It's the third battle of this year's Excel esports on Thursday morning, and it's fair to say I haven't done excellently so far. I came 72nd in Battle II. That doesn't really qualify as excelling.
I don't think I've got worse at it; there are more people competing this year who are really good at it. But this is something I need to work on, and it's all about speed and technique. I'd really like to do with this what I did with memorising cards, and devise a way to solve problems using Excel more quickly and efficiently than has ever been done before. I don't know if that's possible. You can't invent new Excel formulas. But Excel has a LOT of formulas, most of which nobody in the world ever uses. There's scope for believing that if I can get familiar with them all, and how to apply them... it's definitely possible.
Brilliantly, the spreadsheet provided for Battle II accidentally had a formula left in the example box for task 4 - if you noticed that (which nobody did), you just had to copy it down into the answer boxes! No brainpower required! But the point is, it's a really great formula!
=SUM(ABS(OFFSET(Customers!$B$2:$F$2,MATCH(G169,Customers!$A$3:$A$102,0),0)-OFFSET(Wines!$B$2:$F$2,MATCH(H169,Wines!$A$3:$A$102,0),0)))
That's so much more efficient than the way I did it, which had lots of intermediate steps. I did those steps really quickly, but I need to get to the point where I can instinctively see that one complete formula, and set it up! It gives me something to aim for, at least...
God, my spreadsheets are full of formulas that look like that and I consider them a despictable failure of clean and accessible coding...
ReplyDelete(Also I know it's not your fault but the captchas I have to solve to comment are really a significant deterrent to commenting)
Also also, I was so distressed by the captchas I didn't reread what I wrote well enough to avoid the typo(s?) and now I look like an idiot. Thanks Captcha creators!
ReplyDeleteAlso also also, No I don't want to compete building spreadsheets thank you. My spreadsheets are works of art (literally, in some cases) and I craft them to make them beautiful so the banging out of the numbers in an untidy fashion would cause me great distress. So I'll stick to watching and thinking "man, I would not being doing it like this" instead.
See, that's the whole appeal of this competition - it's not about building useful spreadsheets, it's about quickly solving specific problems, by means of clever techniques. It's just like "memory sports" in that respect! Useless, but fun!
ReplyDeleteAlso also, you shouldn't be having to do captchas. I just logged out and tried it, and all I had to do was tick a box to say I'm not a robot. Are you a robot? I might be discriminating against robots...
ReplyDeleteNot just one Captcha but two. Madness! Particularly since Imagus (which is a very useful extension in most aspects) doesn't go well with captchas.
ReplyDeleteLet's see how many it makes me do this time...
Edit - just one
Google's just picking on you! I tried on my work computer and just had to click a few really easy boxes with a bicycle in them...
ReplyDelete