Author: Debra Dalgleish

November? How did that happen? Again this week there were lots of tweets about the AC/DC video distributed in an Excel workbook, but I’ll spare you from reading them. There was even a timely USA election related tweet, and I hope it’s the last one for another four years or so!

And although I’m a Virgo, that first one isn’t from me. What kind of Virgo posts a typo?

Thrilling

• am making lists. Gleeful, exhaustive, Virgotastc lists. In Excel.
• Back to crunching numbers. I can’t imagine doing this in the days before Excel. Must’ve been hell- candle wax dripping onto ledger books…
• I get a sick thrill from financial modeling on excel spreadsheets. I love the tidy perfection and instant formulaic gratification.
• who would’ve thought you could have this much fun with excel pivot tables.
• 2nd fav feature of Excel 2007 – having ‘wrap text’ on home ribbon. Saves oodles of time when doing my biz plans 🙂
• new personal record for largest Excel workbook – 1,533,492 cells used!!! o.0

Macro Magic

• Why is it every time I record an Excel macro and think that’ll be good ‘nuf…I find myself re-writing the whole thing?
• VBA in excel can be the coolest thing ever when you get it to work. Otherwise it can send a sane man to insanity über fast.
• Loves the person that wrote the Excel Plugin for Find and Replace within cell comments.

Make It Do This

• Who knew that working a voter hotline actually meant tackling big ol’ excel spreadsheets? The lengths I’ll go to for Barack…
• I am on excel writing Italian American Places in Chicago!! CIAO A TUTTI!! i wish i COULD add more people on this thing
• When an IT leader suggests using Excel for long term data storage in a company with multi-TB SQL servers, it’s time to panic.
• lots of things that i’m not sure that excel is prepared to do. basically my boss drew something and said: make it do this.

Can I Go Blind?

• thinking that making timelines in excel is nearly impossible. giving up on that and trying to find something new.
• staring at balance sheets that don’t balance and thinking that there has to be a better way of managing projections than Excel spreadsheets.
• Nice. Excel 2007 just corrupted another document I was working directly in. Great. Such an advancement over the last version.
• Can I go blind from looking at Excel for 8 hours a day, every day?
• I hate excel. It shouldn’t take longer to make a graph than to do the experiment the data comes from.

The big excitement in Twitter this week is that AC/DC released an ASCII art video that runs within Excel. And what band could be more appropriately named for this type of work? I guess SUM 41 could do an Excel video too. Any others?

Anyway, here are some of the interesting Twitters from this week, giving us a little glimpse at what the world is doing with Excel.

It’s Useful

• My modest Excel wizardry always gets oohs and ahhs at the office… But for some reason my mad coding skills never get much attention…
• OMG! my husband is using EXCEL to draw the floor plan of our house for wiring maping…he is such a geek. I love him
• Making an Excel spread sheet of chores. Nerdery = complete.
• anyone know where i could download a free copy of microsoft office with excel in it?

It’s Aggravating

• I hate when excel spreadsheets don’t add up. How is that even possible when the computer does the adding??
• Excel is 12+ versions old, yet it is still not possible to specify a delimiter when exporting to CSV, or quote all fields, or escape chars.
• Wishing Microsoft did some research before building Excel so I wouldn’t have to write a VB script everytime I need something done…
• I have an unending hatred of excel 2007. Perhaps the next time I reformat my computer I shall install excel 97 instead.
• Hmmmm, took 30 min to make a simple X-Y graph in Excel 2007. Who the hell removed the chart wizard?

It’s Colourful

• I always give Canada the prettiest graph colour when making a chart in Excel.
• ugh one of my tweets is live twittering an MS Office Roadshow, it’s so painful to keep reading how awesome colouring is in Excel 2007

It’s Entertaining

• Deep in spreadsheet. Been yrs since I was an analyst, but some skills never die. Perhaps I go as EXCEL for Halloween.
• Watching the sox, just ate a lot of chocolate orange birthday cake, working on excel
• Trying to fix old spreadsheets at the bowling alley. My replacement did some ODD things with excel =(
• Uh, using Facebook. If I mention Twitter on Facebook now, will Excel pop up with a circular reference error message?
• i don’t even like AC/DC (the band, that is), but putting your latest video in an excel file is just cool
• Definitely forget Excel. And PowerPoint for that matter. Let’s go with interpretive dance and smoke signals.

The reformatting error in the infamous Barclays Excel worksheet was the topic of several Twitters this week. There were also suggestions for improving Excel, grumbles, bragging, unusual uses and a couple of interesting quotes.

Dear Excel

• My biggest Excel pet peeve is when the default colors are used in charts.
• Never have understood why Excel defaults to such lilliputian-sized text.
• Dear Excel – Remember that time I told you to stop assuming everything I type is a hyperlink? I meant it.
• Why does Excel have “Transpose” but not “Flip” in the paste menu?

I’m a Genius

• I am an Excel formula genius! Not that its a good thing, just say’n.
• Buckling down and figuring out pivot tables. Never wanted to be an Excel monkey, but I can see how theseare going to be useful.
• On the bus discussing Excel perf with excel pgm. Good stuff in the works.
• getting intimate with microsoft excel. this relationship is moving a little too fast for my taste.
• Just helped the accounting department save about 4-6 hours of work by showing them VLookup in Excel. What a powerful tool.
• is there anything better than excel? if pivot tables were a woman I would marry her.

Grrrr!

• aaaaa I’ve found the end of excel .. column IV … the earth is flat
• Excel error leaves Barclays with more Lehman assets than it bargained for
• my cunning plan to use Excel to document these business rules seems foiled by the fact it is turning my text columns into hashes, grrrr!

What We’re Doing

• building an extremely complex calendar roster in excel for upload into SAP
• received in email: excel spreadsheet of every book bf has checked out of the library since 2005. Yes, this is how librarians date.
• i didn’t know i needed to be a financial wizard to be pastor. seminarians: learn excel. now.
• is trying hard to find an elegant solution to this damned Excel writing library
• Just recorded my first-ever Excel macro for a task I repeat every week in tracking my daily vitality and effectiveness.

Quotes

• “Teaching Excel is not the same as teaching business.” – Jeffrey Zeldman
• “Oh the C, oh the C is the gradh geal mo croide, long may it stand between Excel and me” back to that C problem that bested me yest. 🙁

_______________

P.S. Visit the Contextures website for help with an Excel VLOOKUP formula

_______________

I’ve been travelling all week, and am glad to be home again. It’s a long weekend in Canada, with Thanksgiving on Monday, but no twitters about that yet. However, clogging up the Excel Twitter search this week was the Excel Centre in London. This twitter explains it: “Three conferences at the Excel Centre: Web Apps, UK church youth, and Organic food vendors. Makes for interesting hallway conversations.”

Despite that interference, I found a few twitters that explain what people are doing with Excel this week, why they love it, and a few hints that Excel could be improved.

Nerdy and Proud

• i’m glad that i get to do some interesting work! it sounds super nerdy, but i love getting to just tinker around in excel.
• Is it sad that i’m REALLY excited about is the fact that i learned how to do drop-down dependencies in excel? answer: probably
• i love excel spreadsheets. i derive an insane amount of pleasure from learning/utilizing new formulas. It’s embarrassing.
• just discovered SUMIFS in Excel 2007. this, my friends, is spreadsheeting we can believe in.
• John Walkenbach has a new Excel 2007 & VBA book. Wonder if there’s anything in it I don’t know. Prolly not given I did my 1st VB app in 1995

Strange Uses

• Currently consolidating all the recommended wedding planning timelines into Excel (much needed). Including bridesmaids’ and groom’s tasks.
• I’m creating an Excel spreadsheet that can “manage” thousands of servers. Talk about complex!
• is your handwashing log excel spreadsheet not working anymore?
• service planning the Library Helpdesk. Trying to decide which Excel chart to use to show peaks and troughs in enquiries throughout the day
• And Tweeps laughed at my idea about putting my blog posts in Excel by topic ~ date ~ URL ~ it comes in handy for reference!

At Work and Home

• my wife was counting numbers on the screen of an excel spreadsheet. What’s the point of excel when you do that?
• Trying to figure out what type of graph my boss drew (on a legal pad) so I can plot it in Excel (like someone in the 21st century might).
• Watching your coworkers attempt to get Excel’s formatting and the office printer to work together is always a joy

Excel Hell

• Excel goes out of its way to be annoying. There really must be code in place to screw with people – it couldn’t be this stupid by accident.
• 2M rows a good thing? If you have 2M rows of data, shouldn’t those reside in a different app than Excel?
• I cannot understand for the life of me why Excel will not let you freeze both the top and the bottom rows of a spreadsheet.
• True, but interestingly even Stephen Elop, after all President Microsoft Business Division, acknowledges the existence of “Excel hell”. (Ed. note: In his speech at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference.)

There was less complaining about Excel than usual this week in Twitter world. Maybe it’s the economy. People are chatting about Excel in the classroom, on the job, at home and even on the subway. And please be careful if you’re ever filling in a paper survey. Thanks!

Fun With Charts

• Working on lesson plans. Who knew Excel does tally marks? Put four | characters in a cell then press Control-5; it adds a strikethrough!
• Have you ever played with the repeat function in Excel to make a pseudo-bar graph? My kids like it.
• Angela uses excel where the kids research the size of the planets which are put on graph automatically so kids can SEE relative sizes

On the Job

• Our hourly people hijacked the Excel spreadsheet and hacked on god only knows what.
• Funny to see the guys working for the other company on our floor flipping tabs from facebook to email/excel as I’m walking behind them 😀
• Dangerous with Excel…in a bad way. creating a budget for a new business. they didn’t teach excel in philosophy class.
• Oh, Twitter friends! SAVE ME! How do I retrieve a previously saved file when I have already saved over it? Microsoft Excel. Any ideas?
• Doubting Excel’s “RAND()” function. Picked 48 twice in 7 samples

Just Relax

• Old man on the subway is reading Excel 2000 Power Programming with VBA. Poor guy.
• I love working in Excel – it lets me make-up words without spell checking. A feeling of relaxtivity.
• There is something about working in Excel that I find very satisfying. “Little boxes all the same.There’s a green one and a pink one…”
• the table next to me is discussing pivot tables and great database applications over drinks… FUN!
• As tedious as it can be sometimes, I really like tinkering with Excel and Word projects. I could adjust/shade/size crap in here all day.
• Sometimes I wish I could have an open Excel window on me at all times, in the background, in case I need to plot/calculate something.

Excel At Home

• taught chris how to use excel for his homework. gosh i wish most of my family wasn’t computer illiterate…
• My mom got a part time job entering paper surveys into Excel, and if you ever take one, don’t mark 2, or halfway in-between. Please.
• Quote of the day: “If I ever have a kid, I’m going to name him some weird Excel forumla so he messes up all his teacher’s spreadsheets.”

Another week in the world of Excel Twitters, with the usual moaning and groaning, and the occasional high five. Innocent children are lured into the scary world of charts and spreadsheets, and Excel is simultaneously creating and solving all the world’s problems. And no, that wasn’t me in the coffee shop.

Patiently Waiting

• downloading the 60 day trial of Excel. 400 KB, wow! oh wait, that’s just the download tool. 900 MB. hate download managers.
• I spend 90% of my time waiting for excel to finish thinking

Please Send Help

• Actually found something in Excel that I cannot do. But nobody else can either, so we’ve reached the conclusion that it just can’t be done.
• needs to make friends with a Microsoft Excel genius. And soon.
• I’ve never really had to use it before… and now my brother works for M$ on excel… but he’s not picking up his phone…

High Finance

• found out that the formula was wrong in excel today…that means a bigger bonus!
• my boss’s boss to me at 8:37 am: “Can you build me a spreadsheet that has all the AIG, WaMu, and Lehman exposure by 3 pm?” Excel ninja time!
• is drinking beers while I watch my girlfriend pound out a budget in Excel. EXCITING!

Dealing With Data

• Successfully created a spreadsheet in Excel with macros! I have conquered the craptacular world of plate reader data! WooT!
• Torture data long enough and it will confess to anything- excel teacher.
• Wrapping up my data slinging day. Put all of the Excel cells in a blender and hit the “Liquify” button… and Bob’s my uncle.

Uncharted Territory

• I can see the graph I want to make in my head…why won’t excel do it?
• had a great time helping 2nd graders graph their survey results using excel. Wondering about a follow-up.
• For those of you futzing with Excel on a Friday afternoon: “Some charts look like a pie and you know that’s sweet” http://is.gd/3bXK Ed. note: Pivot tables need a theme song too!
• Huge UI blunder in Excel: Per-chart interpolation settings are in *application* preferences. Oh, and this isn’t documented anywhere.

Excel Is Awesome!

• omg! found the battlestar galactica font! even bigger high than figuring out an excel function earlier in the day.
• Man i just did something awesome with Excel, and i Looked around and there was no one to celebrate my nerdery. Sad.
• Figured out how to make Excel calculate exponential moving averages. Now I just have to seed the data. Finesse beats brute force – who knew?

Or Not!

• I now believe that the ability to work on an Excel spreadsheet for 6+ hours is a gigantic step BACKWARDS in evolution…
• Overcomplicating life through the use of excel.
• if you don’t keep track of your lies, they’ll get you… looks like a job for MS Excel
• Crazy coffee shop lady was talking to Excel. Now she’s eating her hair. Scary world.

As summer comes to an end (well in the Northern Hemisphere), people are huddled over their spreadsheets, assessing their careers, and cooking up plans of world domination, one co-worker at a time. This week’s Twitters show that thoughts have also turned to food and drink, with spreadsheet on the side. A long winter is ahead — we have to stay warm any way we can!

An Illustrious Career

• I am having so much fun generating Excel spreadsheets full of data that no one will ever look at…State government at its best!
• When kids dream of becoming game designers, I bet they don’t dream of sitting around arguing and enthusing about particular Excel functions.
• Went on a job interview – total bomb. Guess I don’t know Excel as well as I thought.
• google analytics guy just called out my old analyst job verbatim. analyst=”monkey sorting data in excel 90%, bathroom 10%”
• Looking back at old jokes I wrote for standup- I have about 150 single space pages and a multidimensional excel analysis of the bits 😎

Stop It!

• In Excel “Insert Copied Cells” and “Paste” are not the same, one will cover over the stuff you don’t want to lose. Don’t mix them up. ARGH!!
• Stupid thing about working out of excel spreadsheets. The one dumbass that comes along and sorts only one or two columns = FAIL..
• There’s no need to have an excel grid with 6 tabs, 100 rows of information in each tab with 4 different color codes. Stop it.

Wining and Dining

• is happy to help out with all Excel issues – and he cooks too!
• Is there anyway to make Excel’s graphs look nicer? I’m now looking at a graph of Russia’s GDP and it’s like mashed blood pudding.
• Honey Bunches of oats, Hot Chip, and Excel seems to be the winning combo
• I think I need to take Excel out drinking and hope we don’t respect each other in the morning.
• Rocking out to Al Green. Somehow my excel budget worksheet is so much sexier now

Excel’s Evil Side

• I got my co-worker addicted to Excel. The OCD shall inherit the earth.
• my pivot table pickup line usually works wonders
• Board here…staff on best behavior…meaning not so much Twitter today because it doesn’t look like work. Need Twitter disguised as Excel.
• One step closer to creating an Excel function so convoluted that no one will ever truly understand what it is doing.

Well, the political conventions are over in the USA, and students are back in school, so people are tweeting about Excel again. There’s lots of talk about training sessions, the usual Excel joys and frustrations, some colourful comments, and a touch of humour.

Excel Features

• Excel’s single most annoying habit – automatically applying text-to-column delimeters when you paste. urge to kill!
• has *mastered* “text-to-columns” in Excel. It’s going on the resume.
• Is it impossible for people to conceive of using indent in excel instead of five billion spaces?
• Microsoft Excel has no keyboard shortcut for “save as”. Probably because they are *only* on version 11.

A Bit of Colour

• you can COLOR your tabs in Excel. Surely, this knowledge will save the world.
• Just found a weird thing in the Excel 2007 color model. Should make an interesting blog post next week. 5-6 people will be fascinated. (Ed. note: Hmmm…I wonder if this was the result.)

Personal Issues

• I just want to be clear, because of the timing of my last two twits: Excel is not driving me to drink. (Yet.)
• Friday night and I’m creating workbooks on Excel to figure YTD income by agency. How is it that I’m single?
• microsoft excel is an organized freak’s (um, me/my) best friend.
• “teach your children well” means expose them to the advanced features of Excel! If they’re into it.

How Tough Can It Be?

• I think my co-worker uses calc to total stuff up then manually types the results into the “Totals” fields in excel… Honestly.
• I had to train on the basics of how to use excel 5 times today. I didn’t know it was the most complex piece of software ever invented.
• hate how being “the computer guy” somehow means that I have to do analytical Excel homework assignment for PhD who can’t click the Fx button

Everybody’s a Comedian

• I, too, wish Excel pooped magical ponies onto my desk but it just doesn’t do that.
• Office for Mac: Excel without VBA is like a car with square wheels
• Excel was sent from a distant civilization to disrupt the nature of the our planet. Microsoft found it in a crater and decided to sell it.
• My boss: Does anyone know how to put bullets into an excel spreadsheet? Me: Hold on, let me get my gun.
• if there was no microsoft who would I blame?

Thanks to the Republican National Convention, which was held at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, there were lots more Excel twitters than usual this week. The first twitter explains the problem. There were also many comments on the new Microsoft ad, featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld at Shoe Circus. Hidden among all these twitters were a few thoughts on life with Excel.

Bad Spelling

• People: it’s “Xcel,” not “Excel.” Publicly traded utility, not spreadsheet application!

The Future. Delicious.

• name two delicious MSFT software programs. Beyond excel it gets hard…
• Two retirees eating churros doesn’t make Microsoft software suck less.
• I don’t care what a bunch of silly tech blogs say, I liked the new Microsoft commercial.
• Maybe the tagline for that spot should have been “Microsoft: A Company About Nothing”
• Everyone is talking about how awful the Microsoft/Seinfeld ad is. I’m guessing then that it’s a resounding success.
• If Microsoft’s brand message is, “We’re kind of old and a little confused about why we’re really here,” they succeeded.
• Ok this Microsoft ad I love, mostly for the use of Gates’ mug shot for his discount card.
• If Bill Gates is a PC, is Jerry Seinfeld a Commodore 64?
• Were you confused? Microsoft explains Seinfeld-Windows TV ad, saying it was ‘just a ‘teaser’
• Your ad strategy now is to force people to think of Bill Gates naked? “Vista: It’s better than Bill Gates naked.”

Life With Excel

• OK Fall TV can begin – I have Cynthia Turner’s excel spreadsheet: Fall Broadcast 2008-09 Primetime Schedule
• just rose to level 73 (medium wizard) in Microsoft Excel
• I hit on the wrong key in Excel and it made the paper clip guy pop up. I didn’t want him so I closed it down and he winked at me.
• Excel wastes trees… lots of trees…
• I use a combo of excel, a pda and a moleskin to doodle, tally & track every inane little thing
• Yes, Excel, I do want to keep this information on the clipboard so I can paste it into another application. THAT’S WHY I PUT IT THERE.
• if you can’t figure it out in excel, it probably isn’t worth figuring out

There were more Excel Twitters than usual this week, and some of that was thanks to Dick Kusleika, who decided to record all his activities in Twitter. I didn’t include those — you can follow Dick and read them for yourself! Anyway, here are some of the Excel comments that I found interesting this week.

Excel Health Hazards

• Just had a mini-heart attack – opened Excel db with 34 entries and it only showed 4. Damn you AutoFilter!
• Trying to coerce a 527 line excel spreadsheet into a coherent site map. Brain leaking out my ears….
• You ever get that effect after playing a game for a long time where you see enemies/whatever everywhere? Experiencing the same w. Excel now.
• Excel giving me fits. Wish “Help” was actually helpful. It probably makes perfect sense to a Microsoft software engineer.

Excel Hell

• Having to use excel for any kind of analysis is as engaging an endeavor as having to host my mother-in-law for four weeks.
• I love it when Excel says “Eh, I might have told you that your 4 hours of work was saved, but I’m a lying bastard. Start over.”
• Suspicion: in Hell they give you a Win laptop and make you do massive pivot tables in Excel ’00. You “recalculate cells” for an eternity.

Excel Links

• It’s Friday Eve: Use Excel as a Time Saver in Reading Back Long Legal Descriptions http://tinyurl.com/68qxt9
• Part 3 of 3 now posted. Dramatic change from the prior two…w/ li’l ol’ Excel 2003. Check it out: http://is.gd/1Z5S
• Curious tool – http://paraclouding.com (I don’t often think of 3D generative geometry being driving by MS Excel).

Excel Ponderings

• “bad-ass” and “excel charts” are mutually exclusive.
• It’s been more than a decade since I first heard the phrase “seemless integration”. Yet somehow, Word, Excel and Powerpoint still aren’t.
• you know your company is ‘maturing’ when you have 5 spreadsheets for every decision. Note: Andrew Carnegie did not have Excel.
• I wonder if the federal budget is on one giant Excel sheet?

Excel Is…

• Excel is a videogame. Business software never has so many pretty colours.
• MS Excel is like the Human Brain – No one knows how to use more than 3% of it.
• Excel is a horrible blind date revealed to be a ninja when you are attacked by thugs.
• there is NOTHING excel can’t do!! it’s a floor wax! it’s a dessert topping!!

Don’t Ask…

• Working on my excel that lists different types of death. Currently have 29.

This week there were several twitters about Excel and music, but no consensus on the type of music that works best. There’s also a growing number of twitters comparing Excel to Apple’s Numbers. There are the usual battles with Excel, and even a few people talking about pivot tables. And apologies to all the cat lovers, but the last comment in today’s list is my favourite.

Excel is Music to My Ears

• Sitting down in front of Excel for an epic planning session, and “Don’t Stop Believing” from Journey comes up on random play. Good or bad?
• Listening to the Across the Universe soundtrack and entering this never-ending mailing list into excel. Such a pain.
• Listening to Josh Ritter’s “The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter” while I enter invoices into my budget tracking excel spreadsheets.
• absolutely loving Pandora.com today. really helps me on days like this where i am using Excel constantly. 🙂
• Listening to Metallica, grinning like an idiot, trying to keep my head and feet still – trying to block out mind numbing excel work!

Excel vs Numbers

• Excel is ugly and smart. Numbers is pretty and stupid.
• When I open an excel doc in Mac Numbers I feel like I’m personally giving Bill Gates the finger…and I like it.
• Maybe so, but when I couldn’t add a trendline in Numbers, I switched to Excel. One piece of crap or another.
• Excel = bane of my existence. I hate virtually everything about it. Unfortunately, there’s no suitably powerful alternative. Numbers = joke.
• Figured out how to individual schedules for teachers using iWork Numbers. Not flawless enough for picky me, but more handsome than Excel.
• Just spent an hour debugging a cell forumlae in Numbers. Remembering fondly the VB back-end to Excel.

The Zen of Pivot Tables

• Ever say to yourself, “nothing in my youth prepared me to create pivot tables in excel” or is it just me?
• One of my staff is getting very excited about pivot tables in Excel. She is quite odd
• the zen of msft excel – find peace in your pivot table
• Pivot tables? No accounting for taste 😛
• It’s 2.30am, I got a problems with Excel pivot tables, half a pack of crisps, it’s dark, and I’m wearing sunglasses.

Let the Battle Begin

• There’s a minor Excel/Windows Vista tantrum going on in the living room. I’m readying the tranquilizer darts.
• pushing enter on an excel doc at work all day maybe merits its own drinking game
• welcome to the dark side, where we use Microsoft Excel and see little white boxes in our sleep, like a less fun Tetris
• no matter whose Office suite you use 20 years from now, you’ll be using the same Excel formulas. They’re not going away; learn them
• Excel Charts makes me want to punch kittens. It is SO Monday.

If nothing else, at least these weekly Twitters let you know that you’re not alone in your love/hate relationship with Excel. This week we look at the Good, the Bad, and the downright Ugly.

The Good

• I’d be happy if they’d switch to Excel. Anything’s better than ferreting the unanswered questions of out a pile of mangled Word docs
• they should release Excel on the Xbox.
• impressed with new found excel geekery but can’t help thinking it’d be easier to, you know, just do the calculations along the way on paper.
• Just discovered the “Format Painter” feature in Excel (and probably other Office apps). I like.
• You know I’ve been messing with Excel too much when the menu bar scrolls off the top of a webpage and I wonder why I can’t “freeze pane” it.
• I swear I learn more advanced features in Excel by preparing for fantasy football drafts than I do in my job. And I teach it!

The Bad

• learning the hard way that looping through every cell in an excel worksheet = not so good performance. 🙁
• Microsoft Excel–or as I call it, Microsoft’s “No, I didn’t want to get anything useful done today” Application.
• Dear Microsoft, do you really think that ‘undo’ in Mac Excel should undo me changing the zoom? Seriously?
• I wonder how many spreadsheets in the world have two extra, unused sheets thanks to Excel’s default (and what their carbon footprint is).
• The gods of formatting are angered. May my offering of a normalized excel chart with properly drawn lines be pleasing…
• i love excel like i love getting a tetanus shot

The Ugly

• Worked on taxes in excel for 3 hours. lost the whole thing. I’m cryin’ and heading to the fridge.
• Nursing head from 5h of excel budgeting on office big sceen. So not designed to be group activity.
• A hierarchical crap-ton of excel spreadsheets glued together with smb file sharing is, unfortunately, still not a RDBMS:)
• Just discovered a big mistake in the excel sheet has caused an assumption that we still have loads more money. Oh the pain.
• just updated a complex and possibly the ugliest excel in existence – mea culpa – i will attend to aesthetics when client agrees content 😉
• Just wasted my morning writing an Excel macro so idiots can do a job that we have 100 better ways of doing anyway. *seethes*

And my favourite comment of the week:

• Watching Excel churn like a Valium-saturated Amish buttermaker.

If people would stop Twittering about Excel, and just do their work, maybe they could go home earlier. Unless they’re using Twitter to ask for help, which a surprising number of people do. It’s hard to help them in 140 characters though, unless you just post a link to the Microsoft newsgroups.

Anyway, here’s another list of the things that people are doing, or trying to do, in Excel:

• established file sharing thru Office Live! Now we can share our Excel wedding spreadsheets more easily.
• Writing a script to merge data from different bank accounts into one Excel sheet
• Yep, some companies run their entire business on Excel. It’s a lot cheaper than SAP . . . .
• yeah Excel can do a bunch…I got an email with the game Sonic (from Sega) made in excel
• trying to figure out how to tape all of this olympic coverage. why can’t NBC have an excel export of the schedule for the week or two?
  Ed. note: I found this Olympic US TV schedule in Excel
• Moving our household budget out of the dark ages (Yellow Legal Pad) to Excel…
• anyone using a decent password manager other than a pgp encrypted excel spreadsheet?
• doing magical, magical things with mysql and excel pivot tables.
• work this week consists of entering in patients in an excel document & reading new moon.
• Working on a worship statistics spreadsheet…and I suck at Excel.
• a project is getting out of hand when you start making excel sheets to remember the names of people involved….
• working up a fitness and diet routine in excel, like the nerd i am
• just finished half my pile of entering 230 new email subscribers into excel
• working on some fancy Excel spreadsheets to help them predict the wind speed at the spaceport site.
• creating excel spreadsheet w/all of my health record data. and having fun doing it, damn it!
• You could export the playlist into a spreadsheet and print it from there. I’ve used Excel to do it before.
• realizing that when a non-engineer says “Matrix” they mean “Excel spreadsheet” or “Table in a Word document”.

And my favourite Excel Twitter of the week:

• if you hate excel, you should just get a chisel and a huge boulder… you can keep track of your stuff that way.

As usual, there are plenty of Twitters about people’s love/hate relationship with Excel. But what are they using Excel to do? Some pretty interesting things, by the sound of it. And sometimes the Twitters reveal a little too much information about their use of Excel.

The list of happy hours seems like a productive use of Excel though. Do you use Excel for anything unusual?

Excel Uses and Misuses

• Detailed schedules on official 2008 Olympic games site are presented in MS Excel files. http://en.beijing2008.cn/schedule/
• first box getting packed for the move. I’m using your Excel spreadsheet method for keeping up with boxes
• creating a detailed excel file containing my customers and their instructions.
• Going to try and do an excel based flight planner this time.
• is building excel model for analytics case competition
• just got emailed an excel spreadsheet with all happy hours in sf!
• For vacation I suggested we make packing lists in an Excel workbook with a summary sheet split into categories. Does that make me a nerd?
• there are 18 ways to get TV for three people. and that’s just from Dish. I need Excel for this decision. what exciting times we live in.
• What do you use to keep track of candidates you have sourced? We have an excel spreadsheet which is not working well! HELP!
• Wondering why I’m staring at an Excel spreadsheet filled with hydraulic gradients and slope failure analysis at 10:45pm…
• Working on our latest project – the massive 800CD track-by-track Excel database.
• writing an excel add-in to visualise the data our websites use.
• someone at my job used excel to create a web page. Try looking at that in notepad!
• wait til I show you my weekly meal plans and Excel workbook grocery lists (laid out in the order of the store!) sexy!
• if you want a job do not send me your resume as an excel file, or docbook. XLS is not an acceptable format for documents, EVER
• I love it when I get to do *my* work while being paid to do *another* job. = typing up Casting Director addresses in Excel spreadsheet.

Thanks for Sharing

• “Hi! Do you want to help me learn Microsoft Excel? It’s a key part of my job, I don’t know it and I was hired anyway! Awesome!”
• Doing overtime with Microsoft Excel because I said I knew how to use excel when really I don’t.
• Excel stole my mathematical ability. It didn’t gain much.
• If you have a real complicated looking excel sheet on your desktop, it really looks like you’re working hard.
• Listening to Dizzy Gillespie and working in Excel, I feel the two cancel each other out

If you’re visiting my blog from the Blog-to Show at the Successful Blog, thanks for stopping by. And everyone else, thanks to you too!

The blog has new posts Monday to Friday, with the occasional weekend post, such as this one. Today’s post is a summary of Excel comments found in Twitter yesterday, and as usual, it’s a love/hate thing.

There are those who express some love for Excel (I like the first one):

• The Windows Excel Help pages are surprisingly useful. Mastering pivot tables may double your income.
• Needing to learn Excel really badly—so I can trick out data stuff!
• i’m rockin’ the Excel sheets (for uses other than intended)
• I love using excel to reformat and create data providers for drop down menus.
• excel should not be used for project management.
• use Excel to track job optys, reqs to apply, deadlines, etc.
• Trying to make a link between word and excel, macro wise
• transcribing from my excel tracking sheet to paper ’cause the office can’t cope with electronic submission

And others who aren’t so happy, even those relentlessly cheerful Mac people:

• Second major Excel crash in 2 days – why do I still have to use MSFT software, even on a Mac?
• Excel just ran away with my processors again.
• I keep waiting for Excel to be friendly
• is skipping out on Excel Training, bc well it’s Excel Training
• dear excel 2008, I think it is so cute the way you hang every time I have to make a graph
• This sounds sad but it took me about a minute trying to figure out where the save icon was in Excel 2007
• ohh excel ribbon bar how i despise you
• wonders why the first option on right clicking in Excel for Mac is Help?

Last Saturday I posted Twitter comments about Excel. Since yesterday’s post was about PowerPoint, let’s see what people are saying about it. As with Excel, some people seem to love it, or are at least ambivalent. Others speak of PowerPoint and violence in the same sentence. No mention of versions though.

So which quote rings true with you?

PowerPoint Positives

• grabbing screen shots from video footage for PowerPoint to accompany streaming video clips. Just discovered screen dump straight to slide
• Wonders how meeting were ever interesting without PowerPoint? Overhead projectors rocked! He he
• Learning how to add PowerPoint images to a Livelink Wiki
• Pondering the power of PowerPoint
• sitting in a coffee shop (zoka’s), working on the PowerPoint presentation and the patent application
• Last minute changes to the mod, the powerpoint and my brain. Today should go ok if I can stop saying “Um.”
• Finishing up a PPT for a trade show in LV next week. Still love PowerPoint…very flexible and easy.

PowerPoint Peeves

• Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
• Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down
• wrestling with international flights and powerpoint.
• Good meaning deli-owner suggested I use Powerpoint to make websites. Hear that everyone? Who needs Drupal, Javascript, Vim, or Subversion?
• Tufte seminar just fantastic; losing count of ways in which one may bash the dreaded Powerpoint.
• Staring at this prof’s PowerPoint, I can’t help but think there is a need for a presentation design workshop at this university.
• I hated them both last week too. Powerpoint kept crashing.
• is suffering through death by PowerPoint for two hours. Where is @presentationzen when you need him???
• stalling – a powerpoint is due, but shopping online for faucets is more fun
• Two hours of work lost due to permanent hourglass, SharePoint, PowerPoint, slow laptop, and the related low amount of RAM.
• Yikes! Just got a presentation deadline pulled in sooner than expected. Please let PowerPoint be my friend!
• Keynote beats Powerpoint hands down
• I’m tired of PowerPoint. I want PowerfullerPoint, or maybe PowerTetrahedron.
• damn you PowerPoint – you locked up on me ARGGGGHHHH!!!!
• currently working on our JIU FGD PowerPoint. I super miss JTA! ( I want to go baaaaaaaaack!)
• Ugh. I just got the “I can do that in PowerPoint in three seconds” thing from yet another clueless producer. Stabstabstab.

These are some of the comments posted in Twitter recently, that give a glimpse into what the world thinks of Excel, and what people are using it for. Why are the Excel haters’ comments much more interesting?

Some people love Excel:

• A friend just sent me a real cool College Football schedule in Excel format … anybody interested?
• Love learning about new, useful Excel functions. COUNTIF is perfect for what I need right now.
• merging about 20 different excel documents together. must de-dupe!
• there is something about watching an Excel macro run that I find entertaining
• I just used Excel as a web page mockup tool. Co-worker wanted to “move stuff around” but doesn’t do HTML.
• Entering data into excel….I think I missed my calling
• Just solved something in excel using formula rather than the VBA I was expecting

Others, not so much:

• Office 2007 UI SUCKS!!!! Just wasted hours working on addins in excel and they are MS addins !!!!!!! YUUUUCCCKK!
• Sometimes I really hate Excel. Why isn’t it totalling all the cells in my range?
• Working on other people’s Excel databases is like being forced to use a completely different set of logic, that makes no sense whatsoever.
• discovering the secrets of excel. it’s like learning the rituals of a religion i have no desire to practice, except less interesting
• Yeah I pretty much hate all the other 2007 Office programs too, it’s just Excel I’m working in right now. Argh!
• Excel 2007 makes me insane! They tried to make it “easier” and just screwed everything up.
• The day’s not complete until Excel has crashed for the second time. For the same reason.
• I really really really hate excel right now
• Microsoft Excel is a crafty foe, but this is a battle I must win.
• waiting for excel to open. i’ve got 10 minutes…anyone need anything?
• The project for this week is done…the next person to ask me to make an Excel sheet with drop-down menus is getting stabbed in the eyes.

Finding new ways to make Excel interesting.

We’ll try videos, animation, whatever we can find (within reason!)