Are you an Excel guru?

[cojak]

Following on from the Agencies to Avoid thread, I thought this was an interesting off-topic thought.

Sadly I'm a 'No'. Google is my friend though so I'm familiar with conditional formatting, auto-filtering, creating drop-down lists, splitting cell data, linking between work sheets (and work books if needs be) and can do useful thing with that bastard-child VLOOKUP, and that kind of stuff. Sadly INDEX eludes me and I wish I could do more regarding serious data management.

Still, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, and I was in much demand in my previous contract for my 'expert' Excel knowledge (by Marketing though, who can barely recognise a laptop from an Etch-a-Sketch)

[MaryPoppins]

I'm the same as you, but probably crapper at looking good with it.

[Mich the Tester]

No, and many of the people who think they are, aren't either, as can be demonstrated by doing some basic testing on the wondrous spreadsheets they build. Businesses spend millions getting highly trained programmers to build stuff and getting highly trained testers to test it so they can have some confidence that their software does the maths correctly, and then semi-skilled people called 'managers' take the data out of a tested system and out of 'the cloud', stick it in an excel sheet, add the wrong formulae and a bunch of whizzy looking turning tables and drop downs, and then take decisions based on the output.

The democratisation of technology has a down side; the democratisation of clusterf**ks.

[Platypus]

Like you, I can make Excel do things that most people can only dream of, but I'm no guru.

Google is indeed my friend.

Although now I'm looking for a great cartoon I remember which illustrates the point nicely, it doesn't help me

[cojak]

My problem is that I'm not good at pure theory with Excel so I can't learn stuff without a problem to solve.

The problem with that approach is that I don't know all the various ways Excel can be used, I'm working from a very small pool

[Old Greg]

Like you, I can make Excel do things that most people can only dream of, but I'm no guru.

Google is indeed my friend.

Although now I'm looking for a great cartoon I remember which illustrates the point nicely, it doesn't help me

Much the same. I can usually work out how to do what I want so look like a genius compared to colleagues.

[eek]

Much the same. I can usually work out how to do what I want so look like a genius compared to colleagues.

+1 in my view I'm not great at Excel. Sadly that usually makes me the local guru as in the kingdom of the blind.....

[MaryPoppins]

Much the same. I can usually work out how to do what I want so look like a genius compared to colleagues.

Ditto.

Not difficult, granted.

I suspect not drinking out of a beaker makes me look like a genius compared to some colleagues.

[TheFaQQer]

I thought I was, until I saw some of the spreadsheets this project uses

[Old Hack]

Been a bane of my career. I have found, many little offices, have a go to person, and the person who knows a bit about developing and he’s been building little spreadsheets for years that make his life easier. Then the department becomes reliant on these little spreadsheets, and the tech guys adds a little bit more functionality here and there, then the organisation starts relying on it to automate some of its processes. Then work out, some of these orgs I work for, have 100 branches, each with their little go to person doing their own little thing.

You have 100’s, sometimes thousands, of stupid little spreadsheets, or worse, access databases, holding their own versions of central data. Then, you have the political nightmare, of getting the departments to agree to give these little tools up, so you can centralise the applications using a properly designed, specc’d and built application. Also, then you have to agree a common data model...

Earlier in my career, I would have to understand complex spreadsheets, so I knew what they were getting up to, and some of the code....

I still actually come across this sometimes, current client has many departments who operate on their own, different, versions of centralised data; nightmare.