The World Cup of Microsoft Excel (theatlantic.com) 26
Competitive Excel clearly is not the NFL, but it does have the beginnings of a fan base. From a report: This was just the second year of the World Championship, but it's already streaming on ESPN3. This year's edition has 30,000 views on YouTube. Supporters of Michael Jarman, the No. 3 seed in this year's competition, call themselves the "Jarmy Army." A few months ago, an all-star game of sorts aired on ESPN2, and this month, ESPNU will televise the collegiate championship. The tournament begins with a 128-player field and proceeds March Madness -- style, in one-on-one, single-elimination contests. The format lends itself to frequent upsets: This year, the No. 2 seed was eliminated in the third round. In each match, players work as fast as possible -- they're generally given about 30 minutes -- to answer a series of progressively more difficult questions testing both their puzzle-solving skills and their fluency with Excel.
The questions all revolve around the same scenario. In the quarterfinal, for example, the questions all had to do with a fictional country transitioning from dictatorship to democracy. The first and easiest question asked players to calculate how many votes were cast for the purple party. The championship case, which was far more difficult, centered on a 100x100 chessboard. This year's total prize money was $10,000. Naturally, a large proportion of Excel competitors work in Excel-heavy jobs; the field included plenty of finance bros, data analysts, mathematicians, actuaries, and engineers. All but one of the eight finalists had over the course of their lives spent thousands of hours working in Excel (the other is a Google Sheets guy), and half of them had spent more than 10,000. The tournament is not particularly diverse. Of the eight finalists, Deaton was the only woman. In the field of 128, she told me, she counted no more than a dozen, which didn't surprise her, given how heavily male the relevant occupations skew.
The questions all revolve around the same scenario. In the quarterfinal, for example, the questions all had to do with a fictional country transitioning from dictatorship to democracy. The first and easiest question asked players to calculate how many votes were cast for the purple party. The championship case, which was far more difficult, centered on a 100x100 chessboard. This year's total prize money was $10,000. Naturally, a large proportion of Excel competitors work in Excel-heavy jobs; the field included plenty of finance bros, data analysts, mathematicians, actuaries, and engineers. All but one of the eight finalists had over the course of their lives spent thousands of hours working in Excel (the other is a Google Sheets guy), and half of them had spent more than 10,000. The tournament is not particularly diverse. Of the eight finalists, Deaton was the only woman. In the field of 128, she told me, she counted no more than a dozen, which didn't surprise her, given how heavily male the relevant occupations skew.
best ad-hoc query language? (Score:1)
Any suggestions of the most compact language for answering ad-hoc queries? This should include the ability to make subroutines/templates/macros. Also it's assumed that one takes the time to learn it well, as terse languages often have longer learning curves, per Gods of Irony.
For example, suppose you were hired to give quick stats for a sports broadcast show and thus had to produce results in a snap.
SQL can do it, but tends to be verbose. And Excel is not well-suited for larger data-sets.
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SAS, SPSS, GraphPad, Python. Depends really on what you're after. For building something like a Dashboard, I would suggest Redash, Tableau or Smartsheet.
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If it requires managing indexes due to data size, then Python is probably the wrong tool for the job, at least by itself, unless you reinvent a database the hard way in it.
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Downside (Score:2, Funny)
Not the tool for the job (Score:4)
What horrifies me is this wave of people I have seen over the past 15 or 20 years that use excel to analyze data. They will export from a database and have these horribly useless spreadsheets to maneuver. Like today there was an export from a database where the spreadsheet was used to process data the database already did..
I understand why this is. People know how to use excel, but not a database. People feel comfort in excel. It makes them feel productive. But it is horrendous.
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Pretty much the same effect as a GUI, then. It makes people feel productive, even if it impedes their productivity.
This mechanism also has made it unfashionable to learn other than learn-by-doing, halp-problem-quick-fix, stackoverflow style.
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> Pretty much the same effect as a GUI, then. It makes people feel productive, even if it impedes their productivity.
Agreed, some of the most efficient CRUD tools I ever built were based on command-line interfaces. It had simple menus where you press a number or letter to pick that menu item, but it also allowed extra characters for shortcuts. Thus, newbies could still use it without knowing the shortcuts.
I'd talk with users as they were doing their work to see what improvements were needed in terms of U
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> But if the marketing narrative is "no training needed"
The "long-cut" menus didn't need much training, just more keystrokes. I usually put enough help-screens in so that experienced users can figure out most the shortcuts once they master the basics and want to move to the next level of productivity.
I just found programming such much easier in a command line than a GUI because you don't have to figure out how to coerce the GUI to act how you want for many kinds of shortcut features. Fewer layers to tame
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I use Excel quite frequently:
1) Open a CSV file
2) Enable autofilter
3) Find interesting columns and select one or more values from the filter drop-down menu
4) Hide or delete columns that are not currently interesting
Most systems I interact with have a database on the back end but don't allow end users of the system to execute arbitrary SQL
Even if they did, constructing the SQL to examine the data in order to figure out which columns contain interesting data to filter on and then constructing the final query
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What horrifies me is this wave of people I have seen over the past 15 or 20 years that use excel to analyze data. They will export from a database and have these horribly useless spreadsheets to maneuver.
Go on, can you say objectively why? You used the word "horrible" and "horrendous" but I don't know how you could substantiate the only important criterion, which is whether people achieve their analysis results better in Excel or SQL or whatever else.
Personally I export from SQL quite a lot into Excel. I do it because clicking boxes for filters is quicker than writing "WHERE" clauses, and because Excel bundles graph-plotting inside it, and because I personally prefer "playground" style interactivity rather
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I understand why this is. People know how to use excel, but not a database. People feel comfort in excel. It makes them feel productive. But it is horrendous.
I love coming onto a customer site and being given Excel spreadsheets when I start gathering requirements. It's a sign the project will go very fast.
Excel is hands down the best tool for end-users to craft their own specs for you ahead of time. With it, they can show you exactly what they need, and do it in a developer-friendly format.
plenty of diversity (Score:2, Interesting)
there was plenty of diversity you warmongering fool
each and every person there has their own individuality and personal story; the author only sorts people by a specific and single characteristic
some folks just insist on slicing humanity into categories so their agenda can be pushed; let's not pretend they're solving any of the worlds's problems instead of contributing to them; the author clearly wants to paint it as some failure of society that arbitray buckets weren't filled with enough people
I personal
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each and every person there has their own individuality and personal story
That is, quite frankly, a load of hippie shit.
The truth is, people from the same background have very similar thought patterns.
This is why echo chambers exist. By your "logic", everyone in an echo chamber has their own individuality and personal story. Yet somehow, most people, not you, know that echo chambers are not conducive to creativity.
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"...echo chambers are not conducive to creativity..." jeez dude you've really carried the straw man to a totally different zip code
I would sooner have everyone choose to be in an echo chamber than a self-important person such as yourself deciding en masse how folks should be; you have no high ground and certainly no standing to decide for others what is important to them
by denigrating the very idea that each person has a right to live their life as they desire -- and it doesn't matter if it turns out to b
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Is that where you got the idea everyone is the same? No one can excel (hah) or do worse than everyone else? They're all the same? People are fungible?
I have to admit, you do an excellent job of obfuscating whether you are an idiot or just acting like one.
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If we use your approach, the word doesn't mean anything because every group of people is equally diverse. Instead, it is used in a way that actually conveys some meaning.
ESPN 8 (Score:2)