in reply to StillAlive

Kind of unrelated, but a coworker shared a spreadsheet with me the other day, and instead of dragging down to autocomplete the row number or using ctrl+d, he wrote a “1” then “A1+1” and dragged that down. It kept breaking because the rows had to be rearranged, and if you initially highlighted a modified row before dragging it would propagate the error down.

You’re an engineer, damnit.

in reply to binarytobis

It's a valid method that avoids some edge cases where Excel's autocomplete gets confused. He just forgot the last step of copy and then paste back into the same cells as text to remove the formula.

My pet peeve is my coworker who finds it easier to write macros to analyze the data instead of setting up formulas, and then I am completely unable to follow his analysis logic because it's all just columns of numbers with no way to tell what was used to calculate what.

Esta entrada fue editada (hoy, 1:55)
in reply to idiomaddict

An uncomfortable amount of my ability to sell myself as an employee is how good I am with excel, and yeah it's an impressive piece of software. Hand written spreadsheets are a useful accounting tool that can be bastardized for purposes that can be framed in accounting language (stuff like unit conversions and keeping track of inputs and outputs).

But excel does stuff like allowing you to make values change as dependent values change. It goes from the Sumerians tracking how much wheat each person has and the taxes they owe being calculated by hand to, in the size of a few clay tablets being able to automatically calculate it, factor in debts, and then look at every prior year. And it takes no more space for the tax collector to fit all the people they collect from. And they can share it with the Temple easily. And that's without considering all the ways it'll help merchants and be useful for distributing resources to the wards of the temple. And depending on the math abilities of the craftspeople they may also find it useful

in reply to The Picard Maneuver

It is funny seeing an increase in young men trying to retcon their choice to not pursue higher education by claiming "real men do blue collar work".

My field used to be like 95% men when I started around 20 years ago. I work in medicine, but our specialty uses a lot of heavy machinery and tools to fabricate custom braces and prosthetics. I work at a university hospital and we haven't had a male resident in like 5 years.

in reply to TranscendentalEmpire
It’s funny because if you dip your toes into a lot of blue collar work, you’ll find it still requires (or at least significantly benefits from) college education. I’ve met a few people majoring in landscaping or recreation, there’s a lot of advanced shit to learn. I know I sure as hell couldn’t figure out how to use plants to draw water uphill, but that’s what one of the places I volunteer at is doing with their planting. It’s not just men standing around grunting at each other and doing whatever until it looks decent.
in reply to TranscendentalEmpire

Was sitting in a capstone senior class at my liberal arts university. Happened to be taking it with a bunch of business majors. Some dipshit derails the entire class by saying "why do we need to learn any of this stuff, like history? I just want to make money."

"Haven't you ever heard the phrase about history repeating itself?"

"Well, if it's going to repeat itself, then I'll just learn about it when it happens again."

There was a literal business school like five miles down the road. And this guy chose to enroll in a liberal arts university and stay for four years. I get that the industrialization of higher education gave us that bullshit "go to college in order to get a higher paying job" and so this dude clearly just bought into that. But... again, no one was forcing him to go to a liberal arts school.

in reply to FrChazzz
In engineering school we made fun of how the people only in it for the money all wind up changing to a business major in year 2 or 3. The money is a big thing for certain, but you have to actually be passionate about it in order to get through the education. It's baffling someone could care that little in a major famous for not being great financially
in reply to buddascrayon

Spreadsheets are cool. Where they fall apart they fall apart spectacularly from people insisting on using them as an alternative to a database solution, in my experience. It doesn’t generally matter for normal user centric use cases but I’ve also had to perform a post bankruptcy audit on more than one company that trying to over leverage spreadsheets of duplicate, inconsistent, over saturated, and unreliable data was at the very least a significant contributing factor for the doors being shut.

Over ten contract managers all with their own version of a spreadsheet that tracks reportable items for their contracts and gets rolled up to a master spreadsheet via formulas that financial business decisions gets made from is the first immediate example that comes to mind.

Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 19:24)
in reply to buddascrayon

The disdain for spreadsheets comes from people who don't understand data organization, or people who do.

Tabular data? Good.
Schemaless? Unstructured? Probably maintained by eleventy-four random sales people and an account? Being given to me like it's a gift and expecting me to just magic it into some reporting system? On a recurring basis? No. Please God no.

I can be trusted to use a spreadsheet for my things that I don't share. Other people need to use something that will yell at them when they give it malformed gibberish.

Oh, and executable logic doesn't belong in the same context as data. That shit needs to be able to be told apart from the data.

in reply to BeigeAgenda

Glistening with sweat, displaying their power with every movement - the biceps, the pectorals, the glutes. Appearing through the dust they worked up while performing their task, unphased by the swirl of nature around them, unbound by the chaotic entropy of the multidimensional Coriolis vortex that they themselves stand at the point of, defiant, inevitable. Adorned with bronze, forged from the same Earth they demand fealty of.

What's not to love?

in reply to BeerStainedBunny
Sumerians built and invented a lot of stuff. You see, nobody had done anything yet, so there was a lot of catching up to do. So really it was more important than writing stuff is for us in a way. Plus selling stuff, history (aka yesterday), instructions, etc.
Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 23:25)