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I had a coworker who could really Go Fast in Excel, and by watching him, learned enough tricks to be able to impress onlookers by flying through computations with keyboard shortcuts.

From my perspective, it's gotten harder to use spreadsheet programs efficiently with each new version - the keyboard shortcuts collide more, and everything moving to Office 365 / Google Docs / etc. has made the available tools less powerful.

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Microsoft keep bringing in game-breaking features to Microsoft Excel to break the meta. It is aimed at the casual audience to bring in the party gamers and makes the program an absolute mess competitively.

Maybe I imagined it, but I'm pretty sure I CTRL+Z'd in one document and it focused another Excel document and undid it there. Also when I try to save anything it defaults to the cloud rather than the longstanding save dialog. I've heard in the past the Excel team was elite and held back BS but maybe not anymore.

The thing that's always got me is how loose a hold Excel has on the clipboard. Copy a cell and you best not do anything but paste it where you want to, cause so much as breathing will clear that copy.

That has happened to me so many times, I should know better, but it still gets me. When I'm working in a document, I don't want to undo some other document. I just want to work on the document I'm working on. This is such a horrible "feature" that it really is a bug.

it's been downhill ever since excel 2003 imo

excel used to almost be a joy to use; now it's sluggish, inconsistent, and buggy

i mostly use excel 2010 now as it's a little less obnoxious than the newest builds...

i look forward to not having to use this steaming pile though I suspect I've got another 20+ years of it :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg will turn you into a more proficient user of Excel.

However, make sure you know the limits of Excel...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988

> However, make sure you know the limits of Excel... > > https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988

It's not fair to blame Excel for this, the real issue was using a very outdated file format from before Office 2007

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg

That's "You Suck at Excel" talk by Joel Spolsky.

I was expecting a different video :( I had watched that one and it's too basic.

so true - I held on to Excel 2003 until 2018 at which point it really just didn't work anymore on Win10

As someone various colleagues have urged to compete at modeloff years ago, it's really just something one would do if they enjoy it, anyone smart/experienced enough to do modeloff/etc. would also know it's not a good value proposition in terms of winnings/expected value/etc.

Also, anyone who writes a formula like "=SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””)" is a bit suspect imo

from chatgpt:

Here's a practical example to illustrate:

Assume cell C3 contains the string "A:B:c".

Removing colons results in "ABc". Converting to lowercase results in "abc". Extracting ASCII codes of "a", "b", and "c" gives 97, 98, and 99, respectively. Summing these values gives 97 + 98 + 99 = 294. So, the formula SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””)))))) for the string "A:B:c" results in 294.

> SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””)

Smells like K, except way more human-friendly :)

Make that code lowercase, introduce significant whitespace and call the langauge "Boa" or something, and it's guaranteed it'll take the world of scientific computing by storm.

what does MID do?

not a damn thing in the truncated formula expressed in the article, but in real life it is substring(text, start index, length)