My best Excel trick, which reveals how little I know, and yet Early [0] doesn't use it (or maybe doesn't need it, but that's hard to believe):
1. You can drag down the bottom of the formula bar/field and make it multi-line
2. You can insert arbitrary[*] newlines in an Excel formula
Combining those, you can turn the absurd default format of single-line-of-code functions into something readable and manageable. Here's a simple one from a spreadsheet I have open:
And just think of highly nested functions. Once you know it, writing single-line functions of any complexity is absurd, as absurd as writing 'real' code that way.
> You can drag down the bottom of the formula bar/field and make it multi-line
For folks on LibreOffice (currently v24.2):
* There's an downward-pointing "expand" triangle to the far-right of the formula input line.
* That button toggles the formula input area between 1-line vs 6-lines with scrolling.
* Newlines can inserted by shift-enter.
* If there are additional formula lines lines outside the viewable line(s), then a dashed line on the relevant border will be shown. (Plus the regular scrollbar, in expanded mode.)
I could do half-screen nested array formulas when Excel was before the ribbon (and screen resolutions were smaller), out of necessity and because I could. It was in quite demanding uni home calculations and then mostly when working as intern in IB. But then having a life is also important...
The only thing I still enjoy is that any data smaller than 1M rows is sliced and diced almost without thinking. I am sometimes really grateful that MS did not break the shortcuts, while almost breaking the product overall. The muscle memory works perfectly.
It's interesting that the challenges are not business or accounting centred, as is the expectation when using Excel. If this is now general problem solving, are we watching language-specific competitive programming through the lens of a more broadly accessible platform like MS Excel?
It used to be financial modeling but they realized they’d get more attention with the esports audience this way.
It’s gone quite far now - one of the many challenges was a mock terrain map where you’d calculate distances to hike while considering the weight of your pack. Even the way they walk through the tunnel is done for show.
Excel is a general purpose computing environment and has been for quite some time.
When I was in the air force we had a complete aircraft maintenance planning and performance management system entirely in Excel. It can connect to remote workbooks on a shared drive/SharePoint too, so the higher headquarters would tie into our dashboard for their own operational readiness tracking.
It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.
Can anyone find the actual challenge files? Not that I would be competitive at all, but the description of last year's World of Warcraft themed one is interesting, and I want to walk through it.
The descriptions of the problems make it sound a little like algorithmic puzzles but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language… Excel is pretty amazing in what you can do; I’ve regretted having to use Google Sheets for the last few years.
That sounds correct. This issue would be when the decimal separator matches the argument separator. In that situation =IF(A1 > 42.1, B1, C1) would be equivalent to =IF(A1 > 42,1; B1; C1)
The possibility of incorrect parsing of equation with a variadic function that contains a decimal number in the equation.
However, this is a localization as even the functions change names.
It’s just a locale setting as to which is applied. If you use English (US or UK) then your argument separator will be a comma. If you use other languages, then a semi colon will apply. You’ll find most guidance online referring to English language functions and comma separators, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter. If you ship a spreadsheet to me that you wrote in German functions and syntax that contains:
=SVERWEIS(X2;A:C;3;0)
I’ll open that and find
=VLOOKUP(X2,A:C,3,0)
This suggests client localization that is rendered differently with different language settings.
The formulae are indeed stored in the same format, regardless of language. For rendering and parsing in the UI they use translated function names and the field separator (commma in English, but semicolon in many other languages because decimal numbers use a comma there).
It does irk me a bit (though not as much as the translated VBA back in the day). But that's probably because I know English, I often look for solutions to my problems in English, not in my native language, and then would have to mentally translate that back. But that's perhaps a burden for programmers more than for typical users.
A few thoughts:
• it's been that way for decades, at this point. So changing it would annoy a lot of users
• the problem with comma and semicolon would remain unless you want entering numbers normally and within a formula to be different. I'm not sure that's good in a product built around numbers (and often numbers that should be written and formatted like any other number in that country).
• making it configurable might work, but that then requires more testing, although sometimes it's not clear how much testing Microsoft is still doing, so that might not be much of a point. But adding options also has UX limits and not just in the length of the settings screen.
I wish more programmers would pay attention to how productive power users in different can be with their tools. Look at CAD competitions. I wonder if there are video editting competitions?
I used to work as technical director for a touring live graphic design, 3D modeling, and animation tournament. It was kind of like iron chef for designers. They worked live in timed rounds with their screens projected overhead. It was sponsored by Adobe, Autodesk, and Wacom. It was pretty impressive to see how power users did their thing for sure.
In high school, I participated in a STEM-based competition. There were a ton of categories like CO2 dragsters (my favorite), architecture, 2D and 3D CAD, GIS, and numerous others I can't remember. Some categories had more of a business focus but most were science/engineering related. The 3D CAD one was pretty fun. I recall two parts. In the first half, you got a hand-drawn sketch of a bushing and had to recreate it in Autodesk Inventor as fast as possible and then generate a 2D drawing properly dimensioned (like what you'd hand to a machinist). The second half involved creating all of the parts for a basic ceiling fan and then making an animated exploded view that also spun the fan. I was really good at that stuff back then but I definitely wasn't the quickest. I'm sure it's a lot different now, so much of CAD now involved CNC and 3D printing that's there's probably aspects that include messing with gcode now.
My GIS competition was fun too. They gave me a bunch of map data and I had to produce a report on Washington DC storm surge flood zones and potential rescue helicopter locations all within a couple hours.
I recall there being a video production category too. I didn't compete in it but you'd be given props and dialogue to turn into a video over the course of a day or two. Very few of the categories were contemporaneous competitions, most were long term project presentations.
Although they do have a category for best editing, it's hard to call it an award for "best film editor" when it doesn't control for the overall quality of the film. For example, with the Oscars, it's extremely common (2/3 of the time) for a film that wins best picture to also win best editing.
Drop 10 hours of footage to the competitors on day 0, assign judges random groups of completed films on day N.
Maybe let each editor request one reshoot in the first week, a committee aggregates similar requests, all editors get all the reshoots once they're finalized.
Maybe include storyboards and a rubrik for what story the film is supposed to share and how we're meant to feel, but maybe not.
I think this may actually be two different things. Much like how being good at coding doesn’t mean it’s fun to watch you code. Though there are “performance” coders where it really is!
Programming efficiency isn’t about typing/editing fast - it’s about great decision-making. Although I have seen the combo of both working out very well.
If you focus on fast typing/editing skills to level up, but still have bad decision-making skills, you'll just end up burying yourself (and possibly your team) faster and more decisively. (I have seen that, too.)
I interpreted the original comment totally differently - I thought they were saying that the programmers [who created these tools] should pay more attention to how productive [or not] power users can be with the tools [that they created]. And use that as an important metric for software quality. Which I definitely agree with.
> how productive power users in different [fields] can be with their tools
There are a lot more tools in programming than your text editor. Linters, debuggers, AI assistants, version control, continuous integration, etc.
I personally know I'm terrible at using debuggers. Is this a shortcoming of mine? Probably. But I also feel debuggers could be a lot, lot better than they are right now.
I think for a lot of us reflecting at our workflow and seeing things we do that could be done more efficiently with better (usage of) tooling could pay off.
Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).
This is obviously 99% marketing. Microsoft/Waggener Edstrom tend to be really good at getting mainstream media to report on the marketing activities.
Example: For many Windows launches since Windows 3/95, there's been this media splash where Microsoft spends x million dollars on marketing and mainstream media then reports this, thereby getting (like) 100x millions worth of exposure.
Excel is not "complete" until they stop forcibly converting long strings of numbers into scientific notation - or at least give me a sheet-specific way to turn it off. I know how to stop it on my machine, but I have shared documents where if any one of the 16+ other users forgets, then it's messed up for everyone.
Let alone the date issues.
At one point I did a deep dive on one or the other of these "quirks", and the earliest request for exactly the fix I want is from nineteen-eighty-fricking-five. Unbelievable.
Yes, there will be edge cases. They need to balance historic compat vs one more fricking setting checkbox. I am thinking that you will never see this solved.
def 2 decades - 2023 was the best version and it has been downhill ever since
I'll admit, on occasion having more than 65k rows is helpful but generally that's the domain of a database, not excel and it wasn't a good tradeoff IMO
They've now made a change in that at least when you open a csv it now asks you beforehand if you want your data transformed, eg converting strings to numbers where that loses leading zeros.
I had no idea this was real. Fascinating. I'm curious: anyone plugged into the scene know if it's organic or if it was created as a marketing thing by Microsoft?
From my understanding it wasn't started or ran by Microsoft. They have Microsoft listed as the first sponsor on their main website, for what it's worth.
Pretty sure it started as a joke and evolved into a real thing. I actually won an Excel spreadsheet in High School quite a long while ago. Makes me wonder if I should try out...
I don’t understand how a Microsoft team that respects its customers (and maintains shortcuts) can co-exist in an org that sees their customer as marks.
I had a negative view of MS when I was young. Then I got jobs at large orgs managing IT for 1000s of people. I don't know how else you'd do it without the Microsoft stack. I'm not saying you can't, but good luck managing whatever custom ball of knots you manage to come up with and also finding people to work on it for you. If you think open office and some kind of custom IAM solution will work, you just don't have the experience to have an opinion on it, IMHO.
I'm pretty good with Excel, my main tool at the job for over 20 years. I understand how he did it, but it's just really humbling...
I still think quality of what you do with Excel (idea) is more important than how you do it (skill).
1. You can drag down the bottom of the formula bar/field and make it multi-line
2. You can insert arbitrary[*] newlines in an Excel formula
Combining those, you can turn the absurd default format of single-line-of-code functions into something readable and manageable. Here's a simple one from a spreadsheet I have open:
And just think of highly nested functions. Once you know it, writing single-line functions of any complexity is absurd, as absurd as writing 'real' code that way.[0] Early shows how it was done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46340638
[*] I think you can do it anywhere but I haven't tested anything crazy; mostly I just use them between expressions.
For folks on LibreOffice (currently v24.2):
* There's an downward-pointing "expand" triangle to the far-right of the formula input line.
* That button toggles the formula input area between 1-line vs 6-lines with scrolling.
* Newlines can inserted by shift-enter.
* If there are additional formula lines lines outside the viewable line(s), then a dashed line on the relevant border will be shown. (Plus the regular scrollbar, in expanded mode.)
The only thing I still enjoy is that any data smaller than 1M rows is sliced and diced almost without thinking. I am sometimes really grateful that MS did not break the shortcuts, while almost breaking the product overall. The muscle memory works perfectly.
I enjoy the idea, and love watching it grow.
It’s gone quite far now - one of the many challenges was a mock terrain map where you’d calculate distances to hike while considering the weight of your pack. Even the way they walk through the tunnel is done for show.
Huh, interesting. I thought I’d been working remote so long that offices had done this to make people more excited for work.
When I was in the air force we had a complete aircraft maintenance planning and performance management system entirely in Excel. It can connect to remote workbooks on a shared drive/SharePoint too, so the higher headquarters would tie into our dashboard for their own operational readiness tracking.
It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.
You're supposed to do a $0 checkout for some reason and then download them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
https://youtu.be/ICp2-EUKQAI
There is little difference between (if (> a b) c d) and =IF((A1 > B1), C1, D1)
Excel is the most widely installed functional programming language IDE.
programming languages aren't allowed to be in non-english somehow?
The possibility of incorrect parsing of equation with a variadic function that contains a decimal number in the equation.
However, this is a localization as even the functions change names.
https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/1flsvyu/separator_co...
This suggests client localization that is rendered differently with different language settings.> On my system, all parameter-separating commas have to be replaced with semicolons.
That implies the user has to manually change the syntax.
It does irk me a bit (though not as much as the translated VBA back in the day). But that's probably because I know English, I often look for solutions to my problems in English, not in my native language, and then would have to mentally translate that back. But that's perhaps a burden for programmers more than for typical users.
A few thoughts:
• it's been that way for decades, at this point. So changing it would annoy a lot of users
• the problem with comma and semicolon would remain unless you want entering numbers normally and within a formula to be different. I'm not sure that's good in a product built around numbers (and often numbers that should be written and formatted like any other number in that country).
• making it configurable might work, but that then requires more testing, although sometimes it's not clear how much testing Microsoft is still doing, so that might not be much of a point. But adding options also has UX limits and not just in the length of the settings screen.
I've seen your work at Hard Work Party before, by the way! Really cool stuff, glad to see you've also got the startup going as well.
My GIS competition was fun too. They gave me a bunch of map data and I had to produce a report on Washington DC storm surge flood zones and potential rescue helicopter locations all within a couple hours.
I recall there being a video production category too. I didn't compete in it but you'd be given props and dialogue to turn into a video over the course of a day or two. Very few of the categories were contemporaneous competitions, most were long term project presentations.
Maybe let each editor request one reshoot in the first week, a committee aggregates similar requests, all editors get all the reshoots once they're finalized.
Maybe include storyboards and a rubrik for what story the film is supposed to share and how we're meant to feel, but maybe not.
Yes - but they've turned into something I'd really rather not watch: https://www.opus.pro/agent/human-creator-vs-ai
If you focus on fast typing/editing skills to level up, but still have bad decision-making skills, you'll just end up burying yourself (and possibly your team) faster and more decisively. (I have seen that, too.)
> how productive power users in different [fields] can be with their tools
There are a lot more tools in programming than your text editor. Linters, debuggers, AI assistants, version control, continuous integration, etc.
I personally know I'm terrible at using debuggers. Is this a shortcoming of mine? Probably. But I also feel debuggers could be a lot, lot better than they are right now.
I think for a lot of us reflecting at our workflow and seeing things we do that could be done more efficiently with better (usage of) tooling could pay off.
This is obviously 99% marketing. Microsoft/Waggener Edstrom tend to be really good at getting mainstream media to report on the marketing activities.
Example: For many Windows launches since Windows 3/95, there's been this media splash where Microsoft spends x million dollars on marketing and mainstream media then reports this, thereby getting (like) 100x millions worth of exposure.
Let alone the date issues.
At one point I did a deep dive on one or the other of these "quirks", and the earliest request for exactly the fix I want is from nineteen-eighty-fricking-five. Unbelievable.
I'll admit, on occasion having more than 65k rows is helpful but generally that's the domain of a database, not excel and it wasn't a good tradeoff IMO
What does that mean? Microsoft stopped developing new features? You think it was feature-complete?
Obligatory Krazam sketch: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY?si=h6QR2gzac48R6kca
https://fmworldcup.com/
[0] https://www.vimgolf.com/
Edit: Of course, they changed the title! [1]
[1] https://share.google/qJYSGYMKihkjh7bql