Don't you guys get tired of Excel?

[Drrellik]

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.

 

[cooper645]

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.

 

[Joe4]

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!

 

[XcelLearner]

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?

 

[NewUzer]

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

 

[Blade Hunter]

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 .

 

[Rick Rothstein]

....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.

 

[Blade Hunter]

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