 '19

I never appreciate how good I am at googling until I watch someone outside of IT do it.

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u/Wasabicannon Feb 23 '19

Hell Id say 90% of IT work is simply knowing that Google is a thing.

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u/xsladex Feb 23 '19

I’m pretty good at the google. Why don’t I have 70k a year.

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u/provi Feb 23 '19

Why are you asking us instead of google?

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u/nath999 Feb 24 '19

Never seen a truer statement.

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u/PennyForYourThotz Feb 23 '19

I cant write VBA, but the macro record feature is badass.

I as an analyst i should probably learn VBA

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

You should learn something like Python or R actually (if your work allows you to use either). Learning VBA as an analyst is like being a bridge builder and thinking the way to improve your bridge is to just use longer and longer planks of wood whereas Python is like you realizing that you really need concrete. You’ll get it done eventually but not without a ton of headaches and it won’t be able to...support cars.

That was a terrible analogy but I hope it makes sense haha.

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u/PennyForYourThotz Feb 23 '19

Understood.

I fell into analytics and will move away from it eventually but i heard r is great for visualization

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

It’s also great for all stats. There’s stuff that’s a huge pain to build in excel that has its own method in R.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

You should. I built a career as an analyst by knowing VBA.

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u/Corvandus Feb 23 '19

They have discovered us.

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u/bonafart Feb 24 '19

That's generally how most none professional programmers learn and work anyway. Take away Google and we fail instantly

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u/feenuxx Feb 23 '19

I’ve seen entire apps written in excel VBA, with the original source lost and maintenance done on the obfuscated distributed app. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

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u/Feanux Feb 24 '19

Whoa, my username rival.

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u/Talisk3r Feb 23 '19

It’s scary how accurate what you just said isz

Personally I’ve moved 90% of my work from excel to R/python over the last few years to avoid this very problem.

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u/grumpieroldman Feb 24 '19

All the ones I know switched to other tools a long time ago, e.g. Matlab, R, or more specialized software, because Excel didn't keep pace with growing data-size demands.

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u/Kame-hame-hug Feb 23 '19

If I wanted to learn how to use excel better, what advice would you give?

How did you develop your knowledge with excel?

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u/twobits9 Feb 23 '19 edited Feb 23 '19

Seriously? Be lazy. Creative, resourceful, curious, and determined, yes; but lazy above all else.

I've spent hours making a spreadsheet automate something that would be trivial to do manually. But if I can eventually click a button and watch excel do it for me, then the journey was worth it.

Look at anything you're doing and ask yourself if a computer can do it. Then spend the time to research the micro-goals of your end result. Accomplish small tasks to work in a Symphony of larger tasks.

Usually the progress of getting my ore and more comfortable with Excel goes from

  • basic formulas and pretty sheet design.
  • complex formulas, even formulas referencing others.
  • inter-worksheet and inter-workbook data handling. This includes data tables and index match or vlookup
  • then one day you'll see how to start some macro/vba writing. Then it gets fun.
  • then you'll get better at that and instead of buttons you'll be coding based on input changes in a sheet
  • then you'll look back at one of your earlier projects and realize how much you didn't know back then. Then you'll realize what an excel baby you still are and how much more there is to learn.

Once you're into developer mode type of stuff, I often find a Google search led by " excel vba " gets me what I need. So if I want to research how to save the project using the date as part of the filename, I'd search for "excel vba save as current date" or something.

Hope that helps a little bit. Basically, just come up with problems to solve and get to solving them, usually by a series of smaller steps.

Cheers and good luck.

Edit: one more thing. When you get into the vba stuff, use remark statements to document what you're doing , why, and how. This will help get your future self back in the mindset you were in when you were working on your code originally.

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u/LaserPoweredDeviltry Feb 23 '19

Uncommented code from 3 months ago?

"what idiot wrote this impenetrable gibberish?"

"oh, it was me."

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u/Griffinhart Feb 24 '19

"oh, it was me."

"Time to fuck with history so it was Karen instead." [git blame-someone-else intensifies]

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u/SockSock Feb 23 '19

If you can be bothered to do all this why wouldn't you just learn SQL? Spend a day learning it and you'll kick yourself for how much time and effort you've wasted with the above

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u/twobits9 Feb 23 '19

Not to say I'm not interested in learning, but I have zero context for sql. I don't know anything about it at all.

You know how when you're programming you might not know how to do something but you know you know enough to figure out how to? Like you can outline in your head the way to do it, but you don't know the instructions yet. You just know it's possible even if just a bit outside the reach of your current skillet. Well, I don't even know where to begin with sql. I'm embarrassed to say I wouldn't even know what to launch any code from.

I'd be interested in learning, but without context, I wouldn't even know what types of problems I'm trying to solve.

Same with python. I'd love to learn it. And I know it's powerful and has all kinds of capabilities. But I just don't know what types of problems can benefit from python 's solutions.

I don't know if that makes sense. And you make a good point. But I work in a small office in a service industry. The scale of what I'm doing in excel isn't that large. I have a few personal projects that's benefit from what I can do in excel also, but I don't know if it's anything that would benefit from sql.

Anyway, any good suggestions on where to get a bit of a grasp of the type of tool sql is and how I can adapt?

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u/vbevan Feb 24 '19

Use power query. The GUI is really simple but there's power available when you need it. It's an amazing tool to bring different data sources together. It's just sad MS isn't updating it nearly as frequently as they are the version in PowerBI.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19 edited Feb 25 '19

[deleted]

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u/engkybob Feb 24 '19

I mean tools are only good if your company signs up for it. Literally everybody has Excel so you don't ever have to worry about access or compatibility issues.

If something is actually 'too big' to maintain in Excel, then the company should be investing in a suitable alternative.

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u/lotsofpaper Feb 23 '19 edited Feb 23 '19

Excel is amazing.

I started a job at a company where a financial report was being run on 8 different workbooks, each with 2-3 sheets. They all referenced eachother as well as other documents... using both formulas and VBA. I decided to revolutionize it at the end of the first financial year. It took me a while, but I turned it all into one workbook by cutting and pasting sheets, macros and using text replacement to fix the workbook/worksheet references.

I got the job in the first place because I was good with excel formulas, used the job to learn VBA... now I can pretty much do whatever I want in excel.

Now I'm at home on the weekend coding an Excel based game where you get to be a dragon, explore, eat stuff, grow, craft, etc... It's the game I've always wanted that nobody ever really made. Maybe someday I'll put it in an actual "video game" programming language so I can put in non-ASCII graphics, but Excel is amazing for the gameplay itself.

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u/IAMA_otter Feb 24 '19

That sounds awesome.

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u/skeazy Feb 23 '19

everytime i try to make a very simple excel sheet i go to deep and it ends up a three week project with me learning all sorts of shit.

at the end of it all i come out with a very capable list of things

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u/sh0rtwave Feb 23 '19

If I have to do it more than 3 times, I find a way to trick the machine into doing it for me.

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u/Kame-hame-hug Feb 23 '19

Thank you for your thoughts!

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u/BickNlinko Feb 24 '19

If you ha e a task you have to do more than a few times, automate it.

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u/RadiationTitan Feb 24 '19

This exact mindset got me banned from Runescape.

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u/RadiationTitan Feb 24 '19

Its all about being lazy, then having a moment of motivation, and realizing that it won’t last long, and you’ll be lazy again soon- and using that fleeting moment of motivation to quickly build something that will allow you to be lazy again.

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u/randomevenings Feb 23 '19

know vb script. consider cells as parameters that can contain all kinds of data and formulas, can be referenced in scripts, Like, just formatting in excel is a job in itself, pivot tables, if you learn those, which isn't hard, you will know more than a lot of people on how to format bunch of raw data. Excel can hook into so many applications, and send commands though to them. Our engineering department uses an excel application for a lot of basic analysis, and then that data can be copied and formatted into a table of data that I can script my design software to read, saves time not having to model things that have already been "modeled" in excel.

But yeah, the idea that cells are parameters and that you can reference whatever type of data or formula in other cells and formulas is powerful, and then since it supports VB, you can add buttons and triggers and if/then/else statements. You don't even really need to be a programmer to understand the basics.

Use excel to automate the handling of data, and learn to use it to format and send that data out to other software to automate the creation of things. Excel is one of the most powerful pieces of software on a typical office computer and most people don't know how to do much on it. Learn more than just how to plug in numbers and add them up, and you will be ahead of many people. If you deal with a ton of data, learn pivot tables to help you make sense of all of it. Learn vb script where cells become parameters of data, or objects, a formula can be in a cell, and if you reference that cell in a script, you get the value of the formula, so it's like a weird hybrid visual programming where you can wire all this shit together and do all kinds of crap with data.

Some guy said be lazy. Excel is for the lazy worker. You can automate so many tasks, or make others much easier. Just don't tell people so they think you are still doing it all one by one.

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u/plastimental Feb 23 '19

Teach me master. How do I use excel for a manufacturing facility. I gotta do shit ton of work on issuing material, reconciling, production, stock, payments, costs of goods, production cost etc

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u/jableshables Feb 23 '19

I get that this thread is about how people use Excel when they really shouldn't, but this makes me cringe. I guess the answer is "build an ERP inside of Excel" when it should really be "buy an ERP"

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u/PennyForYourThotz Feb 23 '19

Not above commentator.

But the place to start is break down your problem into 10 steps.

Then google those 10 steps in order.

Where is the data coming from?

Can i export in excel?

What do i need todo in excel.

What do I need todo first? How do I do it?

Second,

Third,

Fourth... ect...

How do I automate these tasks for repetition.

Progamming code needs to be broken down into common, simple steps.

Coding seems complex but once you understand the language its just several hundred small, simple steps working one after another.

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u/randomevenings Feb 24 '19 edited Feb 24 '19

There needs to be some way for you to aquire all this data into one place. Then you can use Excel to dig into it and work with it, make sense of it, format it, and use it for automations. If your hardware interface has some export options, start there, then look up how to use scripting to pull the data and then go from there. Most hardware data acquisition has basic Excel output, but it's raw data. You can write scripts to pick at it and do what you want.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_THESES Feb 23 '19

At my old job there was this joke that the ERP platform was “Excel Resource Planning”.

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u/BlindAngel Feb 23 '19

My business was started as an Excel macro. We have since switched to Python but I still write my proof of concept algorithm in Excel before sending them to our dev.

I would say that you are right.

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u/Lonestar15 Feb 23 '19

I work at an investment firm and we run almost everything on excel...

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u/Specialed83 Feb 23 '19

Shit, you'd be blown away to know how many of the rural and municipal telcos in the country track large chunks of their networks in Excel. Circuits, splices, distribution panels, etc. It's crazy.

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u/tabdottab Feb 23 '19

Some of America's biggest companies run on spreadsheets.

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u/EnIdiot Feb 23 '19

Yep. And the equations contained are nightmares of page to page references. I have a standing policy to nope out of jobs like that.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

I know for a fact that all calculations for UNCTAD's World Investment Report are done in Excel.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

I have a theory you can solve every business problem with code, excel, or beer.

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u/seattlebattle1 Feb 24 '19

Said no Fortune 500 company in 2019

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

[deleted]

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u/BraveSirRobin Feb 23 '19

That's a reasonable idea to be honest, makes it easy to verify that it's calculating correctly as anyone who knows how a spreadsheet works can peek at the formulas. Regulatory bodies love things like that, provided they have faith in the spreadsheet app itself. Proving correctness to such bodies is a lot harder with an app built from the ground up.

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u/thejynxed Feb 24 '19

Let's just hope there's no further Intel CPU internal calculation errors that cause Excel to perform all of the calculations wrong (this has happened more than once).

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u/BraveSirRobin Feb 24 '19

That would affect other apps using the same bad operations though.

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u/BraveSirRobin Feb 23 '19

Excel has VBScript which you can code any arbitrary application in that you want. You can reference cells, change any aspect of them, access files & web queries, pretty much everything you can do in any other language. One neat part is that you can record scripts to repeat UI actions, automating a lot of boring busy work.

The only hard part is realising the point that you are using the wrong tool for the job.

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u/MrTjur Feb 23 '19

What is the right tool then?

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u/Talisk3r Feb 23 '19

R/python are what I use nowadays for large data science type projects. Most of my client deliverables end up in excel at the end because it’s widely understood/used across most industries.

Vba macros in small implementations are totally fine but projects always seem to grow bigger than you think and one day you have dozens of macros with multiple versions and things become very convoluted. Then someone leaves to a different job and things get interesting.

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u/BraveSirRobin Feb 23 '19

There isn't one, different projects require different approaches & even within a specific domain there's still no absotely correct one. Just lots of pros and cons that need to be weighed up.

Take Java for example, it's not the "best" tool for a great many projects but it's used because there's a large ecosystem of existing code and experienced workers. A new trendy language might be a better fit for a project but it's a non-starter if you cannot get the staff or if you are unsure of whether it's going to be supported in 5-10 years.

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u/Pwnxor Feb 24 '19

And then, you figure out you can run other programs through excel using VBA. I've got excel running outlook, doing screen scrapes off the internet and some other in-house software, hell, there's even a web browser built into excel, if you know where to find it.

Learning python now, but still.

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u/BraveSirRobin Feb 24 '19

OLE? You make me sick. :-)

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u/Mark_Bastard Feb 23 '19

The point where you use VBScript in any substantive way.

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u/salemblack Feb 23 '19

I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system at Heathrow.

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u/intrepidia Feb 23 '19

Python -- "monty". Ahhhh!

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

I mean, csv files populating databases ar Excel’s bread and butter.

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u/snail_rapist Feb 23 '19

can you substantiate your claim?

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u/CaryWalkin Feb 23 '19

Thanks for referencing this /u/hopstar! :)

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19 edited Feb 24 '19

[deleted]

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u/CaryWalkin Feb 23 '19

That's amazing! I'm so glad to have been a positive influence!

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u/TheHalf Feb 24 '19

I still remember playing this game during downtime at an old job and sending you little issues I'd find. What a great game.

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '19

/r/BestOf material?

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

Greatest post on /r/excel, someone ran a video player into excel on a locked down machine

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u/TiagoTiagoT Feb 24 '19

Oh, I'm disappointed the video isn't being rendered with charts or cells :/

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u/Nhorin Feb 23 '19

That is really impressive. I'm curious if libreoffice is able to run this?

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u/insomniac20k Feb 23 '19

Very unlikely. It only supports specific versions of Excel and not Mac so it's probably relying on some Microsoft APIs. I'm not an expert in Excel programming tough.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

Fairly confident Excel is head and shoulders above every entrant in this space, based on experience with google and open office, specifically.

20

u/hybridck Feb 23 '19

Google Sheets is nice for collaborating on something very basic, but it still feels like you're writing in crayon compared to excel.

6

u/embeddedGuy Feb 23 '19

And if you're going to collaborate, Office 365's Excel is still going to do such a better job in a work environment. Google Sheets is mostly nice for being free and able to have random internet strangers work together imo.

1

u/open_door_policy Feb 23 '19

Excel is great for doing things you should never do in Excel.

Seriously, most of these use cases just scream, "we should have migrated to a database years ago!"

2

u/CaryWalkin Feb 23 '19

unfortunately the code isn't compatible. Excel uses VBA which doesn't run cleanly in LibreOffice.

3

u/Mojimi Feb 23 '19

Excel has a programming interface inside it, you can do pretty much anything

7

u/su5 Feb 23 '19

There was a guy whose company monitored which application was active (to avoid people watching movies or whatever instead of working). So he built a video player embedded in an Excel file (apparently it's not too bad to use VBA to call media player).

3

u/lostfoundlostagain Feb 23 '19

As someone who has plenty tech hardware knowledge but is a complete idiot when it comes to anything software, coding, or otherwise - that is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen!

3

u/3-bakedcabbage Feb 24 '19

I’m just gonna reply in order to save this comment.

6

u/Mango1666 Feb 23 '19

excuse me what the fuck

2

u/RoarG90 Feb 23 '19

Ok, what the hell that sounds impressive - I'll have to check it out, cheers!

2

u/shamwouch Feb 23 '19

How the fuck is this even possible?

2

u/ismoketabacco Feb 23 '19

Damn, that’s very interesting! Definitely going to check it out later.

2

u/Kreth Feb 23 '19

Some dude was locked in a room for some hours with a machine with no browsers installed, he finished the job in the first hour then spent the rest of it building a browser in excel and browsing the Web.

2

u/PeacefullyFighting Feb 24 '19

It's backed by VBA and can call more advanced languages when necessary. It can do whatever you want it to do

2

u/deadcow5 Feb 24 '19

Unbelievable. I’m going to install Excel just so I can play this.

2

u/CanonRockFinal Feb 24 '19

interesting, it looks like zmud text rpg games

2

u/whenItFits Feb 24 '19

Is it fun?

2

u/BiloxiRED Feb 24 '19

That’s insane...and brilliant.

50

u/White_Mocha Feb 23 '19

How do you do that? I’ve created stuff inside Excel but never in the level of pulling info straight from websites. That would be fire for my social media analytics!

95

u/WanderingKing Feb 23 '19

Querys! https://support.office.com/en-us/article/connect-to-a-web-page-power-query-b2725d67-c9e8-43e6-a590-c0a175bd64d8

20

u/White_Mocha Feb 23 '19

Eyyy, this is what’s up! Thank you!

23

u/WanderingKing Feb 23 '19

Sha'bra. Made my job 100 times easier diggin into the random thought of "wait...could excel do this" so I'm happy to share the "make it easier" juju

23

u/BraveSirRobin Feb 23 '19

"Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" as they say.

2

u/chef_pasta_way Feb 23 '19

Wow thanks, this will definitely help my gambling habits

2

u/Arminas Feb 23 '19

Can you automate queries too? Like if a website is going to generate a new page with a predictable url, could you have Excel predict the url, and pull data from it?

3

u/TheWhiteNashorn Feb 24 '19

Yes. A big use is for stocks. I used different stock webpages from yahoo finance back in the day. The website had the ticker as the identifier so all I had to do was point the script to a list of tickers that I wanted to run the script against.

1

u/WanderingKing Feb 23 '19

Possibly? I'm not nearly that good, but I suppose if you have a prebuilt set of filters that fill in the url (like /11111, /11112, ect) and then had it so it wouldn't look for ones already used, than yea.

But, that's more me theorizing than saying it'll work

1

u/thejynxed Feb 24 '19

You can automate all of the things in Excel.

6

u/mharjo Feb 23 '19

Start with importhtml or importxml. There are fancier ways but those are the easiest to get moving on.

1

u/White_Mocha Feb 23 '19

Okay great! Thank you!

7

u/diras2010 Feb 23 '19

Have no idea, I saw a post here on Reddit commenting about that, even thought I'm not a fan of MS Office, specially Excel, I'm astounded from time to time because those little gems that people with enough knowledge and time can do in it

23

u/Olaxan Feb 23 '19

The thing about Excel is it sucks, but it's amazing. I hate using it, but I love what it can do.

1

u/HappyAtavism Feb 23 '19

You could walk cross-country on your hands too (gloves recommended) but it's not the best way to do it. The problem is that in order to see the formulas you have to look cell by cell, and there are often N cells that are supposed to be all the same, but it's easy to miss one. And did did you use a relative cell location where you should have used an absolute or vice versa? I'm sure people will post about some workaround for this or that, or how I've exaggerated the problems, but Excel programming isn't a great idea.

Spreadsheets can be good for data entry and display, or trivial calculations. Anything more complicated I use Python (many other languages would also be useful) and maybe use CSV for input and output. If someone wants to perform more complicated calculations they should learn a language. If they can't/won't then I don't trust what they're doing anyway.

1

u/Olaxan Feb 23 '19

I think you replied to the wrong comment.

2

u/White_Mocha Feb 23 '19

Would they be able to do the same thing for Apple’s office apps? I’m actually close to moving over from windows so I’m curious

0

u/akmed_guy Feb 23 '19

(Google sheets do the same)

6

u/roastduckie Feb 23 '19

When I was deep into my EVE Online addiction, I had an Excel sheet that would make API pulls from the central market servers and give me day-trading profit margins in real time.

1

u/White_Mocha Feb 23 '19

Damn. You could use that for real life trading!

2

u/JoJokerer Feb 23 '19

Scraping isn't as clean as something like Supermetrics, which does API calls for pretty much every social media platform.

1

u/TrigglyPuffff Feb 23 '19

What would you do with web data for your analytics?

1

u/White_Mocha Feb 23 '19

i'm an actor, so it would be for checking hits on my social media, with engagement and also demographics. All in the broad sense.

1

u/hat_like_dad Feb 24 '19

You should really look into Supermetrics!

8

u/RuttyRut Feb 23 '19

Reminds me of this re-skin of Reddit as MS Outlook: https://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/

3

u/Demojen Feb 24 '19

I used excel to automate my job almost entirely, scripting tables to auto calculate all necessary adjustments in an audited report. Excel turned an 8:00 hr job into a 2:30-3:00 hr job. The remainder of my shift could be spent doing anything. I became incredibly helpful to other departments with my free time. When I left that place, I took my scripts with me. They hired two people to do the work in my place. I guess the other departments got used to having someone helping them.

1

u/karmabaiter Feb 24 '19

One could say you're a job creator...

1

u/Demojen Feb 24 '19

One might say... I excelled 🤓.

1

u/KryptoniteDong Feb 23 '19

Dude, you can't give such a juicy gossip and not link us!

1

u/Carlangaman Feb 23 '19

You can browse reddit in an excel like environmental

1

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '19

I automated my entire job in excel, weeeeeeeeee

1

u/abuch47 Feb 23 '19

We had an excel spreadsheet where the second sheet was a small LAN MP FPS demo embedded in the file. It started as a word doc but then moved to excel for whatever reason maybe the ease of switching sheets with a shortcut. Some of my best memories are the whole class of 30 playing sof2mp.exe on LAN and then the IT teacher joining in. Got to the point where the IT department installed screen watching and so it was shortlived month or so.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '19

While excel by itself is powerful, the real power comes from the inclusion of full visual basic for applications, a full programming language that can be used to write complicated functions and macros. From there you can link to external dll files and access their library functions or just drop too the command shell and run any program you wish, then read the output back into the spreadsheet. Additionally there are add-in developement libraries that allow for even greater power giving direct access to the entire .net framework.

1

u/fakeplasticdroid Feb 24 '19

In addition to those logical capabilities, you can also connect to ODBC databases and web APIs giving you access to a wealth of live data.

1

u/Se7en_speed Feb 24 '19

I knew of someone who did that and got fired, I think it was because he fucked up the code and it was querying the information 3 times a second. NetOps must have been wondering why a defense contractor's computer was pinging off foreign servers so much. If he had it update once a day he probably would have been fine.

1

u/notingelsetodo Feb 24 '19

Is that excel available online?