I've had colleagues that disconnected their juniors' mice to ensure this.
The reliance on excel in all aspects of investment banking is remarkable. From the simple stuff in corporate finance (merger analysis, capital issuance etc.) to complex derivatives pricing on the market side.
On the pricing side, external libraries typically handle the heavy lifting, but excel is the glue that brings it together. Certainly not the most efficient tool - I've had spreadsheets that take over an hour to calculate. You'd hit F9 and head out to lunch.
Good point. The upside of Excel is that in return for predictably slow execution, you get a tool that can be used on the fly without learning SQL or adding a DBA layer to every task.
If you and your parent poster are right about why Excel is so prominent, and I personaly think both of you are, then we might be able to see a shift in economics and businessmanship and in the way Excel formulas play a large part of what it is that makes the world go 'round, once business men start to learn how to program, or when Excel start's to learn to talk "business", but no earlier than that.
Which movement do you think is strongest? The AI camp or the ones that think programming should absolutely be a part of a proper education in business or economics? I hope for the latter, because I think it will be the end of the huge gap there is today, between the decision makers and the engineers, two groups who quite often but for no good reason feel alienated from each other.
The division of labor here is due to time constraints, not a failure to understand value. A lawyer can also be a doctor, if not for the fact that they'd get little of either done.
If you make programs that 'speak business', then you make programs that are significantly more complex than those that 'speak computer'. Learning how to handle this complexity and optimize this kind of code is not something a business/economics person wants to spend their time doing. So they leave it to someone who specializes in it.
Yes, I see what you mean. But surely, just adding Programming to the curriculum of businessmen, who I'm sure are quite intelligent or else they should be considering other occupations, does not equate to a person having to learn Another Occupation. Or do you think programmers, good ones, just know Programming?
Some folks do combine excellent programming skills with excellent business skills, but that's not necessarily what everyone should aim for.
I find that you can score someone on a whole range of skills, much as you can on computer games. The more overall skills you have, the more you will cost. If a job requires excellent programming skills but doesn't need any business skills, then paying for someone that has excellent business sills would probably be a waste of money.
In terms of your parent point about whether all business analysts should learn some programming, I think that programming skills are definitely helpful for business analysts, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient. Different skills help in different situations.
I'm curious, is there a way to "profile" an excel application? If you suspect a sheet is taking longer to calculate than it should are there tools that can help you drill down to discover the bottleneck?
ex Excel PM. There is a project that was between the Excel team and the high performance computing team at Microsoft for exactly this purpose. Not surprisingly mostly used by investment banks and insurance companies. (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff877825(v=ws.10).a...)
I don't think you even need to go that far. Can you optimise your implementation so that parallelisable chunks could run across all your cores? This sounds like the kind of think Excel may even do "automatically" but like many such things you usually need to structure your implementation in a suitable fashion.
Excel uses multiple cores for calculations. You can configure how many to prevent it sucking up the entire CPU for long calculations.
It's a pretty easily parallelizable problem since the sheet is just a dependency tree with the cells as nodes.
The build-in functions (e.g. probability distributions etc.) could also be multi-threaded, although I'm not sure if they are. Our external API called from cells was written in C++ and already multi-threaded.
It's a NP complete problem. What I mean is, there is no generalisable solution to this. Optimising algorithms employed by sophisticated technical users (think `-O`optimisation; Java hotspot) typically employ sets of heuristics that run the code in more optimal ways based on certain patterns. To trigger these you usually have to be aware of them and write your code in a certain way.
Given that Excel isn't really targeted at these kinds of user (heavy lifting typically offloaded to external libraries) it wouldn't be "Sad" if they didn't already do it, and I would in fact be pleasantly surprised. Which is why I'm asking the question.
To trigger these you usually have to be aware of them and write your code in a certain way.
Compiler writers also look for common patterns in people's code and figure out how to optimize them. when you have both years (decades) of legacy code and developers who don't even know what patterns are optimized, you as a compiler writer need to optimize the code that is being written.
On decisionmodels, the website looks like it is coming straight from the 90s (but after all so does excel) but it is a gold mine of stuff to know before one can claims to really understand excel. I highly recommend the reading to anyone aspiring to be a "poweruser".
Seconded. decisionmodels.com has excellent stuff on the difference between F9, sh-F9 and ctrl-sh-F9, and explains when the formula graph gets rebuilt. When you're building calc heavy XLL addins it's important to have a clear understanding of the behaviour of the calc engine code invoking your addin.
Unfortunately, these shortcuts are language-dependent. Just as the function names.
And you cannot switch Excel to English, but leave Outlook in German. Language setting is global over all Office programms.
And even if you could, at work the IT department has greyed out that setting via some policy. Even though I am Administrator on my work desktop, I cannot change the language!
>And you cannot switch Excel to English, but leave Outlook in German. Language setting is global over all Office programms.
Non native english speaker, but I use English menus for all programs, and English menu language for the OS.
As long as I can write and spellcheck in my native language, I am fine.
Unless I didn't speak english at all, why would I chose to see my language's word for Edit instead of "Edit", and never be able to take advantage of 2.000.000.000 tutorials, instruction videos, forum posts, that almost all assume english menu items?
> Non native english speaker, but I use English menus for all programs, and English menu language for the OS.
So do I - on workstations I control. Alas the mandatory corporate Windows laptop isn't one of them, so I have to constantly switch between English on my own devices and French on that laptop... Definitely hampers shortcut memorization.
Also, a curse on Microsoft for localizing Excel formulas - what were they thinking ?
Well I see the point to try to cater to users that might not be fluent in english - the target userbase for Excel is much more broad than a programming language, and if you want someone with low knowledge of both computers and english to be using Excel effectively, it helps a lot that e.g. your rows column is called "rows" and not asdfghjkl or something gibberish for you.
You seem to be french - so I am confident you can picture someone (dad, mom, an old uncle perhaps?) that would have an easier time remembering that a function is called RECHERCHEV than if it were called VLOOKUP or ASDFNASF!#^E3 or what have you.
As long as there are not namespace clashes, it seems to make sense to allow both, simply as a parent said the pervasiveness of English language documentation (that MS do a lot to promote through awards and certificates).
I don't know who downvoted you without any comment, I for one believe that that could be a good idea: just support all languages as alias and hide what is not your language - but don't cap the use of the foreign functions. If the interface is gentile whenever you see a spreadsheet from another country, it could be feasible.
MS actually did that with Visual Basic for Applications in Excel 95.
Umlaute in keywords, yay!
Example stolen from Wikipedia:
Prüfe Fall wd
Fall 1
' Auf Sonntag wird Datum vom letzten Freitag zurückgegeben
VorherigerGeschaeftstag = dt - 2
Fall 2
' Auf Montag wird Datum vom letzten Freitag zurückgegeben
VorherigerGeschaeftstag = dt - 3
Fall Sonst
' Andere Tage: vorheriges Datum wird zurückgegeben
VorherigerGeschaeftstag = dt - 1
Ende Prüfe
Ugh, I did some VBA in Germany around 2000. So crazy that keywords were in German (and command and periods have different meanings in numbers). Totally unportable code.
The non-programmers in other countries are actually more confused with the English formulas than with their native ones. I know as, not living in the English speaking country, I had to explain various Excel functionality (and formulas) to such people.
And it's true even for those who during some time in their life spent some years in some English speaking country.
I do the same thing, and one of the reasons why I always do that is that it makes it way easier to troubleshoot stuff when you're using English locale.
Googling will give you a much broader pool of solutions, and having to translate the names of options and commands you need help with just to gain access to this pool is an unnecessary extra step
If you have your os locale set to non-native language, then most of the sites will default to English language as well. That's something that annoys me as hell and I wonder if there is any workaround...
it wasn't IT. on XP Microsoft realized everyone used the computer in English on all markets, so they started to charge for it as an extra language pack if you bought the os license in another region.
Apple doesn't charge you for a language pack in OS X, it ships with all the supported languages included.
And also doesn't charge for OS X at all.
I can't see how MS is better given that you pay for it.
That's a sensible comparison only if you forget that you must to pay Apple premium for the hardware on which OSX is capable of running - the price is folded in there.
Sadly Excl has caused so much human induced error that is not audit-able. Learn to program in a statistical language. Billions are lost due to using the wrong tool for the wrong job.
- programmers never make copy and paste errors in other languages
- programmers never reverse a plus and minus sign in other languages
- programmers never break things with a last minute change
- there are never errors due to the size of code bases
Oh, right. Nearly all of those errors happen no matter what language you are using. Because they are humans giving instructions to a computer, who just does what the human says.
(Ok, the version control complaint might be better handled by merging in git or other DVCS. And there are troubles when people give you a csv where a field is the text 1e24 and excel turns it into a number because you told it to be magic when importing, rather than specifying that column was text)
Edited to add: the focus of that article is on accounting. Double entry accounting was created to make you input everything twice to help ensure you are doing the correct thing. You mess up one of the two items and stuff doesn't balance. Modern accounting software automatically creates the second entry, so you have no idea whether you did something wrong. That's the real issue. We came up with an accounting system that is slower to help make sure you did everything correctly, then we automated it so you only have to input one entry so accounting is faster and all of a sudden, we are surprised that more mistakes are made!
Your missing the point PEOPLE make mistakes. Where will you see the mistakes in Excel or a program. In Excel it is or close to impossible to see the steps someone did to get to the output. In programming you can see every single step and have version control.
> Because:
> - programmers never make copy and paste errors in other languages
But they are discover-able and you can audit them and then fix them
> - programmers never reverse a plus and minus sign in other languages
But they are discover-able and you can audit them and then fix them
> - programmers never break things with a last minute change
Version control!
> - there are never errors due to the size of code bases
TL;DR - Excel is just a really accessible programming language, and as such it's used by a lot of amateurs. Like Perl in the 90's, the ease of getting started means a lot of people can use it, but the average quality of their code is abysmal, since the average level of experience is very low. That doesn't mean the tool itself is necessarily bad.
-
Did you watch the Spolsky video? I only ask because this is all child comments from a top level comment about a Martin Shkreli video, and since I watched that first, you might have as well and not gotten to the original video. The way Joel suggests using Excel is very like how developers program when using good practices. Always name ranges and cells before using them. Never use numbers directly in formulas (unless obvious, like 365), use the named cell/range you set up. Use tables when you want tabular data so you are prevented from accidentally using the wrong formula for portions of ranges. Use the included named formatting themes for cells that are meant to be user editable, and those that are computed.
I watched the video and very quickly came to the conclusion that Excel is an IDE+Interpreter, like what people refer to when talking about Smalltalk (I assume, I've never actually used Smalltalk). The other thought I had is that it's probably the closest we've ever gotten to what people mean when they describe a visual programming language that just about anyone can use. Predictably, we often see the counterarguments to a system like that exhibited in Excel spreadsheets, which is poorly architected and designed spaghetti-code from people that don't have enough experience to know any better because they are amateurs.
Copy and paste errors look far more discoverable when you use R1C1 mode, and look to be outright prevented in a lot of cases when using tables.
Version control might be a good argument if it actually applied. Excel is a language, and I don't see any special version control baked into other languages programmers often use. It sits on top of them, and I don't see any reason why it couldn't sit on top of Excel as well. Export to a format that is version control friendly (perhaps with the help of an extra tool) and commit to VCS. Want to make a change? Check out the spreadsheet, convert as needed, and start working. Problem solved.
Really, I came away with a much clearer picture of what Excel specifically is after the Spolsky talk, and it probably wasn't even that advanced. What it did do was give a crash course for programmers that let you make the clear associations to what you do in other languages, so there was communication going on at a few levels.
Version control is about more than just holding different versions and being able to restore them. It makes it so much easier to discover what changed between one version and another. Excel files are too opaque for that.
I'm not sure how they are too opaque for that. If you are converting into an intermediary format, and saving that, depending on the format, it may even be easy. Here's someone that rolled their own solution, and they say they can edit it through a regular text editor[1]. Here's a company that provides a solution, which also purports to offer team collaboration[2]. Here's a free set of tools that provide versioning, change tracking,and diffing[3]. That's from a single google search, the first three results. I'm dubious that there's not a way to deal with this problem that fits most the sensible criteria you could come up with, given that this is obviously an need people have been working to serve for quite some while now.
I've worked a lot on trading floors the last 20 years. Excel was king in 90's and 2000's, recently there is a lot of Python & R around. Not that most of the really complex analytics and data come from C++/C#/Java DLLs or libraries, so many spreadsheets are complex but not that bad.
Excel is still king on the trading floors I've seen (mostly fixed income). There's always a push from management away from trader created spreadsheets but it's so easy for them to mock up a quick calculation, and then they start using it daily...
Not just IB. I'm in digital media and many managers/analysts have comparable skills. Really we are just looking at different metrics. Lots of the same data munging and modeling.
A lot of what he was doing wasn't even that fancy, just lots of holding ctrl to navigate cell ranges quickly and pasting of formulas and such. I'm surprised he didn't format his data more nicely though, but if this is just for his own personal use I get it. Color formatting for inputs vs calculated metrics are really helpful though.
That is an oddly fascinating video. He's quite good. I mean, he's out on bail pending charges for securities fraud, but in a way it makes sense, this would be an important skillset for that sort of grift.
He's being charged with running a Ponzi-like scheme and being "engaged in multiple schemes to ensnare investors through a web of lies and deceit". A lot of people in his business are aggressive and less than forthright. Securities fraud is _quite a bit more serious and less common than those personality flaws_.
The name Shkreli didn't immediately ring a bell for me, and I found this very candid interview with him on CBS News. He is very open and no-filter on every question, some of it makes a lot of sense, some of it is quite far out.
It's not a "good deal" because it's not consumption for the sake of consumption. High drug prices hit those unfortunate enough to be born with a sickness, and some of those people might have a hard time with their lives if majority of their time is spent earning enough to pay their medicine.
However, I like that he then goes on to say that there should be a system that takes care of the people who CANNOT afford the drug (government-funded or a corporate-driven solution of some sort).
The whole business take on medication and health care just seems crazy for a scandinavian citizen like myself.
Some CBS news affiliate brought him on to talk about the Epipen situation.
Honestly, he's very candid, and he says things people don't want to hear. Sometimes he says things that are just wrong and inconsiderate, but other times he says things that are simply inconvenient truths.
For example, he brings up the Epipen situation in a different light: He says $300 ($600 for 2) is significantly cheaper than the alternative (a trip to the ER, which can be thousands of dollars). He goes on to say it's a relative bargain, and that insurance companies should be more than willing to pay for Epipens because of the potential cost savings. To him the problem isn't Mylan (which has become the target of everyone's ire) but the insurance companies or medicaid.
Whether that's true or not it's a different perspective, and as a society we need to hear things that the masses don't necessarily agree with. The US system of healthcare is highly flawed, it's not a good idea to just make a boogeyman who will hide the real issues.
Giving a mugger $300 is also cheaper then treating a gunshot wound. Doesn't make it right. These companies are exploiting corners of IP law to block competition, using the US armed law enforcement as the muscle in their mugging.
The free market take is that competition allows for faster development of more newer, better, cheaper drugs overall. That may mean the occasional crazy pricing, especially in a constrained market where only a few entities can supply a need.
The socialist take is that the government should intervene in cases where a need isn't being met in a sustainable way by the market, and people are suffering.
Another way to look at it might be that one prioritizes the future over the present.
I don't think it's controversial to say that both these are true in certain situations, and sometimes those situations overlap (such as with medicine). In a perfect world, we would have all the benefits of both the free market and socialist takes, without the downsides associated with each. It's possible we might be able to approximate this somewhat, such as with Shkreli's suggestion that the government take over production of generics. Other options are better public funding of research and development, so drug companies can shoulder less of that cost (and thus charge less to recoup investment and make a profit).
In the end, I think neither system is perfect, and both have very real advantages that we need to be careful not to discount.
He did a podcast episode on the Milo Yianoupoullis (I tried okay) podcast. It was...interesting. Like you said, some of it makes sense, some of it is out there. Was really engaging to listen to though.
Well, I'm not going to force you, so feel free to abstain. Personally I like listening to all kinds of people and in different contexts. I found it interesting, and was recommending it to someone else who seemed to be in the same boat.
Although somewhat impressive, majority of us are similarly skilled with our editor/IDE of choice. My Emacs and IntelliJ workflows would probably look similarly advanced to non-programmers.
Ah, interesting. Tbh I rarely used spreadsheet capabilities and I usually used ob-ipython to load table to pandas in python and after manipulation write it back to org. I mostly use org tables for occasional manual data manipulation.
One problem with excel is that temporary steps you went through are hidden - it's hard to reproduce the excel spreadsheet. With org mode + ipython workflow I can trace all transformations that led to the end table, but hide them when they are not relevant.
I believe this gets me the best of both worlds - some form of WYSIWYG tables like excel + IDE-like programming environment in python and version control. Excel obviously lacks proper programming tools. Jupyter notebook does not treat printed tables in a special way org does.
Does everyone love this guy all of a sudden? I thought he was the most hated person in the world but I don't see a single bad comment about him here or in the YouTube comments. Quite on the contrary.
Well, first of all, he is mentioned here solely on his Excel process, and in that regards, his tweets about Harambe or purchase of a hip hop album are completely irrelevant, and honestly it is nice to see a community that can discuss a part of a persons work without tainting the view of that with other workings of said person.
But if you do hate him, you can apparently call him and tell him why and he'll take the time to discuss with you why you hate him, and he does this quite calmly and rationally (given the situation)[1].
Might be of help to someone else to realize that you are talking about Martin Shkreli, rather than Spolsky.
I missed the parent you were referencing, and thought one of the child comments was saying that Joel Spolsky was out on bail for securities fraud (which was the result, obviously, of me not catching who you were talking about)
Ooooh thanks. I've been reading a lot of Spolsky's blog posts from 2005-2006... I was thinking, what's happened to this guy in the last 10 years? Everyone hates him? Securities fraud? What?
It feels like people react to him the way they do Al Capone or Jordan Belfort. Obviously he's a jerk, it looks like he was probably eyeballs deep in securities fraud, but it's so audacious and disconnected from real life that it's like watching a scumbag in a movie.
Probably we're all better off with the law coming down on him, but that doesn't preclude a day-to-day fascination.
My opinion of the guy rose sharply after I learned that his drug pricing practices were standard for the industry, and that he did nothing that other companies like Valeant and Allergan have been doing at 100x the scale.
Yes he acts like a giant dick, but he's got great knowledge of how to analyse an investment, and recommends great books and so on. If his life would've turned out a little different and he was less publicly abrasive, he could've been celebrated as a child prodigy or an investment wizard...sort of like this Japanese trader cis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-e1MxcjFDk (an amazing guy).
Yeah, everyone condemns Martin Shkreli, but having watched the video Benjammer5 linked to, he seems like a regular bright dude / techbro (ugh..). I would not be surprised that a significant number of people who lambasted Shkreli, if given a similar situation, would end up making the same choices for that $$$.
I have found that most people make horrid moral decisions when it comes to money/career. They go into this weird denial, or fall back on, "Hay--it's legal!". I've had my fill of people like this, including a particularly greedy sister.
It seems like ethics, and morals are just missing in some people, and most of these people wear ties, and do it all in a legal fashion.
I have watch a few of his videos months, maybe a year ago? It seems like it was a while ago.
I watch his videos for two reasons; He was obviously opening up his life to the world, and I was curious to what this guy was all about.
I came away with, like myself, he seems to have a real lack of friends. And like myself, he definetly needs a girlfriend. Not someone he could buy, but an honest caring relationship. I definetly got the feeling he wanted people out of his league, and it really bothered him. Maybe I'm completely wrong?
>I have found that most people make horrid moral decisions when it comes to money/career. They go into this weird denial, or fall back on, "Hay--it's legal!"
I was just having a discussion with someone last night who was complaining about executive bonuses (in health insurance specifically), and how he thought that was unfair. He then went on to describe how he's moving into government work for the high pay, low effort, and how he would try to do the same pension spiking practices that's got California in so much trouble. After all, it's not illegal.
Were it not my house, I feel like I might have put my head through a wall.
So, on the topic of people making horrid decisions when it comes to money, I recommend a movie called "The Box" inspired by a sci-fi short novel by Richard Matheson called "Button! Button!" (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button,_Button_(The_Twilight_Z...). Not a spectacular moving, but two hours or so well invested, I believe.
> If his life would've turned out a little different
You know you can say the same thing about Pablo Escobar, and Hitler, and many others. Just because someone has an innate talent at something, perhaps even a genius, does not make them worthy of the rhetoric "if only things had turned out a bit different for them...". People do what they do, we shouldn't question what they could have done.
Stipulating that Shkreli is guilty of securities fraud, theft, and is a dick of a person, it's still awful to compare him to people who are responsible for the deaths of hundreds or millions.
Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule of Nazi analogies) is an Internet adage asserting that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler approaches 1"—that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will ...
Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule of Nazi analogies) is an Internet adage asserting that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler approaches 1"—that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will ...
His method is known. This is why the study of history is important.
Holy crap that's super useful. For whatever reason I never could figure out (or remember) a shortcut for the 'filldown button'. Instead I would copy the cell I wanted, and then control+arrow my way to the fill destination, shift+control+arrow my way back, and then paste.
This way is a lot simpler and should cause fewer mistakes.
Handy in conjunction with End,<arrow key>, which offhand (I don't have Excel on this PC) does something like: find the next entirely blank row/column in that direction, then extend selection to it (exclusive). If you've got gaps you can just repeat it.
So, if you've got one column filled in for every row, and one row filled in for every column, you can quickly select the whole box and fill it down from the first row.
You don't need to press end to enter end mode - holding down ctrl toggles it. So you can hold down ctrl and use arrow keys and, like it does with text, it will jump entire logical blocks - either continuous cells with content or continuous empty cells. Add shift as well as you select all that stuff instead of just bouncing across it.
The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals,
a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager [Shkreli]. Turing immediately
raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of
treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I really like the subtle animation on all updated cells as he types in a value. By default excel just updates it instantly but that makes it hard to see the scope of your change by eye.
A quick scope through the options doesn't show what makes it do that. Anyone know?
Update to answer my question: my work PC had 'turn off all unnecessary animations (when possible)' ticked in the ease of access centre under the 'make your computer easie to use'. I don't know if this is by default. Unticking it made these animations occur but wow it creates a bit of lag in excel even on my workstation. This is probably some configuration thing on my work's SOE and why they have it disabled in the first place.
By default this animation is on, yes. It's one of those (many) subtle things that makes Excel so awesome for non-trivial spreadsheet use, despite it being derided in certain circles.
Microsoft totally wrecked font rendering in Windows 10 (W8 too?). Edge browser doesn't have ClearType either, which is braindead for a program you spend so much time reading in.
Edge 14 in the Anniversary Update actually brings back ClearType support for at least some text, so there's still a glimmer of hope that Microsoft will work to improve text rendering in Windows. Raymond Chen had an interesting post on how subpixel scrolling makes ClearType smoothing impossible: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=...
I work as a scientific programmer and I used to have that reflex; even deriding others who couldn't or wouldn't automate such things for wasting time. To me, 'data' was just a blob, to be looked at as little as possible.
I've done a 180 on that. The other day I started work on making a plant database, by hand; from designing the schema (columns and sheets in Excel really - blasphemy!) to typing in the values from encyclopedias, wikipedia and books by hand (ok, the latin names I copy/paste). Yes I could just use one of the several large, well-known databases; or one of the hundreds of specific-purpose ones. But making this database has taught me so much already, things I never would have learnt if I'd spend that time on writing import scripts.
Nowadays I let my students/analysts first do extensive eda, which is usually lots of tedious work that seems a waste of time to the programmer instinct. But it's not.
That makes a lot of sense, and is why retyping code snippets from SO or wherever is more helpful than a straight copy-paste. There's something about manually typing information that makes you instantly more familiar with it.
When I was in college I noticed that when professors allowed you to make "cheat sheets" I rarely had to use said cheat sheet - the act of actually writing out the cheat sheet put the material in my head. It ended up being the most effective study method for me.
Data is mostly spatial so sometime with ArcGIS or QGIS, or R depending on what exactly it's about; R for statistical properties of data sets, scatter plots for variable relationships etc. Or Matlab for people with engineering backgrounds. I don't generally care what tools people use and everybody has their own experiences and background. Never need nosql databases (or RDBMS for that matter) for our type of work.
I'm experimenting with physical notebooks myself since a few weeks actually. No electronic note taking has ever really worked well for me, although I've been getting by for 15 years. I'm not sure I'll ever find a system I'll really like - it always feels that as long as I find a way that forces me to get intimately familiar with data sets (to the point where I'm re-doing or at least re-thinking the ways the data was made to begin with), the insights bubble up by themselves. In other words I've come to the (regrettable) conclusion that methods and tools don't matter that much, it's the elbow grease that does. (of course I'm not claiming that I could analyze 15gb of data spread over 50 tables with Notepad...)
The best part about paper notebooks is being able to page through them years later. I experimented briefly with a computational notebook (tiddlywiki) in grad school, since my work was primarily computational, and unfortunately those were lost when my laptop died.
It's entirely intentional. The point isn't just to transpose the numbers from one medium to another; it is to understand what the numbers mean. The best way to do that is the way Martin does it in that video. That's how anyone who does this professionally does it.
Absolutely. But the OPs comment is spot on. Do it manually when you start out and you'll quickly learn both the importance of the numbers you're typing in and common issues you can run into with either manually inputting data or in structuring the model (or that one time you fat fingered a number and blew out everything driven by it)
I assumed it's because he's teaching a lesson. Doing it by hand shows the video viewers how to go find these numbers in the public record, and along the way, what each number means and why it matters.
Just pulling them all in at once from an API would be like a "magic" step to most people who are trying to learn about the basics of analyzing a stock.
He explains that by using a line he can more easily move it "when the quarters move".
Using a border would require removing the border and adding a new one every three months. A line can be dragged around at will. This also makes it more useful for miscellaneous illustrative purposes.
Possibly because a border is part of a column so if you insert a new column adjacent to a border you have to remove the old one and redraw it which is pretty annoying because its tucked behind a few clicks and menus.
A line however floats relative to the columns so you don't have to remove/redraw it. At worst you might have to move it.
More about finger speed. The excel part isn't that impressive. It is impressive, just that Excel has a lot to offer in terms of formulas and matrix generations that I didn't see here.
I have to show this to emacsers, they're gonna feel jealous a bit.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be...