# Don't you guys get tired of Excel?



## Benzadeus (Apr 30, 2020)

Ok, maybe the thread title is bait. I like Excel, but there are guys with 20k+ posts here. How can someone don't get bored!
Don't you guys get tired of Excel? What gives you motivation to go on with Excel in the forum?


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## Joe4 (May 1, 2020)

Benzadeus said:


> Ok, maybe the thread title is bait. I like Excel, but there are guys with 20k+ posts here. How can someone don't get bored!
> Don't you guys get tired of Excel? What gives you motivation to go on with Excel in the forum?


Really, you could say that about anything.  For teachers who have taught for 30 years.  Don't they get tired of teaching?

For me (who has over 50,000 posts), it is the desire to learn and to help others (I also like problem solving and puzzles).
There is just so much to Excel and VBA, there is always something new to learn.  I am still learning new things.  It is cool to watch how others solve the same problem differently.
Some 50,000 posts and 18 years later, I am still learning new things about Excel.

I guess it boils down to, I really enjoy working in Excel.  People seldom grow tired of doing things they enjoy!


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## Peter_SSs (May 1, 2020)

I have eaten 20k+ breakfasts, but I still love eating breakfast & don't find it boring.


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## Benzadeus (May 2, 2020)

Joe4 said:


> Really, you could say that about anything.  For teachers who have taught for 30 years.  Don't they get tired of teaching?
> 
> For me (who has over 50,000 posts), it is the desire to learn and to help others (I also like problem solving and puzzles).
> There is just so much to Excel and VBA, there is always something new to learn.  I am still learning new things.  It is cool to watch how others solve the same problem differently.
> ...



I could agree with you, but the fact is that back in 2006 when I began to study Excel/Formulas like a maniac, I went to VBA, became Excel MVP. Then, I studied databases. Then, DAX/Power Query/PBI. Then Office Web addins. The fact is that the tools available in web development are so powerful that I can't help to like Excel as much as I liked in the past.


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## Joe4 (May 2, 2020)

Benzadeus said:


> I could agree with you, but the fact is that back in 2006 when I began to study Excel/Formulas like a maniac, I went to VBA, became Excel MVP. Then, I studied databases. Then, DAX/Power Query/PBI. Then Office Web addins. The fact is that the tools available in web development are so powerful that I can't help to like Excel as much as I liked in the past.


To each their own, I suppose.
Since becoming proficient in Excel, I have also become proficient in Access, SQL, and JavaScript. but I still like Excel!


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## Jon von der Heyden (May 5, 2020)

I think with Excel, what keeps people engaged for so long, is the fact that it is seemingly endless.  There's always more to learn!
Another aspect is the community.  I have formed a handful of really good relationships here.  I am in a life-relationship with someone from this board.  Another chap has been a friend for over a decade.  Heck he's even employed me.

I don't participate as much any more, but I pop past frequently just to see how things are going.  My interests have shifted in the past few years, but if you speak about me to anybody who knows me, chances are they will mention Excel.  It's more than an application - it is something I will have a life-long passion for, and a community that helped me build a career.


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## Rick Rothstein (May 9, 2020)

I think Joe4 said it best when he said "...it is the desire to learn and to help others (I also like problem solving and puzzles)"... that pretty much covers it for me as well.


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## DataBlake (May 26, 2020)

For me excel has many functionalities with VBA that interact with other forms of code/applications that it is seemingly endless. I can use excel with just about anything and learn an entirely new way to do the same things, but faster and more productive for the specific task. You can move a column with copy/paste or you could send everything into arrays/dictionary objects and do the same task in a fraction of the time. Its stuff like that that breathes life into excel over and over.


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## ashakantasharma (May 30, 2020)

If you are PASSIONATE about something, you would not be BORED in entire life.


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## TinaP (Jun 16, 2020)

Back in the 1940s my mom's favorite class was bookkeeping.  Perhaps I have a genetic predisposition to love putting numbers in little rectangles?

All humor aside, I marvel that we all have different interests and while I can easily solve most (certainly not all) Excel problems, I have trouble with Scrabble and word/letter puzzles.  It's a good thing, too.


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## xenou (Jun 18, 2020)

I'm still enthusiastic about visicalc ...


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## MARK858 (Jun 18, 2020)

xenou said:


> I'm still enthusiastic about visicalc ...


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## Rick Rothstein (Jun 18, 2020)

VisiCalc? Pshaw! It's MultiPlan all the way for me.  ?


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## MARK858 (Jun 18, 2020)

Rick Rothstein said:


> VisiCalc? Pshaw! It's MultiPlan all the way for me. ?


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## Eric W (Jun 19, 2020)

Quattro Pro for me!  I may still have some install disks somewhere . . . ?


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## MARK858 (Jun 19, 2020)

Eric W said:


> Quattro Pro for me!  I may still have some install disks somewhere . . . ?


I just hope then that you never get the urge to change MS Office for WordPerfect Office


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## Eric W (Jun 19, 2020)

Back in the day, I preferred both WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, when they were separate companies.  WordPerfect Corp. eventually bought Quattro Pro in an effort to make a full office suite to compete with Microsoft.  But the first few years were quite rocky, and the components did not mesh well at all.  WordPerfect eventually got it right, but by then, the market had moved on.  (With some questionable tactics by Microsoft, depending on whose story you believe.)  But no, after using MS Office for 25 years or so, I don't have any real desire to go back.  But I did install WordPerfect on my mother's computer, and she still uses it!  I hope her computer lasts, because there's no way I can try to get her to switch at this point.


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## Richard U (Jun 22, 2020)

I have been using Excel for 30 years now (WOW!) and it has been the hub of my professional experience.  Every day I learn something new.  I have used it for everything from the mundane, to a platform for a major newspaper to publish print and online editions (Hint, the newspaper is named after a street in the NYC financial district).


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## Cerated (Aug 16, 2020)

I just like to explore all the functions of excel and be the best at it.


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## montecarlo2012 (Sep 6, 2020)

Jon von der Heyden said:


> I have formed a handful of really good relationships here


I tried, You are lucky,


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## Drrellik (Oct 4, 2020)

With Peter, Rick, Fluff, Bill, and many many more spending years learning and developing the knowledge base of Excel and still learning new things.  I have a question? 

Do you ever wonder how much the programmers who put Excel together actually know about what it can do?  Or are the users the ones constantly finding new ways to make things happen?

I think one post mentioned enjoying watching people solve the same problem with a different solution.  I think that is what I like as well.


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## cooper645 (Oct 17, 2020)

I concur, I enjoy learning new things trying to help others and then I find some VBA solution over about 20 lines of code and some on comes along and provides 5 lines that do the same thing 5 times faster.
Always learning and the skills transfer to work, which has allowed me to free up hours over the course of a month, which is spent doing other tasks.
It puts me ahead of my peers and I feel has been a strong factor with promotions at work, a useful skill.

People tell me its sad, but their opinion changes when I write them a macro that saves them 10 minutes of their life each day.


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## Joe4 (Oct 18, 2020)

cooper645 said:


> People tell me its sad, but their opinion changes when I write them a macro that saves them 10 minutes of their life each day.


Tell them that is not sad.  Sad is doing work you are not passionate about!


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## XcelLearner (Oct 29, 2020)

Richard U said:


> I have been using Excel for 30 years now (WOW!) and it has been the hub of my professional experience.  Every day I learn something new.  I have used it for everything from the mundane, to a platform for a major newspaper to publish print and online editions (Hint, the newspaper is named after a street in the NYC financial district).


That street intersects with Broad Street?


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## NewUzer (Nov 5, 2020)

To answer your question, not yet. But maybe in the future, haha.


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## Blade Hunter (Nov 17, 2020)

My entire career has involved Excel. In the begining back in the early 90's, macros were done as Excel 4 Macros (Not VBA).

In the last 30 years I have trained in, used and moved on from:
Business Objects
Cognos
Salesforce
Access

All of these still are used in many places but everything I ever did in any of these I can do in Excel.

I would consider myself an Excel Expert but what keeps me coming back is there is always more to learn .

I would be surprised if I ever stop using Excel in my career, I probably only have 15 years left to go .


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## Rick Rothstein (Nov 17, 2020)

Blade Hunter said:


> ....there is always more to learn


I have not been working with Excel anywhere near as long as you, but I do have a number of years working with it under my belt and that is what I love about Excel related forums... there is always the chance to learn something new. A few weeks ago, maybe months ago by now, I read a post by someone using the name *hrlngrv* (who I think is a person named Harlan Grove that I used to bump up against in the old, old Visual Basic, non-compiled version, newgroups many years ago) in another forum that I also participate in. In that post, he had something similar to this made up VBA code line...

Val = Sheet1.[SUM(A1:A9)]

Now I had never seen the shortcut form of the Evaluate function preceded by a sheet reference before and wondered what was up with that. An investigation followed. As it turns out, that sheet reference propagates into the Evaluate function's argument and becomes a sheet reference for all unreferenced cell addresses in the function's argument. That floored me! It was so simple and, as I said, I had never seen it before. Here, *hrlngrv* had used the sheet's Code name but this also works with with the sheet name, so it could have been written this way as well (assuming the Code name and Sheet name defaults had not been changed)...

Val = Sheets("Sheet1").[SUM(A1:A9)]

I thought "Wow!", given a guaranteed single sheet reference, you could write a short-form Evaluate function and specify the sheet reference for its cells at run-time meaning that, say, in a loop, you could apply the short-cut Evaluate function to several different sheets (I used to think you had to use the long-form of the Evaluate function to be able to do that). I thought that was kind of neat. I would also note this sheet reference propagation also works with a direct call to the non-short-form Evaluate function itself as well, so there is no more need to repeatedly concatenate the same sheet reference for all of your cell references within the Evaluate function's text string argument.

Anyway, that above was a long-winded way of saying you should read other volunteer's postings and try to dissect their code (or formulas) to see if there is something new in them that you never saw before. You will be surprised how many new things you can learn that way.


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## Blade Hunter (Nov 18, 2020)

Thanks Rick, that is now also something I have just learned .


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