You know who's awesome at Excel? Martin Shkreli. You know, the Wall Street asshole who's in jail now? A while back, someone told me "hey, dude, there are these videos on YouTube where Martin Shkreli uses Excel, and they're fucking magic. It's like the first time you watched someone who's really good at Vim. "
It's true: [0]. Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag, he's fucking awesome at using Excel.
Does being good at excel mean that one knows the shortcuts of navigation? The video indeed showed that Martin knew his ALT+, CTRL+ etc., but is that what differentiates an excel pro from a newbie? I thought that 'knowing' excel goes much deeper than the navigational shortcuts: solver, array formulas, powerpivot, vba etc. etc. - this is what I'd call more sophisticated excel features. If someone clicks the number format dialog or hits ctrl+! and then goes from there, surely shows if someone uses excel every day but not if he 'knows' excel.
In my 25+ years of using Excel, here's what makes a pro:
1. Someone who knows how to use two dimensional TABLE()s and vector functions.
2. Someone who can implement an imperative convergence (such as Newton/Raphson or non-plug-in goal seek)
3. Someone who can audit their dependencies and not shit out dozens of unused vars
4. Someone who knows the limit is 10 sheets and 20MB. :)
Visual Basic and shortcuts do not a pro make. VB makes Excel =less= usable, IMHO because now there is an extra dimension to debugging that requires understand each Macro and what it touches: it breaks the entire philosophy of show formulas + auditing.
Yes, this sounds like /r/iamverysmart and /r/gatekeeping, but I'll own that.
>Someone who knows the limit is 10 sheets and 20MB. :)
Hahaha. Isn’t that the truth.
It’s come to a point that there is only one true workflow for actual business excel work.
1) Back up your source data and then never touch it.
2) Clean source data, make sure you use tables.
3) As soon as possible, separate data from calculation.
All work, will probably be used more than once. So there is never really anything like “scratch work”. So when you open excel make it a point for it to be readable.
I’ve taken To ensuring calculated fields are at the end of the table. With a column header indicating that this is not native to the original data set.
Db and programming language will give you a backend. You'll still need a front end to display the info, and Excel is great at that. Not to mention you can send an Excel file by email, but you can't just send Docker containers to your clients and colleagues to run your spreadsheet.
Or just send the payload exported as JSON/CSV. We keep all kinds of project-relevant information in Word-/Excel-documents even checked into source control - plus these documents are used as a means to poll data from the customer. I'm actively fighting this terrible practice by writing some simple CRUD UIs (currently with React, but .NET would be a good choice too), to be able to transform project parameters influencing application configuration on our and on the customer side.
I’ve wondered on more than one occasion how many business problems could be solved much more quickly by just using excel as the front end gui/view instead of using some heavy weight client technology or worse, a web app.
- The XLS was used by multiple teams, from multiple sites, from multiple projects. It drove project-level decision making at the VP level. The person who wrote it was a genius, but there was no documentation or commenting, and over the decade after he left, it bloated Akira-style: many grubby hands had perverted it beyond its original use.
[Imagine if someone had written the most beautiful C++ & Boost (or C & GLib) numerical methods code, and then some boner noob came along and inserted their own bubblesort because they didn't understand Boost ... yeah, that kind of perversion.]
But because it was so important, and fed so many OTHER spreadsheets, it remains like a brain tumor pressing up against a spot so vital it could not be removed. I did a partial conversion to JavaScript and a MongoDB, but that was roundly shat upon because the main users weren't programmers and refused.
This is how very large companies work. (Most of the time.)
Because there’s too much overhead, it’s too hard to share, and the benefits don’t show up until the problem is more complex than most people ever need.
I mean with a Python and Jupyter Notebook workflow it is incredibly easy to share the work and understand what's going on if there's base level of knowledge.
All the simple formula stuff and basic data handling (using Pandas) would be incredibly easy to learn for pros at Excel.
it's not excel that's the problem - it's you or your replacement 6 months later trying to reverse engineer the iterated solution that you willed into being... ;-)
"Excel THINKS IT CAN DEAL with many gigs of data thanks to PowerPivot and the addition of an in-memory database."
It's so cute when I hit ctrl-downarrow on a blank sheet and Excel sends me to row 1,048,576. Wishful thinking because if I ever filled 1M cells with functions, well... lololololol... time to use JMP...
If you're putting the data in Excel's new data model, this is no longer a problem. I regularly have files with tens of millions of rows of data which pivot tables can work against with sub-second aggregations across multiple columns.
Actually much earlier in 2012, when Excel first shipped with xVelocity branded PowerPivot. It supports a new data model that reminds me of Microsoft Access in some ways (drag & drop relationships etc). This is a whole different beast from copy/pasting data into sheets - in fact, the data doesn't show up in sheets by default and you usually have to add other things (like pivot tables) to take advantage of it.
Microsoft is a sleeping giant in BI self-service right now, and the things they've been "quietly" adding (only if you don't follow them) are actually very compelling. I actually run a Windows VM on my MBP just so I can run Power BI.
Is this power bi..? Ah, I think it is. I’ve really tried to get up to speed with it, but it feels so alien to normal excel in many ways. I feel an existential dread when I drop a column in power BI.
But yeah, it’s very powerful. It’s very sql like in the way you have to treat actions and data.
Yes and no. Power BI is a mixed cloud/desktop thing - the desktop GUI for creating reports/charts is actually pretty cool. PowerPivot and Power Query in Excel are add-ons that tack on the same analytical engine that Microsoft purchased to power new features in SQL Server. I believe MS is branding this all now as Power BI, but it's still a little confusing to be honest.
In the Power BI desktop app you can connect to standard RDBMS' like MySQL, Postgres, or SQL Server and basically it works like Tableau. The really interesting part is you can export these data sources and hook them into Excel (local or via the cloud).
> It’s very sql like
It should be, this is essentially using Excel as an GUI on top of technology designed to run an analytics RDBMS. It actually is an entirely separate interface from Excel and feels bolted on after-the-fact.
Here's an example of the PowerPivot Excel add-on screens:
Steal money from poor people? No problem, just a small fine. Steal money from rich people? Off to jail you go. I'm not saying that what Martin Shkreli did was right, i.e. he did not go to jail for raising the prices on medicine (for which he had good reasons). He went to jail for lying to investors in a sort of Ponzi scheme using new investments to pay off old debts.
Neither action was right, but it’s not fair to frame this as the same action in both cases with the only difference being whether the victims were rich or poor.
The price hike was rent seeking, not stealing, it didn’t depend on any lies, and it was legal. Plus, the goal was to get the money from insurance companies, not from patients. The investment fraud required lying, it was stealing, and it was illegal.
The drug price hike may have been justified with lies, I’m not claiming there weren’t any lies, but buying the rights, hiking the price, and getting the money didn’t require any lying, and it was done in full public view.
>>You know, the Wall Street ... who's in jail now?
He is a seriously misunderstood figure. Have watched his YouTube videos too, not just the investment class but also his working sessions. Sure his excel skills are legendary.
But I learned a lot from him about skills, learning and mastery. Merely watching him work not only motivated me. But gave me tremendous perspective on time, its utility to life and how skills and knowledge need to work in general.
This guy has legendary skills in investing world. But apart from that he was always reading a book or two. He was doing organic chemistry, chess, playing guitar, learning programming and interests in wide variety of topics in economics.
He was first genuine example of 10k hour practice I have watched live in practice.
You also get to look into the mind of this guy, and see what's at the core of it, and you see most is basically 'knowledge and practice'.
> This guy has legendary skills in investing world
No, he doesn’t. He seems clever, but is clearly a sociopath. He has very few winners on his books, all of which were high-vol high-beta bets in a bull market, and almost wiped out his fund in a short period of time. There are so many better investing role models than Shkreli.
Agreed. He really is an inspiration. In jail he's spending his time reading and learning, which you can follow along with on his blog. He's a very intelligent guy and I think he's almost like an anti-hero who's bad at portraying himself. I think if he played his cards right he'd paid a fine and spent no time in jail, but he had way too much fun stirring up a scene.
I largely believe now that the left movements across the world have degraded to making a virtue out of laziness, poverty and people lack of ability to take initiative.
There was no way this guy could have survived, in fact Martin should have spent time learning a little politics too.
If you have the kind of skills, motivated enough, have ability to take initiatives and overall quality of human enterprise that this guy has you are bound to attract envy, spite and more importantly people just want to see the end of you for being a live anti thesis to their lives.
I have a feeling that people won't relax until they see Elon Musk meeting the same fate too.
One powerful use of Excel is through Apache POI. Replace VB with the language of your choice, run all your logic and tests in that language, and spit out a spreadsheet at the end of it, all neatly formatted for your end users.
It's a long video is there a specific point where the magic happens? I skipped around and all I saw was him copying and pasting and setting up basic algebra formulas.
Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag
There's no reason to couch your comment like this. He's not a heartless douchebag, and the claims of him causing medicine shortages were greatly exaggerated.
Where would I start? I know next to nothing about that guy besides the headlines about the drug price raise. Wikipedia doesn't paint a brighter picture either tbh.
You mean the guy who wrote this? Clearly, he's a diamond in the rough /s.
'Then a letter from Mr. Shkreli came to his home, addressed to his wife.
“Your husband has stolen $1.6 million from me,” it read.
“Your pathetic excuse of a husband,” the letter added, “needs to get a real job that does not depend on fraud to succeed.”
“I hope to see you and your four children homeless,” the letter said. “I will do whatever I can to assure this. Your husband’s arrogance is infuriating, and making an enemy out of me is a mistake.”'
Advocating against bad actions is different than going homeless because your parents did something wrong. You can't assume that they didn't and can't assume they deserve any punishment for what their parents do.
It's pointless to ask any of these peanut gallery NPCs where they keep their 1.6 million dollars, because their milquetoast "peace and love, maaaan" world view guarantees they will never have what it takes to earn such an amount in the first place.
Please watch your language. And like most things, shrekli wasn't as evil as the media paints him out to be and equally, he wasn't as great as his supporters think he is.
There are plenty of people whp are great at excel but you chose to talk about him. Don't give that guy any more attention. Thats what he wants. Lets all just forget about him and go on with our lives.
Insurance firms send a clear message- fuck with us and we completely ruin you.
And before anybody downvotes me- please inform yourself- not a single person had to pay a penny more than what they had to pay before the price increase, except the insurance firms.
The point of insurance is that the customers pay the full cost. (And a little extra). It's just that customers share the full cost of all the customers, not their individual costs.
It's passed on in aggregate, spreading the burden. Except now the burden gets heavier for all because some companies find a way to leverage the most vulnerable.
The funny thing is you're being glib, but Markowitz literally is quoted as saying diversification is the closest thing there is in finance to a free lunch.
Diversification? An insurance policy is a wager made with one party on a series of closely related events. There's nothing diverse about it, from the consumer standpoint. Some diversification is possible for the insurance firm itself, although there are limits to that so most firms purchase reinsurance.
Of course it's diversification. Instead of being short your own illness only, you enter a swap where you receive coverage for your own illness (thus being flat on that clump risk), and pay a small floating leg covering (a small proportion of) everyone's illness. You have much smaller variance, but the same expected return (minus administration costs) - just like any diversification.
There was no campaign. Nobody met in a smoke filled room and decided they were going to ruin the guy's life. What actuallu happened was the guy was a douchebag, and people called him out for it.
HN is the only place I find people defending that guy. I suspect it's because this forum is full of douchebags who identify with him.
Humans are complex creatures with many facets, and a crime and shitty PR doesn't change that. Most people don't defend criminals or unpopular opinions as to avoid alienation and judgement.
Generalizing people or groups of people over shallow associations says more about the commenter than those commented on.
Shkreli was one of many finance types who have fully drunk the koolaid. He is not alone, and the others too would be prosecuted if people had the time and awareness to be incensed with the culture.
In his defense, shkrelli didn’t know he was a tool. On the one hand singing praises of the free market and on the other taking advantage of every loophole someone could find.
I mean the argument that “no body has to pay a dime more.” Is so patently ludicrous for someone who works in finance, that it can only be called disingenuous.
The difference between HN and New York is that finance thinks it’s ok. HN was founded by people/culture who saw Wall Street as everything they didn’t want to be. (And now a sad reminder of how money changes perception)
I know many those who don’t think it’s ok, and are bothered by it, and many who think he is stupid and didn’t do anything particularly wrong. The morality of it is separated from the legality of it.
The defense on this issue is pretty clear cut, raising the price is not illegal. If there is something illegal, then it should be in a regulation somewhere.
If he is doing something the market is open to, then it’s not a problem and he is doing a service by forcing the market or regulators to respond.
Maybe he was a douche about it, but that’s a stylistic issue, not a practical one.
He did get dinged for securities fraud, not price gouging as I recall.
It's true: [0]. Say what you will about that little heartless douchebag, he's fucking awesome at using Excel.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw