Ask HN: How do I learn Excel as a programmer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I learn Excel as a programmer?

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I've come to appreciate some facets of Excel and feel it could be a valuable tool in my arsenal in addition to other languages I know. There seems to be a dearth of material on learning Excel targeting programmers/SW devs, does anyone have any good resources to share?

I'm looking for things along the lines of Joel Spolsky's "You Suck at Excel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94

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You shouldn't need to "Learn Excel" if you are a programmer. You use Excel or Google Sheets or Emacs' "Simple Emacs Spreadsheet" (SES) or whatever tool to do things you need to do, and learn whatever features you need as you go.

I personally use Google Sheets for: - Impromptu project planning and release tracking in small teams - Creating test plans for release testing

And not much else as I can do most other things using other tools. If you want to pivot data and do data analysis, yeah you can use a spreadsheet. Or you can use python.

I wouldn't go out of my way to learn the deep depths of excel when you could take time to learn sed or awk or columnar and multi-cursor editing in emacs or other tools that, beyond tasks that can be accomplished in excel, will help you in a wider variety of tasks.

But by all means I would be using excel for simple spreadsheet things. It's not a tool I'd go out of my way to spend time on learning excel as a programmer without a task infront of me as being a curious technically apt programmer means it's quite intuitive and fast to learn whatever I need to accomplish things in excel as I go.

Learn emacs, learn colemac, learn awk, learn clojure, learn pandas. I don't think you need to learn excel beyond basic spreadsheet functionality.

I would say that Joel Spolsky's video is one of the best ones out there (I used to be a die-hard Excel dev on a trading floor).

Other than that, we have a collection of open-source Git Excel workbook repositories that might be useful to go through: https://cloud.xltrail.com/

Some of them are pretty advanced, others less so.

There are some pretty good lynda.com tutorials that I've watched. I've found an advantage to those is that I also learned a few things about statistics too, which is useful outside Excel.

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