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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

Is there any money to be made on mastering Excel? Like are businesses ready to pay for Excel related services?

In my experience if you are a real Excel wizard you are close to irreplaceable and yes you can demand a very good salary. A lot of the business world runs on spreadsheets and being able to do some magic will make you a very popular person with management.

Investment firms value Excel so highly (and are so good at it, see this[1] amazing video that I saw on a previous HN thread of Martin Shkreli using Excel extremely effectively) that I'm sure they have internal training that is better than anything you can get outside.

Accountants pay very good money for Excel training, at least in Israel (I tried to compete with those courses by teaching Excel automation with Python, so I did some market research and customer development.)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4df5il/martin_shkre...

Could you link to a specific moment where his Excel skills show? I have seen this video pop up from time to time and by clicking through the timeline all I ever see is him copying numbers from pdf's into Excel. Surely the whole "wizardry" aspect cannot just be the fact that he uses alt-tab and arrow keys instead of a mouse?

Basically all corporate functions rely on some excel experience.

Corp Finance or FP&A typically require advanced skills. Excel is basically half the value, the other half is business acumen. You need both to be valuable.

Many investment firms heavily rely on Excel

CRM administration for example. Excel mastery is generally the entry point into those teams (from my experience)

If you find a way to audit spreadsheets to find fraud and error you'd make a fortune.

Speadsheets are scary.

http://www.eusprig.org/2006/spreadsheets-in-clinical-medicin...

This spreadsheet "shaming" is getting tiresome. The sheer amount of spreadsheets means that more than a few mistakes will come to light.

Let's not forget the fMRI software with bugs. Was it done in Excel?

Sure, Excel has some problems. No, they are not even close to what is implied in HN threads like this one.

Yeah the problem with excel based processes isn't really reliability (not the least because they are built and maintained by users who understand the domain rather than programmers writing code on specs), but lack of automation.

It's also very inefficient. Sort of a push approach where if you change an input you need to recompute every single combination of outputs instead of just the one output you want, as opposed to code which has a pull approach, where you call your output and it recalculates the steps it needs for just that output.

And as soon as you get into something you would express as a loop, or loop of loops, excel starts to be really painful to use if hardly usable.

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