Category: Excel Humor

Blowguns, beer and Excel? I don’t even want to know what that tweet means. There were lots of tweets about Oracle query and the moving mouse, that I first saw mentioned in J-Walk’s spreadsheet blog this week.

And there are plenty of people who complain about their bosses and co-workers, and their lack of Excel skills. I hope those work mates don’t read Twitter!

The Mean Sheets

• Forecasted operating profit for biz venture based on already optimistic figures =$4. Excel spreadsheets don’t lie, but they sure are mean 🙁
• Last week a client called me an ‘Excel ninja’. I think that’s just a few steps up from ‘data monkey’.
• Oh stupid excel.. couldn’t you crash after I saved the calculation???
• Trying to figure out how to reduce my data collection spreadsheet to fit on a standard A4 page. Excel estimates that will take 342 pages…

No Pie Charts?

• Anyone know of an Excel add on or way to graph on a map of the USA?
• Excel Dashboard and Visualization Bootcamp is winding down, went very well. Have to leave for the airport. Plan to sleep on the plane.
• Within 10 minutes of waking up, i had someone asking for help with excel charts 🙁
• Teaching new IAs how to make charts in Excel. They are thrilled with the possibilities of cone charts, 3-D bubble graphs, donut charts, etc.

Family Fun

• Got back from breakfast to find 2yo had attempted to find Sesame Street on my laptop. Instead deleted excel spreadsheet i’d been working on.
• my former husbands parents had yachts. Bought a 93 foot beauty named The Excel that had been owned by an ms excel creator.

Get With the Flow

• Rap on micro excel-never ending columns never ending rows so boring i cant get with the flow im only a intern so they dont give me dough.Fo’
• “If you move your mouse pointer continuously while data is being returned to Excel, the query may not fail.” http://bit.ly/3kLvR
• Microsoft Excel, much like a shark, can never stop moving or else it will die.
• I wonder why the blowgun didn’t work? Anyway, it’s pretty stupid. They just put it into an excel sheet. Probably better with beer.

Word Counts

• abusing Excel as a text processing tool is taking its toll, some strings get cut off at a certain length 🙁
• Doing math with excel on baby names in history-at a party (we’ve been at this for an hour)-thanks Social Security Administration!!! #geek
• Configuring library management system to accept stocktaking with Excel and Notepad. Very hi-tech.
• Put all the foul words I know into an Excel sheet, wrote/applied a complex formula, came up with the ULTIMATE hybrid swear word..
• Writing all day. Added 1565 words yesterday. Would have been more if not distracted by creating excel file to track word count.

VBA Discoveries

• Excel macros – both bane and boon, depending on how badly they screw up.
• Astrophysics: String Theory was discovered by a VBA developer. After all… everything is just a String
• after checking my comprehensive debugging notes for this excel macro (“s_ed = 2/1/2010 <– WTF?!”), i’ve finally solved this stupid thing!

Who’s the Boss?

• Funny thing about my work. I’m not allowed to call a shovel a shovel. I’m told it’s an Excel spreadsheet.
• Hectic at work. Hate budgeting presentations made by people who do not know to use Excel Solver. Glad that day ends at 2pm for the CHL Final
• today i learned that my boss does not know how to add. seriously. she even used an excel spreadsheet and still got it wrong.

Excel gifts and geek gadgets

Everything in Excel should be done with one click, GetPivotData is evil, middle management can’t be trusted with colours, and life isn’t fair. These are just a few of the truths revealed in Twitter this week.

And remember, even if you’ve used Excel for years, you still might stumble onto an exciting feature you didn’t know about.

Data Wasteland

• Another of my favourite interview questions: Make a chart in excel as if you were presenting to a client. They usually go 3D 🙁
• Chart Chooser by Juice Analytics: Download Tufte-compliance Excel and PowerPoint charts http://bit.ly/14HcyL visualization charts
• The ability to cut and paste charts from Wikipedia into Excel just made my day. Is that sad? It is, isn’t it?
• Using excel charts as his weapon, he ventures out onto the wasteland of data. <sigh>

Adjust the Colour

• Today i learned it is a bad idea to teach middle management how to change colors on excel charts. I think my retina are scorched
• I need an excel spreadsheet with coordinating colors.

Fabulous Features

• I just saved myself at least 3 hours of time by finding the “text to columns” feature in Excel. Incredibly happy.
• NERD-RAVE: I just discovered “New Window” in Excel under the view, it allows me to view multiple tabs on my spreadsheet AT THE SAME TIME …
• get numerous excel sheets on your screen and just stare at them, then switch between them occasionally, makes you look busy
• Why does Excel help have a workaround for a watermark? Why not just create a watermark feature? Lazy Microsoft.

Evil Pivot Tables

• Hey Excel Users! GETPIVOTDATA is EVIL! Please don’t use it, or if you do, use it wisely.
• At a table full of accountants. Told a joke about pivot tables. I’m out of material.
• DAMMIT!! Why can’t you search a drop down list in a pivot table without having to scroll thru all kazillion entries!?!? Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
• Pivot table, hot sauce, and a noodle bowl. Who’s sweating more, me or the cpu? http://yfrog.com/0271xj

Death by Spreadsheet

• just set up an excel spreadsheet to calculate my #eurovision favourites based on multiple scoring criteria… iceland ahead at 163 pts
• You could make an excel spreadsheet which calculates the average annual death rate from excel spreadsheet use.
• I now have so many rooster paintings that I am making an excel spreadsheet to alphabetically keep track of the names. In the 70-80 range.
• Need an Excel Macro EXPERT, stat! Will go toward helping beer site, thanks…

VBA Turpitude

• Starting day 2 of the Excel and Access Integration Workshop. Day 1 went well. Today we get into VBA and ADO.
• Just Published: Working with Lists and Tables: VBA Samples, Part 2 http://bit.ly/CoMs0
• Freed temporarily from wallowing in VBA turpitude. It’s like a veil has lifted, outlines are sharper, voices are no longer muffled…
• Need to fix some old programming. Does anyone know VBA anymore?

Oh, the Injustice

• In Excel…everyone wants everything in one workbook. Everyone wants everything done with one click. That is what I have to deal with.
• why do I pay a lawyer all this money if I have to correct his excel spreadsheet???
• Just taught someone who makes 3X as much as me how to use MS Excel. Life’s not fair.
• My boss has brought a mistake to my attention. Twice. I have informed him that he was in fact checking the wrong column in Excel. Twice.

__________________

My class ring didn’t feature an Excel pie chart, but I wasn’t an Economics major. Meanwhile, Excel is shifting formulas around, and helping to track some shifty political expenses. And I use VLOOKUP almost every day, but not much call for Proper, Concatenate or Len.

Signs of the Apocalypse

• Class ring arrived today, but I can’t wear it yet. I’ve got to earn it first! Three days. The Econ icon is a screen w/ an Excel pie chart.
• Holy whoa, Excel is actually AGREEING WITH ME. ON A CHART. (apocalypse!)
• I’m in Excel drawing a trendline on a chart and it’s using y=mx+b! I have finally applied slope intercept formula to real life!

Fun With Formulas

• “a formula in this worksheet contains one or more invalid references”. that’s nice, excel. would you like to tell me which it is?
• Proper, Concatenate, and LEN are 3 of my favorite Excel functions. Use them all the time. Love VLOOKUP as well.
• there are times when I think that excel is laughing at me and shifting my formulas around…
• just made an excel spreadsheet of all our debt. it’s pretty exciting…not the debt the spreadsheet.

Now That’s a Spreadsheet

• I owned Microsoft Excel like Sora with the Ultima Keyblade…if you don’t get the reference you’re not cool enough. : ]
• loves tea and Excel so it’s quite apt that I’m drinking tea from my ‘I Love Spreadsheets’ mug 😀
• Jus printd huge excel file on 9 A3 pgs. to tape it together in 3×3 matrix. Laid out on office floor, now thats what I call a “spreadsheet”!

Excel in the News

• MS patchday, updates for Excel only this time http://bit.ly/T4o4U
• awesome. expenses shame spreadsheet, in excel, courtesy of the guardian: http://tinyurl.com/pwe252
• Chrysler to dealers: it’s not that we don’t like you, it’s that our Excel formula doesn’t like you. Sorry about that.

Task Pane

• MS Excel Engineer: “Got a great idea, let’s not carry formatting info when you copy/paste data from Word to Excel”. Standing ovation.
• How can Excel be so amazing and Word be such a confounding pain in the ass? One makes my life better and one is the bane of my existence

Plots and Production

• I made a Pivot Table today at work to aggregate some performance data. I think that makes me a producer automatically.
• I work for a BI company, providing a BI solution for a customer, but I can’t use BI tools to produce my weekly report! I have to use excel!
• I’m now using Excel to plot out act 2 of teh Walter screenplay. Is there anything a spreadsheet can’t do?

Good Thinking

• gotta love vba program comments in released software – “It wont work without a swap like this. I don’t get it.”
• I have a feeling that knowing VBA will make me really marketable when I move to Texas. What do you think?
• Finally fixed a tedious Excel query macro error after having big realization in the shower this a.m. It’s where I do all my good thinking.

Local Experts

• Excel class coming up. I signed up for it and my boss laughed. “You dont need that youre our local expert.” Little does she know, google is.
• …I could be making $18 an hour if I was fluent in Japanese and Excel. Dammit.
• Just woke up and found myself in a cubicle with autocad and excel open. I’m working on something, but what is it?

______________________

Excel goes well with Zombie movies, Greek vases, black holes, and of course, Twitter. But please, use its powers for good, and not for deleting patients, or ruling the world.

And if you reach the point that you’re considering strangling someone, just ask yourself, “What would Mr. Spock do?”

It’s a Horror Film

• it’s not *your* excel that sucks. It’s excel. Bloody awful piece of life-destroying software. I’m suprised it doesn’t scream “BRAINS”
• There’s a particular point where Excel falls apart because it can’t compute…I’ve found that point, it’s in my office.
• Oh FFS Microsoft! Now excel workbooks don’t open. Please make software that I don’t need to trick into doing what I need.

Harder Than It Looks

• ROFL at my Excel-illiterate colleague:changes absolute to % values in a 100% stacked bar chart with lots of textboxes pasted over the chart.
• I was asked by a colleague to remake the graphs I made in Excel using Powerpoint. Now I’m trying not to strangle anyone.
• I get to build some graphs. I never knew how hard Excel was.

It’s a Feature

• Just discovered you can hide an entire workbook in Excel. What’s the use of that?! Clicked wrong button, thought I’d lost everything :-S
• Thank god for the undo button in excel. I almost deleted an entire column of patient IDs. That would have been really bad.
• Just found out about ‘conditional formatting’ in Excel. Cool + useful, can’t believe I hadn’t come across it before.

Social Interaction

• i am my sister’s excel help desk on a pretty regular basis. i should start charging her .. Hahahaha
• Excel approach: “Girl, you can pivot my table.” Excel rejection: “Our relationship is a circular reference.”
• If he had to spend the rest of his life trying, Norman would MAKE Shirley see the beauty of an Excel Spreadsheet #badwordstostartanovel

SP2 Troubles

• Just installed Office2007-SP2. Unfortunately, Error in Excel 2007 when saving a 2003 file containing shapes with no text is still present.
• Grrr-Excel 2007 crashed on me. Never crashed before-now post SP2 it has. Taking minutes to recover data-is it looking for a black hole?
• Microsoft under fire for ODF glitch in Excel: Microsoft has faced criticism for spreadsheet interoperability iss.. http://tinyurl.com/cffro2

Making a Living

• How can I combine my love for Microsoft Excel with depictions of Homeric episodes on Greek vases, and make a living?
• Companies’ employes, all over the world, are ruled by Excel sheet. What would happen if I become the king of Excel ?
• Sloppy Excel spreadsheets should be cause for dismissal.
• I just used Excel to spec out, in words, how an Excel template should calculate. My IT guys LOVE me.

Why Learn Formulas?

• If the Excel formula that I just wrote will not fit in the 140-character Twitter box, does that make me a nerd?
• in class getting ready to take exam.Why do I need to know formulas when I have excel
• I just learned that VBA has a DateDiff function and got excited… sad, sad days
• would mr. spock use excel?

Do you have dataviz fantasies? Does Excel fulfill them? Would you accept a second date if it asked? Maybe that accountant told a TRIM joke, and that’s why the second date was refused.

At least no one is blaming Excel for the swine flu. Yet.

Dataviz Fantasies

• Excel is not fulfilling my dataviz fantasies.
• Do not present site analytics via an Excel spreadsheet. The numbers tell a story, so you need to tell us a story.
• I could build you a data center, move you to vm, migrate or build any email system out there, but can’t make a graph in excel. is that sad?

A Beautiful Mind

• I’m realizing I can’t even do basic math without excel .. Technology is making me stupid.
• Do you think listening to the “A Beautiful Mind” soundtrack will help me with the excel spreadsheet I am working on? Yea me neither.
• Finally sleeping after realizing I couldn’t figure out excel in one sitting.

Social Skills

• He was an accountant and loved Excel; she was a poet. He organised his tinned food by expiry date. He asked for a second date; she said no.
• have taught mum how to use excel… until next time she goes to use it
• Pickup lines you seldom hear: “Are you proficient in Microsoft Excel?”
• what do you say when a friend approaches you and says:”My mother just gave me an excel file breakdown of how much i owe living with her.”

75 Simple Pieces

• Not at all. Many of us believe that Excel’s best function is merely to serve as a calendar-schedule for tiny football helmets.
• I created an Excel spreadsheet and broke down what needs to be done to make this place perfect into 75 simple pieces.
• Just spent two hours catalogging all of my comics into an Excel spreadsheet. It felt good and nerdy

The VBA Twist

• some of us are reduced to hacking VBA for the employment of our colleagues who then bizarrely prefer it to the *proper* software!
• is reading a book on VBA for excel. Excitin’. Waiting for the twist.

Excel at Work

• infact, why can’t all internet pages which we shouldn’t be on at work be disdguised as Excel Spreadsheets….
• Doing Excel work to satisfy Micro Management Addiction (not mine).
• More Excel training for things I already know followed by teaching myself SPSS. Government efficiency, people.
• is anyone familiar witht he “mail merger” feature on excel? I might have just agreed to everything during an interview and am not sure

Trim Your Formulas

• if anybody knows an alternate formla to reproduce excel’s TRIM function without using TRIM, please let me know
• never trust somebody else’s Excel formulas… just found HUGE mistakes that could have cost us thousands of dollars… luckily I like Excel
• I can’t believe that in over 20 years of using Excel and other spreadsheets, I’ve never chuckled over the trim() function. Heh-heh, ‘trim’.

______________________

Peach colour Excel forms? I’ve never made one of those, and I’ll assume that you haven’t either. But I have sent screen shots in an Excel file. Is that so wrong? And now that Oprah is on Twitter, maybe she’ll post some pivot table questions.

Off the Charts

• Dear Microsoft, I don’t like the charts bit in Excel 2007. When you do the next upgrade, please bring back the wizard.
• funnily enough I just did some kick ass excel-ling! I made a frikin’ outrageous graph! outrageous! lots of formating! OMG!
• Taking forever to make the simplest graph in Excel. I keep getting sidetracked by more interesting websites.

Brilliant Formulas

• just gave up a really brilliant one-step Excel formula to do a separate calculation on a part of the result; so I had to break that part out
• ah spending an hour helping friend with his excel and turns out all we had to do was subtract by 3 in the vlookup formula
• why, why is my GD formula not working – DAMN YOU EXCEL… then the printer jammed. Sob.

Excel in Government

• Spending my 18 years of experience in education tabulating excel lists for state and federal testing. Your tax dollars at work.
• Idea for new UK Legislation #1: Anyone incapable of basic Excel formatting tasks should be certified ‘Unemployable’.

For Your Consideration

• All of you Excel gurus love that peach color for your forms. Is it part of some training?
• Excel: the musical. Well it’s more relevant these days than workhouses.Excel Glorious Excel,cells, macros and numbers
• you can soon expect MS products (like word and excel) to have social functionality

Pivot Power

• having serious issues with a pivot table. it won’t obey me.
• doing an advance Pivot table refresher course, why of why did i sign up!
• I’ll have a great example of the power of Twitter if I can get my Pivot Table question answered!

Who Are We?

• ahh, corporate beurocracy at its best – imagine the pain I feel every time I see a screenshot emailed in an excel sheet….!
• i’ve seen more pain and business impact by a shared Excel spreadsheet than some “proper” apps/services could ever cause!!!
• “We are unable to force Microsoft Excel to quit at this time. Restarting your computer might solve the problem.” Who are ‘we’?

Whatever You Want

• I successfully set up the hotel on a makeshift, excel-based reservation logging system to cover the next few days just in case!
• Doing reporting in excel makes me wonder why we spent a fortune on SQL server enterpirse with reporting services.
• My home-made MS Excel premiership football match predictor said that Liverpool v Arsenal would be 3-3. I thought it was mad.
• just reminding myself that there’s no real truth in digital worlds : Excel can say whatever you want it to say + pictures can be Photoshoped

__________

The big excitement in Twitter this week was the release of SpreadTweet, a Twitter tool that looks like an Excel file.  There were a few tweets about Office Palooza, Microsoft’s VBA programming contest, and links to interesting add-ins and Excel related articles.

And I didn’t know where Federation Square is – there’s lots to learn from Twitter.

Arbitrary and Dumb

• Reviewing project budget planning and trying to get my Excel groove on – sadly I don’t have one.
• What kind of printing house *needs* the file to be in MS Excel to be able to print a 16″ x 30″ poster?! It’s insane I tell you! Insane!
• I’ll take “Math I don’t understand for $200 Alex… “=(+C3*D3*E3)/1000000*F3” WHAT IS “USELESS INFOMATION spit out by Excel!”
• I must have been stuck in email too much today – was just searching for “Mark as read” for an Excel column instead of “Hide”. 🙂
• Why would Microsoft put a 255 character limit on footers in Excel? Arbitrary and Dumb.

Way Too Many Charts

• Nice Excel add-on from BonaVista systems for doing clean charts. http://bit.ly/3PA30l
• Learn R Toolkit by Kelly O’Day to help Excel users make advanced charts in R is available at http://tinyurl.com/dzsbbk
• just found out some funny behaviours in Excel.Chart.applyLayout()
• Waaaaay too many Excel charts for one evening. I wonder if I’ll dream in ‘default color’ tonight. Zzzzzzzz time now.

It’s Like Square Squirrel Soup

• I hate excel 2007. It’s like Federation Square – they hid all the useful things behind a complicated shell of faux-sexiness.
• Learning how to manipulate these hoary excel forms is like learning to milk squirrels. Difficult, possible, unlikely to be useful in future.
• I used to work for a company where many excel spreadsheets were linked to Oracle databases. It was like eating soup with a knife.

MVP News

• Excel User Conference: First day report from Simon Hurst, covering fairly general topics http://tinyurl.com/c4xa6l
• Blog: Excel MVP Highlights External Data http://cli.gs/1aMB49

All Atwitter

• lookup dick kusleika – he has been using excel for twitter http://bit.ly/VwKow
• Trying my first message. I’m at my desk doing Excel graphs.
• If you want to look as though you’re working on Excel spreadsheets but are actually on Twitter http://bit.ly/11axV9

Sharpen Your Skills

• I wrote an article for MSDN Mag about converting to VSTO/.NET from VBA, if writing VBA makes you feel dirty http://bit.ly/2Xf5u
• VBA is my anti-alzheimer treatment.
• Office Palooza: Join the contest to test & sharpen your VBA programming skills!: http://tinyurl.com/cm2clg
• Did a tiny amount of VBA coding – the research on how to do it took many times the effort of the actual coding.

Enterprise Mashups

• Are Enterprise Mashups the successor to Microsoft Excel? @johncrupi thinks they might be: http://bit.ly/8yNR
• Listening to designers try to modify an Excel spreadsheet is probably the funniest part of my day. Thanks for putting me in the design cube.
• Turns out temping is pretty boring. However, I feel confident that one day my vast knowledge of Excel will allow me to take over the world.

Concagnate? I guess that’s how concatenate would sound after a few drinks. That must have been a bar in Seattle. I would have guessed a Nanaimo bar, but Ken was busy watching the CMA awards.

And speaking of Canadian things — maple wine? I’m not sure about that, even if Excel is involved. I’ll stick with the coffee.

The World Exploded

• My instructor just used the word “sexy” regarding excel formulas…I like her!
• arrayed formulas in Excel: I don’t know how you work but am glad that you do
• Accidentally pressed Ctrl-` in Excel, and the world exploded. What the heck is that used for? That’s the key with the tilde, not the quote.
• So I just spent the last hour thinking that Excel was giving me calculation errors, then I realized Auto calc was turned off. 1 hour wasted

Stupid Excel

• just discovered that apparently MS excel doesn’t do the order of operations correctly… i’m so disillusioned
• Why does Excel die with long lists? Bags of memory, 2×64-bit CPUs takes 30 mins to calc a simple but long list; like 70’s style batch system
• working on a color coded advertising planning calendar & quickly running out of colors, stupid excel and your limited color choices

A Drink Might Help

• What the hell does concagnate mean? And why have I heard it used 3 times at the bar? Excel nerds..
• Building my first dashboard in Excel. Beer is a wonderful assistant.
• Husband -using excel to calculate sugar content in sap for making maple wine. Me – in awe of his mathematical mind (so not like mine!)

Fun and Games

• Best use of Excel ever: modeling my NCAA brackets, and winning the pool.
• has just found out that a big chunk of her favourite game was created via Excel macros. The world is run by these things, it worries me.
• Finished creating sudoku-solving Excel spreadsheet. Why bother? Why not?
• haha yes! nothing like excel macro games for those poor guys who work for companies that delete solitaire off the work computer.
• is doing some Excel magic! It must be magic, because I fail to see the science to it….

Excel in the Arts

• If excel wasn’t just a bunch of 0’s and 1’s i’d rip out its throat like patrick swayze in roadhouse.
• excel makes me want to come over all michael douglas in falling down. rrrooooaaaarrrr!
• Alice In Chains …and an Excel spreadsheet. An unlikely combo.
• Writing up my Excel course while my wife and child watch the CMA awards (and no, not the accountant CMA’s!)

Labour Saving

• Reading a reddit comment about a guy that wrote Excel VBA scripts to do his job for him and then hung out at coffee shops all day.
• I think MS Excel is the PERL of the non-programming world: does a lot, results in unreadable information, proponents hang onto it for ever
• no….this was personal labour-saving automation, so VBA/Excel…not serious programming.

_____________________

It’s been a very Excel focussed week in Twitter, but not the spreadsheet kind. The G20 Summit was held at the Excel Centre in London, where protesters gathered, and provoked much security and endless tweets. The UK Excel User Group conference was held nearby, so I hope they weren’t inconvenienced too much. There were a couple of tweets from the conference, but I guess they were too busy absorbing information to tweet much.

There were some spreadsheet Excel tweets too…including a link to a short story created in Excel, and a report that someone from Microsoft is responding to bug tweets. Now I have to go and grease my formulaic wheels.

Graph Greatness

• Always making data an interesting read… @tgwilson on visualizing march madness in Excel – http://is.gd/pQzW
• Also, look at the graph, in very light grey, it says ‘Graph created in Excel to showcase Microsoft’s greatness… re: http://ff.im/1PPKn
• There’s a bug in Excel 2008 Mac that causes the app to crash if you save and then edit the source of a chart. I hate this bug.

Throw Me a Circle

• I am spending far too much time classifying my life into Excel Spreadsheets. And I am not even a Virgo.
• had a dream last night that involved an Excel spreadsheet & the number 754. I feel Microsoft owes me something for dream product placement.
• Trying to disconnect after a day working in Excel. All I can seen is an endless grid of lines. Somebody throw me a circle.
• Going to read a little in bed before lights-out. Chose a book on VBA. This is either hysterically funny or deeply pitiful. Probably both.

Driven to Drink

• Ahh, Friday beer time. Beer really does grease the formulaic wheels of Excel. All offices should to this.
  BTW – thru personal testing, I find Excel works much better when the user sips a single malt. Strange that.

UK Excel User Group Conference

• Just seen that the microsoft speaker at tomorrow’s excel event is flying in. Should be good…
• Just seen a great data exchange presentation followed by starting VBA…

Microsoft Reaches Out

• Todd- thanks for reaching out! Todd from Microsoft has reached out regarding my issues with Mac:Excel. Very cool. Emailing u Todd
• MFST-millionaire Charles Simonyi – father of word and excel – arrives at the international space station. http://bit.ly/oiK8y

Excel and the Economy

• “It starts out as a clever Excel macro and next thing you know you’re bringing down the global economy.”
• London G20: Excel centre: Protestors will push a giant ‘iceberg’ to the Excel centre in Docklands today as part .. http://tinyurl.com/cfa6jw

Pivot Power

• I still think that Excel shouldn’t be used as a DB, but Pivot tables are PURE POWER!!
• Pfff, I had some kid who wrote “Expert in Excel” or something. Turns out he didn’t even know what a pivot table was.

Flight of Fancy

• Made an Excel program for flight planning. Now what was once two hours of hand calcs is now 30 minutes of decency
• Check out this short story written in Excel format (http://twitthis.com/5v4keo). It works + it’s a great read!

Excel Geeks

• You’d think there would be some way could make money from knowing a lot about excel…
• Im an IT manager. I do not change ur mouse batteries, I do not show u how to use excel, n most importantly I DO NOT change the hallway lites
• Great advice from financial modeling class yesterday: set yur screensaver to an excel spreadsheet, so it looks like you’re incredibly smart
• I was an art history major…what am I doing working on excel sheets until 1am?

The Answer to Everything

• Apparently Excel is the answer. The answer to everything. If I’d only known this before I wouldn’t have bothered with a CS degree…
• If your solution is Excel, chances are that you haven’t really thought enough about the problem.

___________________

Lots of tweets about the Excel Hell video this week. I didn’t find it too funny, but apparently lots of other people did. Apress tweeted about Pro Excel Financial Modeling: Building Models for Technology Startups . I did the technical review, and got my copy this week. And I don’t think my kids are bragging in Twitter about my pivot table skills, but it’s nice to know that parents are appreciated.

Excel Hell

• The Website is Down episode 2 – Excel Hell http://bit.ly/3sTH I love these videos.
• Dante didn’t know about Advanced Excel training courses in dark basements.
• Maybe lifting the 65536 row limit in Excel wasn’t such a good idea. Just lets people create bigger monstrosities.

Significant Value

• can’t beat pen/paper, but if you must add electricity, use excel.
• excel 2007 has a camera feature…i am both officially over excel 2003 and officially a huge nerd…
• Excel isn’t such a burden with the right numbers. 😀
• value of calculus in real world: negligible. value of microsoft excel in real world: significant.

Pivot Table Fu

• Anyone ever have a pivot table disappear? Mine just died or escaped–not sure which. 🙁
• pivot table is awesome, but i have a feeling it’s at the expense of my lifespan.
• pivot tables is the evil tool that makes excel actually useful, but at the same time adds a layer of challenge to MS Office.
• I go to my Mother for any and all Excel-related shennanigans. She out-geeks me on it by far, her pivot-table-fu is strong.

Excel Is For Finance

• Hot off the press: Pro Excel Financial Modeling: Building Models for Technology Startups by Tom Y. Sawyer http://tinyurl.com/dkzlrj
• trying to create a MS Excel Marco for parameter estimators for the Munich Chain Ladder

Or Not

• Compiling list of cat names, for the droves of cats that I will enevatably spend the latter of my life with. Maybe I should do this in Excel
• I think most video game players would be shocked at how much time game designers spend staring at Excel.
• Is it possible to make an Excel document outlining where to put food in a pantry? Answer: a surprising yes.

Chart Obsession

• i have a strange obsession with making charts on excel. and making them perfect and exactly identical.
• When Excel can not be hammered into compliance: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraphsketcher/

Help Needed

• I need help learing EXCEL, gotta know it by Friday….can anyone help me?
• need a soundtrack to some excel spreadsheet action- thinking secret of my success, any other suggestions…

_________________________

March Madness, martinis and Excel related injuries. It’s been quite a week for Excel tweeters. I’ll leave it up to you to answer the 3D pie chart question. And I didn’t know that soap whittling was a county fair event, but you learn something every day – especially if you use Excel.

The Spice of Life

• Every five minutes, for example, I get a 1 minute break while Excel churns away for no reason. I use it to contemplate the meaning of life.
• Apparently it is excel “Catastrophic Error” Day. Good. Well. That certainly does add a bit of spice.
• Each time I learn a keyboard shortcut in Excel I die a little inside.
• I just forgot where “rows repeat at top” was in excel so googled it. Funny that I go there rather than the excel HELP function. Oh well.

Driven to Drink

• have done 4 straight hours of really boring excel. think i deserve a martini. in a size of a glass that those burlesque dancers sit it
• There’s a very large discrepancy between the amount of coffee my body can hold, and the amount I need to stay awake in my Excel training.

Awesome or Amateur

• Making graphs and pie charts using MS Excel for the first time in my life. Probably the last too.
• I don’t think making charts in Excel is really using the full extent of my formidable intellectual powers. But it is a relaxing activity.
• But the Gray Background and Pastel Datapoints are Iconic: A blogger complains about making plots with Excel. http://tinyurl.com/cpgbwq
• why the heck doesn’t excel have histograms? MS office – you are officially in my bad books.
• 3D excel pie charts – awesome or amateur? Thoughts requested.

I Love Pivot Tables

• Am I a nerd? Just ordered a 300 page book on Excel Pivot tables…
• In a workshop learning to become an excel spreadsheet genius. I love pivot tables!
• Just realized that Pivot table are not all they are hyped up to be.

Hours of Coding

• Never rewrite someones VBA app, ever!
• It worries me that probably the most maintainable app I’ve written is in Excel VBA
• Trying to make sense of a VBA Function 1200 lines long. Ugh.
• Ben has just solved a problem with 6 lines of VBA when he was expecting hours of coding! Awesome!

Blue Ribbon Excel

• Funny post – but I want that excel spreadsheet. http://tinyurl.com/bhabn2
• Anyone have any job leads? I’m a genius with Macs, and competition-level with Excel.
• Just whittled down a 2,500-line spreadsheet to 400. If Excel was soap, and my office the county fair, I’d have me a ribbon.
• Hilarious. March Madness On-Demand has a “Boss Button” that replaces game with Excel spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/ZfMSR
• I totally use Excel all the time because I lied about knowing how to use it for my first job, and I don’t want to lie again.
• When it comes to producing work in Excel, I reckon my aesthetic sense is better than that of ANYONE in this company.

___________________

Mmmm…Pi Day. Didn’t see it mentioned in this week’s Excel tweets, but pie charts were discussed. Friday the 13th made an appearance, and there were several comments about Microsoft’s patch that didn’t include an Excel fix. And someone found a pivot table answer on the Contextures web site, so that caught my attention.

Now, where’s my pie, dagnabbit? (Maybe the Google guru can find the correct spelling for that.)

Definitely Unlucky

• I think surfing while working is my brains way of breathing, like a whale surfacing from the depths of excel for air. Thank you, popurls.
• why does lunch hour go so fast…but excel documents stop time
• Friday 13th is definately unlucky for me. All alone in the office with Excel spreadsheets…
• Microsoft won’t fix Excel bug on Patch Tuesday http://ff.im/-1qblA

Pi Charts

• The charts I am making with Numbers make my old Excel charts look with finger paintings.
• is working on Excel and graphs…feels like I’m doing GCSE Maths again, without the bad hair and awkward banter with the 16 year old boys
• ClipArt? That’s bold man. I prefer to wow my audiences with lots of pie charts and Excel tables. 30+ columns deep.

I Know Excel

• I am the Excel god of my workplace. I solve all problems with my amazing powers of freezing panes and choosing rows to repeat at top.
• “anyone want a toddler, slightly bossy!” …Does he know Excel? Send him over.
• Very much enjoyed being an Excel guru at work today. Specially because no-one noticed that each time it was preceded by being a Google guru!
• wants to know if anyone is hiring comic book reading, video game playing, cartoon drawing, script writing actors? I know Excel.
• Quote of the day: I need you to show me how to use Excel to do my job? / What do you need to do? / Don’t know!

Would a Pivot Table Help?

• Can’t get this Excel Pivot table to work. I don’t want to count, I want to sum. Dag nabit…
• Deleted items remain in Excel pivot table dropdowns. Contextures to the rescue http://www.contextures.com/xlPivot04.html
• Boss just learned about pivot tables but cannot grasp the concept. Me: The fax machine is broken. Him: Would a pivot table help with that?

Write Another Macro

• VBA is Joel Spolsky’s fault! :-O
• Today I’m doing my best to write bug-free VBA code. Microsoft did not make that easy.
• I think I love Excel a little too much and should seek help – or I could just write another macro to do it for me…

The Right Tool

• Hmm. How about somebody publish the excel-ized version of Dickens or Dostoevsky? Kinda like a super-anatomical CliffsNote:D.
• if you find yourself putting a bulleted list in an Excel field, then is Excel really the right tool for you?
• Am helping my father sort comics. Excel is my friend!
• Chat excerpt: “Dude, I’m an engineer, I do my freaking GROCERY LISTS in excel”

__________________

The mayor of Toronto is now tweeting, but nothing about Excel that I’ve seen. Maybe he wasn’t affected by the zero day exploit, and not involved in the Microsoft redundancy payout fiasco.

Some people are excited about learning new features in Excel, and a few are looking at replacement software. Others are taking advantage of Excel crashes, and using the recovery time to catch up on Twitter.

I’ll be travelling all week, with no computer access, so the next post will be on March 9th. See you then!

Looks Like Excel

• just discovering gnumeric… a replacement for excel that students will tolerate? The solver looks good, it has an integer search model
• Friend xlated the Polish blist review “Blist looks like Excel could have looked like if it were written for normal people not accountants”
• An alternative to linked Excel spreadsheets http://www.excelcube.com/ Anybody tried this?

A Very Unhappy Place

• working in excel, which is a very unhappy place. Can’t someone invent spreadsheets for rightbrainers??
• beware the Excel sort function – inappropriate use can lead to to complete disarray!
• =IF(MYLIFE=EXCEL,”Breakdown”,”Happy Days”)
• Am about to do battle with Excel. Cue the theme from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly!

Just the Facts

• im wondering if theres a link between Microsoft s redundancy payout gaffee, our financial crisis and Excel ?
• “another zero-day Excel exploit” yuh, what’s that, like # 2,570,001? #boring #broken_by_design
• Mr. President, please, no more sermons and pep talks; just send me copies of all the Excel Spreadsheets. Just the facts sir, just the facts

Friends and Family

• My 8 year old just complained to me that his Excel isn’t working….what does an 8 year old need Excel for?
• I love Excel 2007 an inappropriate amount. Perhaps that is why I don’t have a boyfriend?
• Working in Excel VBA with a Pivot table. If you don’t hear from me in a few hours, please tell my family I love them.

Constant Learning

• woman across from me is reading the Excel 2000 bible. Crikes.
• just learned about “transpose” in Excel’s ‘Copy Special’ – this is awesome.

Excel and Twitter

• obviously not got the hang of this. Excel = easy, twitter not so much.
• Why does Excel hate me? It keeps crashing and taking forever to recover. Granted it gives me time to catch up on twitter.

Heavenly Bodies and Body Counts

• Excel comes in handy for math classes, science classes, and…..ART classes!
• fact-checking an excel sheet detailing the body count in each of our songs. listening to ‘kill uncle.’
• Printing my ticket receipt & stapling it to an Excel form I printed b/c the paperless office is a distant daydream for corporate america.
• the neatest thing I’ve seen in Excel is a simulation of the Solar System before Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson took Pluto off !

______________

Excel can cure you, or make you sick. It can ruin your social life, or help you find a celebrity match. Candy, fish, beer and movies – Excel can help with almost anything. Just remember, hotties hate Excel, and a geek is cheaper than a book.

Excellent Medicine

• Suffering from Excel myopia. This is a well known medical condition.
• is feeling better than this morning. I’m sure an afternoon of excel will change that.
• A weekend packed with awesome plans became a weekend packed with herbal tea and taxes. Hoping Excel will kill my stomach bug’s will to live.

Purgatory

• Excel was defiantly designed by the peeps who run Purgatory. One does not know hell till one succumbs to Access 😛
• I’m with you. There are certainly times when I would rather watch “Baby Einstein” videos than look at Excel spreadsheets.
• I just got out of an Excel/WinXP support question by telling them “I’m a Mac user”. It was as if I had said “I know less than you.”

Eye Candy

• I find Gant charts very left brain… and I don’t know what my brain is but neither it nor Excel ‘think’ like me 😉
• Collecting bags of M&Ms for an Excel workshop for elementary teachers this afternoon. Charting number of each color, graphing, then eating!

Excel is Divine

• Parents out there I cannot stress this enough, if you teach your kids nothing else teach them Excel! Most important tool in business
• Best tool besides Undo in Excel? Format Painter…followed by Paste Special and Paste Special/Transpose
• Being able to do simple things in Excel around the office allows me to stay indispensable, which is nice.
• I have three bibles…the Holy, Access and Excel. Seriously, the software “Bible” series by Wiley has never failed me. Check them out.

Something Fishy

• I’m afraid the excel teacher guy is going to spontaneously combust. His pivot table excitement level seems dangerously high.
• My favorite sushi restaurant has online menus in Excel! I love them even more now that I can make a pivot table of all the rolls.
• Just used Google docs to make a Fish and Chip order list spreadsheet …. with a PIVOT TABLE!

Social Life

• hoping that no hotties find out that I’m spending my long weekend learning about Excel macros. hotties HATE excel.
• I’m updating my Excel to Twitter add-in, but no blog posts planned this weekend
• someone @microsoft saw my twitter complaint about excel and posted something at getsatisfaction http://tinyurl.com/cm29p6

Tea and Taxes

• Holy crap, dorkiness achieved. Massive excel spreadsheet of all my movies and tv shows complete with algorithms for rand # generator ranges
• creating an excel spreadsheet of girlfriends of all my celebrity crushes so I can narrow what they have in common and modify accordingly.
• Have my virtual assistant from india copying all of my ratings from Ratebeer to an excel document. Next step – get it into @97bottles.

Clueless VBA

• has sold out and joined a VBA forum. These geeks know their stuff and cheaper than a book
• I write code like a moron sometimes….VBA needs an infinite loop breaker of some kind too just for people like me when I do something dumb.
• Holy Hell if you haven’t had to deal with Excel dates in your code, feel lucky!
• Think I should have tested my clueless vba on one or two records, not all 146…

_____________

VBA provides job security, dads can make charts dance, and read Excel’s messages before you click OK. Those are just a few of the things that Twitter taught me about Excel this week.

One tweeter thinks “boys like Excel more than girls”. Hmmm…more than girls like Excel, or more than they like girls? Anyway, who needs a Valentine, when you have Excel? And Twitter. And Twittering in Excel? Maybe I’ll email all my hip-hop peeps, and see what they think.

A Long, Cold Road

• It’s official. Excel has a mind of its own. Too bad it’s a halfwitted hillbilly numbscull with half its brain cells fried by bad moonshine
• Starting down the long, cold road of Excel spreadsheets. I will be a hardcore organisatrix but I will be dead inside.
• I can’t even complain about Excel, it said “Changes haven’t been saved, are you sure you want to close it?” And I said “Sure!”

A Line Dance Chart?

• My father is the Excel master of the universe, no lie; he can make charts jump up and do the can-can if he wants
• Got my IT department to purchase a copy of Tableau for me and I feel like having a party! 🙂 Big WIN – No more Excel charts for me! 🙂
• noooooooooo i just made a really sweet graph in excel, THEN ACCIDENTALLY DELETED IT. this is why i am not a science major.

Current Events

• M$ to open stores.Can’t imagine a M$ store.What do they promote?Excel?Oh that’s cool.People will flock:-)Better have some show from Ballmer
• Upgrading factors in my oscars excel sheet to decide what to pick in the annual Oscars Pool.
• Well, I’ve paid my taxes, so can I be Commerce Secretary? I know Excel!

Hidden Features

• No, you’re right, Excel is definitely lacking a ‘Email All My Hip-Hop Peeps’ button. 😉
• little known secret: Excel spreadsheets can be spell checked 🙂
• In Excel, we use FLOOKUPs. If they work, it’s a flook, and if they don’t… you guessed it.

Excel in School

• is not in the mood for work at all! excel is an evil program developed to torture biological science students! and key skills is no better!!
• You know what I hate? Excel spreadsheets. I DIDN’T GET A LIBERAL ARTS DEGREE FOR THIS! I hate numbers!
• Has gotten very good at numbers and Excel sheets…should do an MBA!
• without wishing to be sexist, I have noticed boys like Excel more than girls, enjoy straightforward, unadorned logic perhaps

Excel to Twitter

• hey, this excel to twitter client works!
• getting ready to write an Outlook version of my Excel to Twitter client

Vines and Wines

• Creating two excel spreadsheets with my fruit trees and vines on one and seeds on the other. OCD in the Garden!
• I put together an Excel spreadsheet for scoring the wines at our tastings. It gives rank order, mean and standard deviation of the rankings
• found out how i can use Google map API from MS Excel
• Use Excel instead. There’s nothing you need to use powerpoint for that u cant do in Excel (u never NEED animated slides!)

Thanks for VBA

• says: “Excel, my dear, why stop on breakpoints that were removed last week? Why?”
• Thank you Microsoft, for job security. That most of the world thinks programming is as miserable as VBA, I give thanks.
• “I’m responsible for the introduction of Visual Basic for Applications in Microsoft Excel” does not confer bragging rights. 😉

_____________________

This week, people ploughed through their Excel worksheets, ignoring the snow, annoying co-workers, and other distractions. Cells were merged, money disappeared, and flashes of brilliance were displayed. Mr. Spreadsheet offered some advice to Excel Twitterers, to help them have their tweets mentioned here.

And I don’t think it sucks to have leet skills. How about you?

Pretty Graphs

• Do people get certified to be an excel expert? Is putting on a resume, “I make pretty graphs on excel” ok? 🙂
• Excel: Wasn’t that fun? Let’s make PDFs from charts again someday! Me: Go die a horrible, painful death.
• Why am I being asked to hand-draw pie charts in a course that has an excel textbook as required reading?

Excel Distractions

• someday i’m going to write my memoirs. in excel spreadsheet form.
• another day buried in excel spreadsheets analysing research interviews. Not even any snow to distract…ho hum
• My Sunday can be summed up in two words – Snow and excel! Ok that was 3 but you can tell what an exciting day I have had!!

Annoying Excel Errors

• Why must Excel tell me every single time that unmerging cells will keep upper left data only? Where’s my “don’t show this msg again” button?
• One of the most annoying Excel errors – “Cannot change part of a merged cell”. I LIKE merging cells. And I like moving them around.
• $527 billion limit for pentagon was my fault. i ran out of rows in excel.
• Calculating again and again but some things just won’t fit. And I’m afraid that isn’t exactly excel’s fault. Sigh.
• Excel. It will be the death of me. Where did that €50,000 go????
• Moving cells around arbitrarily in Excel is extraordinarily easy considering they represent massive amounts of money, resources and effort.

Twittering That I’m Twittering

• I have so many more friends on Twitter than in Excel. Why did I spend my day in Excel?
• the only time i get a chance to twitter is when excel locks up on me. lucky for my twitter career, it’s a fairly regular occurrence.
• Folks, if you mention Excel in a tweet, there’s a good chance that Debra Dalgleish will quote it in her blog. Tip: Make it funny/outrageous.
• twittering that i’m twittering while excel crunches a bazillion numbers for me. so much truth in this comic. http://xkcd.com/303/

Excel at the Office

• Wow, working at my dad’s place is so much fun. Had to print some cards for a guy who did his artwork in EXCEL. Yes, I’m a design snob 🙂
• Starting a long day full of excel and lawyers – sounds fun? nah!
• It’s been one of them days at work where every 5 minutes someone is bugging me for help with Excel, sucks to have leet skills
• rocking some excel spreadsheet code refactoring analysis, i should be wearing a suit or something
• They call me the Excel Doctor at work now.

Excel Is Like Magic

• So what do I do with my evenings as an awesome single thirty-something? Amortization schedules! OH YEAH! Excel is S-E-X-X-Y!
• Omg.. excel is like magic for me, don’t understand a thing of it _o_
• Just had an epic moment of Excel success. I doubt I will ever top that display of brilliance and logic.
• Who is the Patron Saint of Excel Spreadsheets? I need some candles and peace that passes understanding.

__________________

Excel, chocolate fish or glue gun? Which would you choose?

Cabin fever seems to be taking hold on Excel users who Twitter. Their winter-addled brains imagine that Excel is a living, breathing, evil being. But that’s just silly. Excel is a bit cranky sometimes, but it’s not evil.

More people must be using Excel 2007, because the “loss of fidelity” message gets a few mentions every week. Ah yes, we Excel users are a pretty funny bunch. Or maybe you just need a sense of humour to survive Excel hell.

Ruh Roh

• couldn’t understand why my computer was running so slow, but after a check of task Manager I discovered I had 16 instances of Excel running!
• a while back i created a super secret excel file for work. guess i did a good job of hiding it, because i can’t find it anywhere. *grumble*
• an officemate collapsed whilst doing his excel worksheet…tsktsktsk. it’s not worth it, man
• ruh roh. grumbling about Excel on Twitter and 48 hrs later I am getting spam about Excel training.
• waiting for my pivot table to return from it’s self imposed exile, where it’s gone to i know not just that it’s taken 100% of my cpu with it

Happy Times

• Having a sneaky chocolate fish and operating under the premise that if there’s an Excel spreadsheet open, everyone thinks you’re working.
• Just was given three bottle of Hornitos for solving an Excel related problem.
• I haven’t been this happy in weeks: my OLAP pivot table thing actually has the correct data in it.

It’s All In Your Mind

• Sometimes I think MS Excel reads my mind and deliberately does the opposite of what I want.
• pretty sure my excel model has become self-aware; let me know if you see any terminators around…
• Any guy who writes Excel macros is on the GOOD page in my book! “Getting” VisiCalc in the summer of 1982 totally changed my life!
• Wrangling with VBA in excel so that people don’t have to think.

Prepare Yourself

• Feeling thwarted- I quit being an accountant because it sucks rocks, but here I sit creating an Excel spreadsheet for the play I’m designing
• Never ever ever think it’s a good idea to put all your debt into excel, then hit the Sum function without preparing yourself for it first
• too bad building a model of a spacecraft means a series of spreadsheets in excel. Pipecleaners, cardboard & a glue gun would be more fun 🙂

Very Disappointing

• If stupid MS Excel had some nifty way of exporting graphs as PNG or JPG files, that’d be so freaking awesome, right now it’s all a bit FAIL.
• seriously? I can’t copy entries from name manager from one workbook to another? Excel 2007- i’m very disappointed in you.
• Only having mean in Excel tables pivot tables to show ‘average’ stinks. A single outlier can throw off the summarized data.

Comedy of Errors

• puzzled by Microsoft Office’s dire warnings of a “loss of fidelity” in my Excel worksheet. Should I reposition my antenna? Use reel-to-reel?
• “Microsoft Office Excel is currently recovering your documents.” When you’re done with that Microsoft Office will you recover my couch?
• I want to go back in time and make sure the mother of the guy who invented Excel never falls in love with his father.
• Mired in Excel spreadsheets. There is a fine line between BI and BS.

It was a week of change in the USA and there were many tweets about that, and some even mentioned Excel. It’s surprising how things are connected in the Twitterverse. Linda Dessau, one of the people whose Excel question I answered in Twitter last week, described the experience in her blog.

We’re almost a month into 2009, and we’re still trying to adjust to Excel 2007. And no, it’s not because we’re old, although struggling with that Ribbon might have prematurely aged us. Anyway, I have my shizz together. How about you?

Formula For Success

• Licking my battle scars after today morning’s Excel session. One day my tombstone will read “Death by Circular Reference.”
• Since I’m not smart enough to use a lot of real SQL I just use excel Vlookup function- It’s my best friend.
• Writing some Excel formulas for hours control. Trying to eliminate overtime. Seems the biggest problem = people punching in even 1-min early
• discovered ‘conditional sum wizard’ in MS excel. my life has been saved. at the expense of my eyes getting weakened though.

A Small Meltdown

• Just witnessed a person doing calculations on his calculator and entering the results into an Excel sheet.
• Up early working on an Excel file. Fun stuff. At least I am not shoveling snow.
• There’s something therapeutic about inputing hundreds of lines of Excel spreadsheet. But there’s a lot more that’s horrible about it.
• Sometimes I think I’m pretty good with Excel then my boss asks me to edit a Pivot Table and I have a small meltdown.
• There is no such thing as saving too often when dealing with large Excel files
• suffering from writers block (if you can call it that when using Excel)

Every Damn Thing

• Asked for a logo. Got an Excel file.
• when did engineering become all about excel spreadsheets?
• I love that developers use Excel to send comments in lieu of a Word Doc. It says something about their world. Just not sure what.
• Invoicing. The most fun a girl can have with an Excel spreadsheet and a free online PDF converter.
• I just wish my law firm knew how/when to use Excel vs Access. They try to use Excel for every damn thing. Oy.
• Excel as brain storming tool

Is It Just Me?

• For the record, I *HATE* the Research Toolbar in Excel 2003. I want it gone. DEAD!
• I’ve been using Office 2007 for 6 months now and STILL can’t find certain functions in Word & Excel – is it just me??? Am I getting old?
• If life were like a DVR, I could skip forward over the parts where I wait for Excel to update and recalc.
• yesterday = amazing historic moment. Today = irritating excel fail. Can I have the historic moment day back pls?

VBA and Java

• No 400-level programming course should contain “This project uses one of the most overlooked “program languages” there is—Microsoft Excel.”
• Writing an Excel macro. Amazing that the macro editor in Office hasn’t really changed since Word 6.
• Writing VBA the way anyone should, with a strong coffee, some peace and quiet. Kids + xbox later, so VBA is my R&R

Duck and Ballerinas

• excel spreadsheets are tedious but make me feel like i have my shizz together, ducks in a row, etc.
• lol I would never claim to be anything other than “barely competent” at Excel – just a page ahead in the manual 😉
• I’m free to daydream of becoming a ballerina whilst Excel and Access do all my work.
• Home from a bad date. He professed love for excel spreadsheets 4 over an hour & I shared how I often share a bed w/ my laptop & blackberry

In this week’s Excel Twitters we learn about fidelity, whiteboards, dads and Slippery Pete. I also discovered that VBA also means “Virtual Bankruptcy Assistant”, whatever that is. It was a long, cold week, but I didn’t see any tweets about people burning their Excel files to stay warm during Thursday night’s lengthy power outage in Toronto.

And yes, Gordon Moar, I included your tweet, but only after I did a little background check. 😉 It looks like this tweet isn’t the first thing you’ve had published. Do you remember your letter to Electron User in January 1988? Well, I hope that was you! If not, let me know, and I’ll fire my research staff.

A Minor Loss

• Why are the insert and delete buttons next to each other in excel?
• I wish Steve Ballmer could sit right next to me and watch his software at work. Maybe he would want to punch Excel too.
• really excel, what does “Minor loss of fidelity” mean? does it mean you were cheating on me with other users?
• I find my excel warning message about a “minor loss of fidelity” strangely heartening. It’s, you know, a minor loss. It still loves me.

Dear Dad

• Just got done conducting a 5 minute crash course in Microsoft Excel with my dad. Man, that’s an up hill battle 😉
• Dad just called me to say, “I can’t see anything on your website. But maybe because that’s I have Excel 2003.” Wow, I had no response.

I Am Growing Up!

• Things Excel is not: Application platform, database, fast, 2nd coming of Christ, application platform, image container, Wine-friendly, open.
• Holy cow, I just made a Budget in Excel! I am growing up!
• Working on our new CRM system called “Excel”. An upgrade from our existing system called “Whiteboard”.

It’s a Nightmare

• Just saw comment on forum somewhere: “95% of my programming is in Excel using VBA.” Poor sod. Can’t the UN pass a resolution or something?
• Writing VBA macro to automate 6 hr process. Why hasn’t my predecessor done this? 6 hours he doesn’t have to do anything else, me thinks.
• I just can’t believe, honestly, that anyone can critique VBA. To some, it’s a nightmare, to me it’s a living
• Realising that learning VBA for Excel may be the best investment of time I ever made. (From someone who hates everything Microsoft.)
• VBA doesn’t read your mind, it just messes with it an awful lot
• “if you need macros in Excel, you should be using Access” I realize that’s generalized for training, but still completely a lie

Awesome Graphs…For Dummies

• in 07, I mostly used Access & Excel, ribbon UI is not that great, but I find it easier to program in 07 than 03.
• Dear sweet god in heaven. I love excel 2007 and how awesome it is to deal with graphs.
• Excel 2007 feels like Excel for Dummies.

It’s a Mental Game

• Working on Excel spreadsheets is a tad easier if I imagine I’m doing so in the Caribbean – go ahead…try it!
• I like changing my name in Office 2007 so people think the page is open by someone else. Today, Excel documents are open by “Slippery Pete”.
• I’m going to be an excel-stentialist.
• Excel tweets keep Debra amused. Wonder if this will make the list?
• Great blues songs about working in Excel have yet to be written. . . .
• staring at a pinata, a whiteboard, and an excel spreadsheet.

Apparently there was a big event in San Francisco last week, that had something to do with apples. The attendees did lots of tweeting about iWork and Numbers. It’s way better than Excel. Or not. They’re torn.

And yes, Dick, I saw your Twitter. Maybe next time you can write an Excel haiku, and I’ll include it for sure.

Goodbye Excel

• I’m ashamed to admit I much prefer Microsoft Excel over iWork Numbers.
• Goodbye Excel, Numbers now has everything I need. In fact Goodbye Office Forever!
• My love for Excel and my love for Apple laptops are a frustrating combination.
• I’m bilingual – Excel at work, Numbers at home. Tho I Must Confess that I am more skilled with Excel.

Name That Colour

• Working on an excel document highlighting cells red or green. Except I’m color blind with those two colors. This should be lots of fun!
• Vlookup. Whoever named excel functions should be forced to use them with same poor help files everybody else does.
• Some excel lovers just can’t get the ‘less is more’ concept. I just received a work sheet with more colors and images than a birthday card…
• i’m convinced that microsoft excel was named in a brilliant flash of irony while its testers were waiting for basic calculations to complete
• i hate how in MS Excel the undo button is universal across all open excel docs. why would i want to undo something in a different excel doc?

Global Domination and Other Uses

• trying to perfect my excel skills in creating a HR dashboard. I suck at excel unfortunately.
• Just finished hours of wrestling with church 09 Ad/Publicity budget for annual meeting; what did cavemen ever do without Excel??
• made a really awesome list of household chores. How much time can I kill putting them into calendar form in Excel? Google Calendar? Or both
• Excel is to databases what measuring the walls is to carpet fitting
• hah! my husband is teaching Excel to our 6 year old (to organize his painstaking charts of airplane info and other facts)
• I’m amazed at all Excel can do. With enough know-how, one could plot global domination using nothing but spreadsheets…

Version Issues

• Access 2007 is actually awesome. Excel’s not bad. But Word sucks.
• Fixing Excel grids again. I swear I spend about 10 hours a week trying to fix unknown issues between 2007 and 2003.
• Just got my copy of Excel 2007 and can’t get the box open… It’s locked down like Fort Knox

Sweet Talk

• Yep, talking passionately about obscure undocumented Excel data analysis features ain’t the best way to make friends at parties
• I hope Deb mentions me on her next Excel twitters post.
• We usually do get along, which is probably why this is so frustrating… my job is 1/2 sweet-talker, 1/2 Excel ninja. 😀

An Excel Haiku

• A haiku about excel: Cells of numbers dance corporations sign and groan I am the macro

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

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Happy New Year! How many New Year’s resolutions involve an Excel spreadsheet? Or tattoos? Or both? And no, I’m not the person who resolves to learn Excel 97. Listening to laundry dry does sound like a nice way to ring in the new year though.

I’d never seen a report of the CSV file problem before, but it seems to be true. Maybe not a reason to stop using Excel, but interesting, at any rate. What could be the reason for that?

Update: In his comment, Dave explains, “The first two characters in the file (ID) is how excel (and other programs) know that you’re working on a SYLK file.” and provides a link to a Wikipedia article on SYLK files.

Happy Holidays

• is wondering why she attempted to work on an Excel spreadsheet during the holidays. Lawyers shouldn’t ever be allowed near Excel.
• if excel tells gives me one more bizzare message about margins not fitting page sizes i’m going to go mad
• Why is the Excel default to vertically align cells on the bottom? That’s enough on its own to warrant replacing the default book.
• Excel can’t handle CSV files that have ‘id’ as the first two letters! Yet another Microsoft gem!
• excel is killing me. slowly. and I suspect it’s having fun… –.-
• Is anybody good at excel? I’m trying to ad those thought bubbles that popup when you drag the mouse across a cell. What is that called?
• user was complaining that excel 2007 has ‘less functionality’ than prev vers. turns out no one @ his last job knew about the office button

Best Friends

• math hates me, but excel is my best friend. everything is super basic, but my boss can’t work excel, so i’m golden. for now…
• Me and Excel are still bonding. We may need couples counseling soon.
• Oh wow! I love the Undo button in excel, it just saved me on a report that I almost butchered!
• I can’t believe I forgot about pivot tables!! Those are Excel’s best feature!!

New Year’s Celebrations

• Behind but now extreme-resolution-keeping. On treadmill to LOSE WEIGHT NOW with keyboard to LEARN PIANO NOW and video to LEARN EXCEL 97 NOW.
• drinking black tea that’s too hot, plowing through these excel sheets, listening to my laundry dry, thinking about what i should do for NYE.
• Man, this year I’m going to meet my Savings goal. And find a way to get the tattoo. Step one done: set up Excel spread sheet.
• Working for the last time this year :-)) Rather large Excel spreadsheet sits open on my screen about half created. We track lots of numbers!
• It’s 50 mins to midnight and we’re drinking wine and slogging through accounts in excel

A Ridiculous Waste of Time

• Trying to write a simple introduction for a lesson on inserting an Excel chart into a PowerPoint Slide. No amount of coffee can help me.
• nasty excel doc with about 20 diff estate development appraisals (ok only 4) – it’s a ridiculous waste of time in my humble opinion!
• After that last twit, I decided to be productive at work and fire up excel. I am going to make a list of every beer I have ever had.
• How many of you are working with at least 1 person who you could replace with an Excel macro?

It was a quiet week for Excel Twitters, thanks to the Christmas holidays. A few people were still using Excel to help them prepare for Christmas, there was discussion of Excel and finances, and as usual, a few complaints about Excel or its latest version. The oldest version of Excel that I have is 3.0, but I still have a copy of Multiplan – maybe I could go back to using that!

A Christmas Miracle

• Baking is way more challenging for me than any Excel spreadsheet. I am exhausted!
• Working on Excel spreadsheet of who in our families is getting how much of what kinds of handmade soap for Christmas. I’m a geek crafter!
• likes the quiet formulas of my Excel gradesheets more than the tumultuous shopping.
• It’s a Christmas miracle! Excel actually did something right! I’m completely shocked.

Not So Miraculous

• LOL. my favorite excel command is “Close”. 😀
• I seem to have accidentally established myself as the Excel genius in our department. That wasn’t meant to happen.
• matplotlib is the new way to draw graphs. good day to you excel. Good day.

High Finance

• I magically gained $8.14 and neither my checkbook nor excel can tell me why, and it is driving me insane!!!
• I dont feel let down by financial institutions. But I am disappointed that 1000’s of pounds of excel spreadsheets didnt work it out sooner.
• What: I’m constructing an Excel worksheet that values options using black scholes and binomial trees. Why? To see if I can do it.

Busy Work

• We started to price out honeymoon scenarios in Excel. God willing, it looks like we’re going to the South Pacific! XD
• Twitter wants to know what I’m doing? Well then, Twitter, I’m putting data from my science fair experiment into Excel. Wheee. 🙁
• Making monochrome, but pretty grids in excel to track wear and tear on computer keyboard desks. Busy work, but easy.

Version 1.0

• Found the source of my need for wine – incompatibility between VFP and excel 2007 file format. Now I need to remember the workaround.
• is getting greedy.. 1,048,576 row limit in Excel 2007 is NOT sufficient for my needs..
• Maybe my dad has the right idea. He’s still running Word and Excel 1.0.

What an interesting week in Excel Twittering! I learned new phrases, discovered tips for getting ahead at the office, and found a way to post my Twitters directly from Excel. Well, from Excel 2003 — the application had some problems in Excel 2007.

Now I just have to figure out how that guy predicted the future, and see if I can collect mileage from my kids retroactively.  Without harshing my mellow.

Excel at Home

• My paper route is SO ORGANIZED!! I love Excel! If only my apartment could be so compartmentalized….
• my mom charges me mileage; sends Excel spreadsheets which I don’t open. IMHO $.48/mile is gouging but her friend told her it’s fair
• Finally doing some Christmas shopping online. Am I anal because I’m using excel to organize, or a disaster b/c I just started? Probably both
• I saw a show on natgeo on a guy who could predict the future with Excel. But then got the BSOD and caused an earthquake

Excel at Work

• My boss needs to learn to use excel. Can’t even do the smallest simplest tasks. Oh well… Makes me look like a genius
• Last night I dreamt that I called Help Desk for something w/ Excel. That’s like A.C. Slater asking Screech for advice on how to be athletic.
• Trying to convince users to not buy visio when excel will do. Gantt charts u know.
• Benefits of being a computer nerd: I make unnecessary excel projects seem important to my boss to get out of normal, boring, regular work.
• I love Excel-based timesheets. Makes me dig out my good ole’ Pseudo-Random Timesheet Generator.

Excel at Twitter

• I think it’s funny that I’m following 2 friends, 2 excel gurus, 6 fictional characters and the Australian Prime Minister on Twitter…ha ha!
• “Now You’ve Seen Everything” – http://linksr.us/hyoNfV – Download your very own Excel Twitter client.

Excel Problems

• realises that one cannot use Excel to compute transactions involving Zimbabwean dollars. 😛 Too many zeroes behind. 🙁
• Excel is dependent on constant human updates; therein lies its fundamental problem.
• I’m 11.5 months Excel Free. It’s not for everyone, but it does feel good.
• Excel, you have been replaced by a 10 lb. manual calculator that is never virtual. Old school technology saves the day. I hate budgets.

Who Knew?

• realizes that the plate-spinning guy on Ed Sullivan was actually the inventor of Microsoft Excel
• Excel 2007 charting is harshing my mellow.

You can learn so much about Excel use by reading the Twitters that people post. Eye shadow? Rock Band scores? Comics? Extra cash? Who knew you could use Excel for such diverse tasks?

What Would We Do?

• The first application I used which felt like magic was: Microsoft Office Excel.
• 2007 Excel BLOWS AWAY 2003. Once you get used to the big buttons, you’ll wonder how you ever did without it
• what would we do without Excel!!! what would we be without Excel!!!

Excel Is Certainly Crying

• Turns out that Excel 2007 has a “feature” called “just doing whatever the hell it likes to your data”. Excellent, thanks Excel.
• How many times do I have to tell MS Excel to stop auto-correcting my numbers into dates?
• note to myself: when a excel sheet get corrupted it’s always your fault.
• Excel just said “Can’t complete task with available resources. Choose less data or close other apps” Think my brain is saying the same thing
• Excel is crying, don’t think it likes generating pivot tables from a couple of million rows of data
• created an excel spreadsheet of all my make up (eye shadows and other). havent tackled lip glosses/lip sticks yet.

Insane Excel Skills

• Trying to figure out a way to make extra cash from home without a big time commitment using my insane excel skills.
• Just sorting out my christmas spreadsheet, the one and only time of the year i use excel!
• Almost done my Christmas shopping! This is definitely the most organized I’ve been for gift giving. It’s even organized in an Excel!
• What do you use to catalog your comics? I just use Excel
• In a slight panic over how much work there is to do in the next few months. Currently making Excel pretend to be Project.
• Testing out an application which extracts Rock Band scores from HMX servers and converts it to an excel file.  http://tinyurl.com/6ob743

Temple of Doom

• Teaching excel to 7th graders is like teaching a cat to do tricks.
• to paraphrase indiana jones, “why’d it have to be excel files?”

This week they celebrated Thanksgiving in the USA. Some people were thankful for Excel and its wonderful features. Others, not so thankful.

And apparently I’m not the only person who uses Excel for holiday meal planning. This might put a positive spin on pie charts! Mmmm…pumpkin pie.

Battles With Excel

• omg. how did they get Excel to make our new bi-weekly time sheets look like something out of the 1950s? gag.
• Will this day never end? I am battling with Excel… it just won’t give up any secrets and I don’t have the patience to search “help”!!!!!
• What’s better than an entire work day spent in Excel? Pretty much ANYTHING
• Speaking of Excel, it’s amazing how many processes depend on user developed sheets. When I say amazing I mean *scary*.
• Spent ~ 50% of this week waiting for Excel to recalc.

Charting Challenges

• Trying to chart some pretty slopes in Excel, man I wish I had paid more attention back in Trig class… Re-learning sine waves kinda sucks
• Anybody know of a easy gantt chart template for excel or open office calc?
• OCD in Full Effect. Tracking web clicks and have taken notes 4 different ways. Settled on Excel Chart. That’s an hour I won’t get back.
• the default Excel charts are aesthetically challenged. I wonder if they looked good in the early 90’s or ever.

You Did What With Excel?

• Fantasy sports seem to be as much fun as updating an excel file. I guess it’s for the stats junkies?
• Anyone know how to insert a check box into an Excel spreadsheet? I need 2283 of them….
• learning how to use Excel to drive Photoshop

With Thanks In My Heart

• Eloise just planned next week’s menus in Excel to generate a shopping list sorted by isle. I’m still in awe!
• menu list made, now setting up the excel sheet o’ ingredients to see how much of it we’ll actually make.
• I made up an elaborate budget on excel today, and now I want to buy stuff so I have something to put in it!
• I begin this day with thanks in my heart and an Excel spreadsheet organizing my pie schedule on my desktop.

Excel and Life

• working in excel again, this time for chemistry. the story of my life can be told in spreadsheets…
• Excel is the most important software package in the world; it’s also a work of art 🙂
• What in the world did our mothers ever do before Excel?
• Got that job. I’m management now. Where’s that excel book?

Answer: Dresses, molasses, puppies and beer. Question: What does Excel make us think of?

And I can relate to that “You cannot quit Microsoft Excel” error, since I got it this week too, while using Excel over a Citrix server. The only way you can quit Excel is to disconnect from the server, wait 30 minutes, then log back in. Fun!

Is That a Feature?

• Wondering where the day (and an Excel file I have now saved three count em three times) got to.
• Error message: “You cannot quit Microsoft Excel”. Microsoft Excel: I wish I could quit you.
• the first time I open any txt file in excel it crashes excel. works like a charm the 2nd time. Is that a feature?
• Excel just informed me that there’s “Not enough memory.” Guess they haven’t heard of that virtual kind.
• Excel has crashed two more times, & now my office light is flickering. Apparently, the poltergeist feels it’s time for me to go home.

Miscommunication

• is wondering when Excel graphs became such an excellent tool of (mis)communication
• just wasted a ton of time trying to figure out how to plot a measly graph in excel -_-‘
• I love Excel. This year’s raw data + my custom charts & graphs = awesomeness.
• I just made a chart in excel that looks like something from a spyrograph. I didn’t know that was even possible.

Excel Is For Girls

• i feel so smart…i figured out my excel project! I’m rewarding myself with a new dress to wear out tonight 🙂
• Sharon says a pivot table will solve my problems. Wondering if she just means Excel or if it will fix 401k balance & the leaking faucet too?
• My husband excel’d my makeup and beauty products. The spreadsheet doesn’t lie…being a girl is expensive!

Excel For Mac

• can’t use this aggregate planning solver on his Macbook. Next version of Excel for Mac rumored to include VBA support… NEED IT NOW!!
• Got 90% through my investments project only to discover Excel 2008 doesn’t come with Solver… I’m screwed if I can’t find an alternative
• Excel for Mac = molasses

Yes, It Can Be Done

• Plotting a suspense novel with an Excel spreadsheet – yes, it can be done!
• obsessively planning thanksgiving via excel spreadsheet. thinking of live-twittering my kitchen adventures!
• Don’t send a PDF of your financial model. It’ll only make the investor wonder why you don’t want to share the working excel version’
• Hobbyist robot system requires a serial port. Its software is written  in Excel. It costs $1,000.
  

In an Excel Mood

• I love twittering. How is everyone today. Not in a creative fun mood – in an Excel spreadsheet mood.
• how do you start your day? i start mine with a cup of coffee and some thrash/metal/screaming/puppies/excel
• Every time you start a new Excel document somewhere a fairy dies. Or maybe that’s just me.
• Playing Battleship on Excel spreadsheets. So. bored.
• Can’t believe I’ve only just found the ROUNDDOWN function on excel. Call myself an accountant?
• I couldn’t love Excel 2007 more if it were made of beer

Another week, another wave of Excel Twitters. It’s always interesting to see what people are up to, using Excel in ways it was never intended. At least one person is hitting the Save button, so that’s an improvement.

And I’m pretty sure I know that guy from Columbia, with the Excel questions in FaceBook. Not the asker, the ask-ee. Or is that spelled ASCII?

Excel Face

• Excel apparently can’t open files with names as long as Windows can make them. Nice.
• This stupid statistics info in Excel is not coming out right!
• Just lost 2 hours of work on an Excel spreadsheet. And yes … I did hit save several times.
• excel crashed and took everything I was working on with it. can I just call it a day and go watch bond yet?
• My coworkers fondly refer to my facial expression during the first part of the month as “Excel Face.” And boy do I have it today.

Excel Wishes

• Why won’t excel stay visibly highlighted when I’m tabbed out to another window? Did it occur to them that people use it to arrange info?
• on excel tips, I used to remember most of the short cut keys for 03 version and pretty proud of that, then comes 2007. 🙁
• I had 3 emails in FB from some guy asking for Excel help without saying please. His reason why I should help? “I’m also from Colombia”
• squirming in a sense of financial pain that i can only hope is due to frightful excel errors
• Chilly Beers & no more Excel. That’s my vacation.

Make It Pretty

• my staff know not to show me anything until it’s organized in excel w/ color coding. the annoyed stares don’t bother me anymore.
• All my projects have me hangin’ in Excel today. Love the functions; wish it was easier to make it “pretty.”

Now That’s a Real Hobby

• excel makes me feel so organized and accomplished. is that dorky?
• Is working on the wedding list thanks to excel messing all the address up .
• creating an excel spreadsheet for carpooling. how pathetic!
• I accidentally said I would make an Excel spreadsheet for Anima character creation. I am an idiot. I DON’T EVEN HAVE EXCEL!
• Nightclubs wouldn’t be so popular if more people knew how cool Excel was. Now that’s a real hobby. 🙂

==============================

Another week in Twitterville, with the usual whining about Excel crashes and lost data. Here’s a tip — save your work in Excel every 10 minutes. Don’t blame Excel when you lose a day’s work because you never bothered to hit the Save button. Geez.

Oh, and Excel comes with a Help file — don’t be afraid to use it.

Incredibly Annoying

• it’s incredibly annoying to not be able to take excel sheets outside of the excel program window
• I keep running these massive, macro-driven excel reports while having ~17 other apps going. Why is my computer whining?
• “Satan will take the form of Excel spreadsheet cell G-14 this week and refuse to assume the proper formatting. “
• Damnit – I’ve had my recommended lifetime dosage of Excel three times in a row now. Next thing, I’m thinking in $Absolute $References…
• Always, *always* been able to help co-workers with every conceivable Word and Excel issue, But MS is working just as hard to stop that.
• I don’t mind so much when Access and Excel try to think for me, but when they’re wrong, I expect them to listen to me.
• …cries salty tears over Excel. LOOKUP requires data to be sorted in ascending order? Why didn’t you JUST FRICKIN’ SAY SO! 2 hrs lost…

Pretty Fancy

• I need a cheap laptop- all it has to do is show me DVDs on Windows media and run excel.
• Just calculated that I’ve spent over 15hrs in Excel since Saturday afternoon. The business world runs on XLSX files, that is certain.
• I love the smell of Excel and Reports in the morning
• thanking an irrational, imaginary deity for Excel (no, not Bill Gates who is very real)
• I’m an excel chart badass! Not really, but I did feel pretty fancy for like, 5 seconds.

Mmmm…Excel Food

• Planning turkey dinner for 25, using Excel spreadsheet with Gantt charts and pivot tables. Does it get any geekier than this?
• playing with dry & fluid ounce conversions in an Excel spreadsheet. Yep, I’m a baking geek.

Hmmm…

• AC/DC’s video-in-Excel is great, but it raises an alarming question: how’d a generation of teenage stoners become accountants?

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?