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> Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works. this right there. except, it IS easy to learn

by mlatu 4y ago

> Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works. this right there. except, it IS easy to learn actually. it's visual, you can click around and find out. if you forget the spelling of some formula, no probs, there is a help button. the interface is what makes it easier, markdown is also an interface. except it's not AS exposed to the user as excel is. people dont want to read manuals or consult documentation, they want to hit the ground running.

crdrost 4y ago
Yeah, I want to emphasize those aspects. • Excel is based on a simpler model of computation, something like the unification ideas in logic programming, state is not named and minimally expressive, etc. You want a looping construct? Better autofill a column or something! • Excel automatically includes printf-style debugging of every object in the system; that is the default state of the system and you have to hide columns you don't want to see. • Excel has no compilation or run step. The document is living and when you change things you immediately see the results of that change. This means that the programming model in Excel becomes much more amenable to the results-oriented mind. Decide on an incremental goal, then calculate a bunch of results “the long way” and then massage the formula until it gives a result that matches your manual calculations. Repeat as desired. It's like clay, basically. You sculpt it to look right and then you sculpt the next piece to build on that and so on.
- MrPatan 4y ago
  Ima stop you right there and ask how you made the bullet points. • Is it just a pasted character? * Is it a markdown thing? * Is it?
  - asddubs 4y ago
    it's a character
  - dbalatero 4y ago
    You can tell it's a character because the wrapped lines don't indent & align like a real bullet list.
  - crdrost 4y ago
    I was on my mobile, I think the keyboard is Gboard, you have a symbol keyboard with two pages and the second page has the bullet. Also if I long press on the bullet I can choose among •♣♠♪♥♦, which I find to be a hilarious random assortment...
- ryanjshaw 4y ago
  One additional point: since Excel packages the code with the data, when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did and learn on the job. This is also why Jupyter notebooks are so powerful. If instead of Excel they run a bunch of scripts and just send me the output, I am left much less empowered.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    > when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did a You must have encountered only very simple spreadsheets. I've had to reverse engineer a number of technical spreadsheets that took days of full time sweated effort to merely understand the principles and more days again to extract the methods accurately enough so that they could be reimplemented in a programming language.
    - feoren 4y ago
      Think about how much harder it would be if you couldn't see the inputs, code, and outputs all together at once. The difficulty you found has little to do with Excel; you were trying to learn a whole new domain by reverse-engineering a model created by an SME. Of course it took multiple days of effort to merely(!?) "understand the principles" of a brand new technical domain. Ideally the SME should be explaining those things to you as well.
      - mlatu 4y ago
        > The difficulty you found has little to do with Excel; i claim, if you allowed access to an underlying source code representation of the spreadsheet, or rather, if you made that transformation at all, you could easily add symbols and labels to transform an excel sheet into something a programmer could turn into a binary but i doubt that step inbetween is desired I mean, the activity of analyzing an excel spreadsheet is more akin to learning where all the items in your favourite point and click adventure is and in what order to get them where, than to actually analyzing a problem
    - 4y ago
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  That pt 3 is actually something I really like in Office. It isn't just instant, you can see changes live as you mouse over different options. I also really like the search tool that lets you just type what feature you are looking for. I have no idea where the 'new pivot table' button is and I don't care, I can just search it instead of hunting through menus.
  - mlatu 4y ago
    as much as i hate microsoft, excel endearingly excels expectations...
pxc 4y ago
> except, it IS easy to learn actually. it's visual, you can click around and find out. That's not easy at all. I am an actual Excel 2007+ virgin. I switched to OpenOffice (there was no Libreoffice yet; Oracle had not yet bought Sun) before high school. Before I finished university, I abandoned all traditional office tools in favor of open-source tools that use entirely different paradigms from Microsoft Office, e.g., Word -> Lyx/LaTeX, PowerPoint -> Org-beamer, Excel -> R. I didn't even use traditional Office tools when they were 'required' by class, instead explaining my commitments to the instructors and teaching myself the open-source alternatives as I went. For the first ~5 years of my career, I was at startups where I didn't need to use Microsoft Office or even tools in that category. So within the past year, I started dabbling in Excel for my job, when the last version of Excel I even messed around with was Excel 2003, pre-ribbon menu, in junior high. And as a developer who is approaching contemporary Excel from a position that is actually pretty close to a blank slate in terms of experience with it... I am here to tell you that this > [Excel] IS easy to learn actually is false. You are almost certainly discounting experience people have gradually acquired with Excel in school and over the course of a career. This isn't just evident with oddball developers like me who wanted to and managed to avoid Excel for most of our careers so far. It's also perfectly evident in baby boomers who grew up without Excel and need assistance for basic tasks, and increasingly in zoomers who, like those two generations before them and earlier, have grown up without being trained on office software in schools. Which takes us back to GP's statement: > > Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works. Moreover, these statements > if you forget the spelling of some formula, no probs, there is a help button. > people dont want to read manuals or consult documentation contradict each other. So do the following two, in a slightly less direct way. > it's visual, you can click around and find out > they want to hit the ground running Pressing the help button is reading the documentation, just as much as running `q --help` or whatever. And anybody who is visually exploring a GUI with as many buttons and menus as Excel's is absolutely crawling, not running. Visually scanning an overloaded, totally new-to-you graphical interface is slow, slow, slow. When I've been driving Excel on video calls with colleagues during working sessions (specifically for the purpose of learning it), I can practically hear the veins on their foreheads bulging as I fumble around. Searching with your eyes, especially when some options are hidden behind additional clicks as they are on ribbon menus, is so unbelievably slow compared to searching through a comprehensive manual by typing a couple of words.

by mlatu 4y ago

crdrost 4y ago

Yeah, I want to emphasize those aspects. • Excel is based on a simpler model of computation, something like the unification ideas in logic programming, state is not named and minimally expressive, etc. You want a looping construct? Better autofill a column or something! • Excel automatically includes printf-style debugging of every object in the system; that is the default state of the system and you have to hide columns you don't want to see. • Excel has no compilation or run step. The document is living and when you change things you immediately see the results of that change. This means that the programming model in Excel becomes much more amenable to the results-oriented mind. Decide on an incremental goal, then calculate a bunch of results “the long way” and then massage the formula until it gives a result that matches your manual calculations. Repeat as desired. It's like clay, basically. You sculpt it to look right and then you sculpt the next piece to build on that and so on.

MrPatan 4y ago
Ima stop you right there and ask how you made the bullet points. • Is it just a pasted character? * Is it a markdown thing? * Is it?
- asddubs 4y ago
  it's a character
- dbalatero 4y ago
  You can tell it's a character because the wrapped lines don't indent & align like a real bullet list.
- crdrost 4y ago
  I was on my mobile, I think the keyboard is Gboard, you have a symbol keyboard with two pages and the second page has the bullet. Also if I long press on the bullet I can choose among •♣♠♪♥♦, which I find to be a hilarious random assortment...
ryanjshaw 4y ago
One additional point: since Excel packages the code with the data, when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did and learn on the job. This is also why Jupyter notebooks are so powerful. If instead of Excel they run a bunch of scripts and just send me the output, I am left much less empowered.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  > when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did a You must have encountered only very simple spreadsheets. I've had to reverse engineer a number of technical spreadsheets that took days of full time sweated effort to merely understand the principles and more days again to extract the methods accurately enough so that they could be reimplemented in a programming language.
  - feoren 4y ago
    Think about how much harder it would be if you couldn't see the inputs, code, and outputs all together at once. The difficulty you found has little to do with Excel; you were trying to learn a whole new domain by reverse-engineering a model created by an SME. Of course it took multiple days of effort to merely(!?) "understand the principles" of a brand new technical domain. Ideally the SME should be explaining those things to you as well.
    - mlatu 4y ago
      > The difficulty you found has little to do with Excel; i claim, if you allowed access to an underlying source code representation of the spreadsheet, or rather, if you made that transformation at all, you could easily add symbols and labels to transform an excel sheet into something a programmer could turn into a binary but i doubt that step inbetween is desired I mean, the activity of analyzing an excel spreadsheet is more akin to learning where all the items in your favourite point and click adventure is and in what order to get them where, than to actually analyzing a problem
  - 4y ago
jabroni_salad 4y ago
That pt 3 is actually something I really like in Office. It isn't just instant, you can see changes live as you mouse over different options. I also really like the search tool that lets you just type what feature you are looking for. I have no idea where the 'new pivot table' button is and I don't care, I can just search it instead of hunting through menus.
- mlatu 4y ago
  as much as i hate microsoft, excel endearingly excels expectations...

pxc 4y ago

> except, it IS easy to learn actually. it's visual, you can click around and find out. That's not easy at all. I am an actual Excel 2007+ virgin. I switched to OpenOffice (there was no Libreoffice yet; Oracle had not yet bought Sun) before high school. Before I finished university, I abandoned all traditional office tools in favor of open-source tools that use entirely different paradigms from Microsoft Office, e.g., Word -> Lyx/LaTeX, PowerPoint -> Org-beamer, Excel -> R. I didn't even use traditional Office tools when they were 'required' by class, instead explaining my commitments to the instructors and teaching myself the open-source alternatives as I went. For the first ~5 years of my career, I was at startups where I didn't need to use Microsoft Office or even tools in that category. So within the past year, I started dabbling in Excel for my job, when the last version of Excel I even messed around with was Excel 2003, pre-ribbon menu, in junior high. And as a developer who is approaching contemporary Excel from a position that is actually pretty close to a blank slate in terms of experience with it... I am here to tell you that this > [Excel] IS easy to learn actually is false. You are almost certainly discounting experience people have gradually acquired with Excel in school and over the course of a career. This isn't just evident with oddball developers like me who wanted to and managed to avoid Excel for most of our careers so far. It's also perfectly evident in baby boomers who grew up without Excel and need assistance for basic tasks, and increasingly in zoomers who, like those two generations before them and earlier, have grown up without being trained on office software in schools. Which takes us back to GP's statement: > > Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works. Moreover, these statements > if you forget the spelling of some formula, no probs, there is a help button. > people dont want to read manuals or consult documentation contradict each other. So do the following two, in a slightly less direct way. > it's visual, you can click around and find out > they want to hit the ground running Pressing the help button is reading the documentation, just as much as running `q --help` or whatever. And anybody who is visually exploring a GUI with as many buttons and menus as Excel's is absolutely crawling, not running. Visually scanning an overloaded, totally new-to-you graphical interface is slow, slow, slow. When I've been driving Excel on video calls with colleagues during working sessions (specifically for the purpose of learning it), I can practically hear the veins on their foreheads bulging as I fumble around. Searching with your eyes, especially when some options are hidden behind additional clicks as they are on ribbon menus, is so unbelievably slow compared to searching through a comprehensive manual by typing a couple of words.