Ask HN: What do you use MS Excel for?
I've heard that Excel is really powerful. Do you guys have any stories about that?
Whether it's personal or for business what do you use it for?
1. A file viewer for certain kinds of data (eg, CSV files and the like).
2. A quick and dirty way to get simple summary stats from some data. Spreadsheets make it pretty easy to point at some data and get things like the mean, median, mode, std deviation, etc.
3. Quick and dirty plotting of small amounts of data. This use isn't as frequent for me, as I tend to use GNUPlot for most of this kind of stuff, but sometimes if you're already in the spreadsheet program poking at some data, you want a chart with a trend-line or something.
4. Exploratory models to play with "what if" analysis. Useful for a first pass at coming up with financial projects, evaluating pricing models, etc. The nice thing about a spreadsheet for this is that you write up all the various formulas you care about, and then you can update one cell and quickly see all the updated values. In a sense, spreadsheets are an implementation of a sort of Dataflow programming[1] and this kind of thing can be very handy.
It's good for getting answers to questions like "If I want this company to generate $1MM in revenue this year, and we set the price for our product to z, how many customers do we have to sign up?" and others of that nature. Of course there are plenty of other ways to do this kind of analysis, but spreadsheets are pretty convenient here.
It all works perfectly but obviously just for one user at a time. So I brought on a dev friend a few months ago and will launch a user facing site next week, as well as a b2b api for match previews / seo rich content.
I'm actually looking for seed funding up to around 25k, if anyone wants to reach out about that, or has other questions.
If you just want to follow some of the tips I'm running a very basic blog site at www.tennisacca.com sharing my most highly recommended picks (rather than listing 100's of games a week and needing a huge bankroll), which win at a ROI of 10%+ on average. It's mostly just for friends until the main site launches next week.
I have used it to chart data extracted from syslog, journald, dmesg. For example trouble-shooting in a Wi-Fi subsystem or boot time optimization work.
And of course all kind of project management type stuff. My job forces me to do that in Google Sheets these days. Action points, bug lists etc. are easily maintained in a spreadsheet. On one side it's a bit of a misuse of the tool, but as long they are short and simple lists with 10s and not 100s of entries it can be the most efficient solution.
The main drawback is that version history is a pain. If something goes wrong (wrong formula, wrong editing) it can be impossible to understand what happened and fix the problem afterwards.
I could use some advice on modeling itself too...
I made it so after inputting less than ten variables it automatically calculated everything they needed, generated several charts and graphs, and a fully completed report at the press of a button. I turned it from a two or three day job into a 10 minute one.
Needless to say my client was fairly excited.
- Plan for miles run every day of the week, side-by-side with what I actually ran, notes about pace, weather, and other factors
- Sum of total weekly mileage done vs. planned, amount left to meet my goals
- Number of weeks left until race
all in one "dashboard." It's nothing fancy, but the date and sum functions made it really trivial to make a template for this exactly how I wanted it.
Like my father, who runs his entire gas station/towing company/repair shop with Excel macros. lol.
1. Accumulating results of performance tests over time. Add columns with results for each nightly regression and keeping additional columns like std/worst/avg for last10, last100 etc.
2. Keeping indexes with locations of our data, and their meta data. So we can quickly find data that matches to specific problems we need to solve.
3. Specification files for our performance tests. Listing KPIs for specific cases, KPIs per type of machine, how to measure (bst5, avg5, single), tracking what should show up as red/green/orange in our dashboards.
4. Running FMEA using an excel FMEA template that automatically fills/calculates certain columns based on answers in the other.
5. All sorts of automatically generated regression overviews for our unit tests over periods of time. Showing trends, violations with specs, etc.
6. Sheets that are connected to our TFS so we can have overviews and do mass updates on items.
7....
In one place where I worked, someone had programmed financial models in Excel. It used to run for a long time, crash often etc. But it was good enough for his team and they used it until I left. That one single Excel file was worth a lot
Here is someone doing paintings in excel: https://pasokonga.com/
In the hands of someone who knows how to use it, Excel is incredibly powerful. Though at some point it crosses the threshold of "why don't you just get a junior developer to code this?". And the answer is always "we are technologically dinosaurs, and we think that any devolopment project costs at least $200k"
Large corporate governance is at best, a shitshow.
I'm curious to hear about things which are easy to do in Excel, but hard in the Jupyter workflow.
If your excel files have anything for forward planning and you want to share those files, I'd be interested.
Unfortunately there was no planning involved, one spreadsheet was just for her to put stuff she bought and the spreadsheet would calculate how much she spent in the month/week. Another one was for her to calculate how much the Saturday children center she is running would earn per month.
Since you made a webapp for personal finances, let me mention you the one a friend made: https://spendbook.net/main it doesn't do planning but I think he'll still be happy to get some feedback.
Even from JSON or XML.
The other advantage is that you have a full language (Wolfram Language) in the event you want to do further evaluation.