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Comment by dimask | Hacker News Reader

> excel gang

Inspecting data on a spreadsheet does not define any that special type of human, and it can be done in different software. Spreadsheet is a common way of storing data.

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You aren't part of the Excel gang so you don't get it. There is a level of Excel user that is in fact a special type of human. Quant traders and accountants for example. They are very hot key dependent and the speed at which they do things in Excel is superhuman and would make you rethink SQL queries. You try to take their Excel from them and there would nothing less than a revolt.

As someone who was in finance before moving to tech, there are still many days I believe Excel is the best IDE I've ever used

OG reactive functional programming some say

leads too easily to spaghetti columns but still

I am a programmer - I'm not in the Excel gang.

But the way you casually dropped the term "spaghetti columns" literally sent a shiver up my spine.

Likewise, I spend years in it for a day job and I never used a mouse.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1667/

Excel gang https://youtu.be/BNG_c9Ofd6c?&t=722

I love excel but this is some seriously delusional stuff.

Tech culture is the absolute worst. Everyone wants to pretend they are splitting the atom even when they are just using excel.

You aren't at the level where you can split an atom in Excel yet? Pfft, you'll get there one day. Keep at it.

Yeah I have heard the legends and even met one person once. I do not think that one needs to be in the excel gang, though, to be disturbed by such interference patterns while looking at a spreadsheet in VisionPro.

One time I used excel as site scraper, db, auto query selector, cascaded regex (regex in a cell for regex in a cell for another etc.), and a backend that dynamic images for a fully functional and complicated site, it was doing a lot of stuff until google found out and started blocking my requests and throttling it, so I wrote a script in there to counter it by adding some delays and such, and that worked well till I killed the site a year later. It is a powerful tool.

Can you recommend some resources to learn how to do the above? I would like to beef up my spreadsheet skills.

If you mean all of these in one place, I don’t know, when I made that I didn’t intend it to be how it ended, but it started as a hacking something to do another and every time I stumbled upon an issue, I just search it in the docs or just the internet. That being said, I believe I still have that behemoth sheet with all the stuff I did it (except the delays script), I can make a write up about all of these sections I mentioned with examples and such, nothing soon as I’m busy with other stuff but when I do I will definitely ping you here. Just note that if you do the same you will perpetually play whack-a-mole game with google if you used that since they will keep blocking it, else people will never pay for hosting services.

I am a firm believer in the policy that one should "know" a few powerful tools (doesn't matter their age) very well rather than messing around with a whole bunch of tools which change with time/fads. Spreadsheets are a great "power tool" in the right hands and since i have never really explored them, your comment was intriguing to me. It would be great if you could do a complete write-up on your website/blog and submit to HN so everybody can benefit from it.

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