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Comment by westurner | Hacker News Reader

TIL about Excel e-Sports. From https://www.fmworldcup.com/excel-esports/ :

> No finance, just Excel and logical thinking skills. Use IFS, XLOOKUP, SUM, VBA, Power Query: anything is allowed, and the strategy is up to you.

It says VBA, so presumably named variables are allowed in the Excel spreadsheet competition.

What about Python and e.g. Pandas or https://www.pola.rs/ ?

> Some events are invitational, some are open for everyone to participate in.

> All battles are live-streamed and can be spectated on our Youtube channel.

View on HN

> What about Python and e.g. Pandas or https://www.pola.rs/ ?

I think it is safe to assume that only Microsoft Excel is allowed. The features they listed are all built in features.

Kaggle speed runs as a sport would be interesting.

They really would. I feel like kaggle is mostly teams slowly grinding for very small incremental improvements over each other. Adding a time component would really sort the wheat from the chaff.

It would certainly change the dynamic. Not sure about wheat from the chaff - faster != better.

Metrics for scoring: error/cost/fitness, time to solution (t), dollars to solution ($), resources in terms of {carbon, kWh, USD,}, costs in terms of costed opcodes,

Whether there's a logically plausible causal explanation (for quickly-discovered probably just associative relations)

The monthly ones are fun.

If you can write it in 20 minutes, I'd be impressed. Excel has everything integrated with macros already so it is easier to use VBA.

There are many ways to do ~no-code GUI analysis with [Jupyter] notebooks (e.g. with the VSCode jupyter notebook support) pretty quickly; with some pointing and clicking of the mouse if you please.

Computational Notebook speedrun competition ideas:

- Arithmetic w/ `assert`: addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, exponents/logarithms; and then again with {NumPy, SymPy, Lean Mathlib}

- Growth curve fitting; data modeling with linear and better models

- "Principia" work-along notebooks

- "Princeton Companion to [Applied] Mathematics" work-along notebooks

- Khan Academy work-along notebooks

> - Arithmetic w/ `assert`: addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, exponents/logarithms; and then again with {NumPy, SymPy, Lean Mathlib}

"How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19452752 ...

"How should logarithms be taught?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28519356

> - Growth curve fitting; data modeling with linear and better models

Input: at least a two-column table

Output: a symbolic (or NN) model with minimal error in predicting the test half of the data after a `test_train_split()`-like routine.

Any good recommendations for starting points to learn how to work with these? I'm not a programmer, but do have programming ability, and use excel all the time. Having a more flexible system with better inputs (tying in web scraping, data pipelines, etc) sounds like a great idea.

Try https://colab.research.google.com/

Kaggle learn: https://www.kaggle.com/learn

"Python Data Science Handbook" (O'Reilly) http://jakevdp.github.io/PythonDataScienceHandbook

awesome-python#web-content-extracting: https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python#web-content-extracti...

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python/

"What is the best way to learn to code from absolute scratch?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299880

I watched one of these a few months ago - VBA was allowed, but the whole thing was very clearly about Excel specifically and all of the competitors came from the finance world. Honestly, I saw way less cool use of formulas than I was expecting - a ton of competitors had an approach of "make a big data table and use Goal Seek". Maybe the All-Star is different?

I work in finance, big spreadsheets. These guys are doing more puzzles that are easy to score. Its interesting but the guys who maintain very large dynamic models i find more impressive. Can your model survive the abuse of a 9 month m&a transaction?

Considering sports like 'Battle Bots' (A RC robot fighting event) have viewership beyond Engineers, I would assume 'Excel sports' has its own appeal considering its one of the widely used software for a long time.

But I can't dismiss the feeling that, Some assistant to an accountant in a scrappy building somewhere who has never heard of such event is actually extremely talented with excel and could win the championship if they participated.

I would assume you have to use stock. Excel/Office ships with a VBA IDE that you get to with alt-F11 (and I think by viewing macro source through the menus.)

Alt-F11, thanks. Is there a macro recorder built into Excel that could make learning VBA syntax and UI-API equivalencies easy?

There's a macro recorder, but the code it generates isn't meant to be efficient or readable.

VBA is easy, you can just google it. It's very bad, but once you know it well, and if you stick to a functional style, you can do what you want. For Excel, get to know Range objects well, and to wring some polymorphism out of VBA, learn interfaces.

I've seen basically Mario in VBA in Excel, so I know it's real. "Show formulas" && [VBA, JS] vs an app with test coverage.

Are unit and/or functional automated tests possible with VBA; for software quality and data quality?

GSheets has Apps Script; which is JS, so standard JS patterns work. It looks like Excel online can run but cannot edit VBA macros; and Excel online has a JS API, too.

Added challenge would be Excel 95 on a 486 DX.

...with a single challange of not making it blue screen.

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