I make spreadsheets for fun, what is wrong with me?

Literally dozens of spreadsheets just for fun, some I update daily almost like journalling

Also can't this get me a job? Like I don't know if I should do my hobby as a job but working in the spreadsheet mines in a cubical farm sounds like a dream come true

  • RandyLahey [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Working in an office job I see just how incredibly fucking bad most people are at spreadsheets, you could absolutely get a job with it I reckon. The difficulty is how do you actually prove your chops at an interview compared to everyone else who puts "advanced level Excel" on their CV cos they learnt SUM()

    And shit like nested formulas and table notation and pivot tables and conditional formatting are like astrophysics to most people

    • 420sixtynine [any,comrade/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      nested formulas and table notation and pivot tables and conditional formatting are like astrophysics to most people

      Wait really??? Dang

      Also you're right about everyone putting advanced excel lol, but you can't exactly write "no but like actually advanced not like resume boost advanced" on a resume

      • RandyLahey [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        The number of people who look at me like I'm a wizard when I try to teach them index/match is astonishing (PS reject vlookup and index/match thought, embrace sumproduct and aggregate thought)

        Hundreds and hundreds of shared spreadsheets and not a single one in an actual table, stuff manually copied over between five different spreadsheets, manually highlighting duplicates etc etc

        I can't blame people, cos you're expected to know all this stuff but nobody actually teaches you, but so much of what goes on in an office is manual spreadsheeting that could be done in five seconds with a pretty basic formula. Of course the cruel irony of capitalist hellworld is that you don't want to automate someone out of a job, but damn

      • SerLava [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        Yeah I do stuff with Excel and Google Sheets. I'm not a wiz on them or anything (everyone thinks I am), but I know how to Google and I can use logic to put stuff into columns and do peacemeal operations on them that add up to something more complicated. I have like, occasionally put some javascript into a google sheet that I got from Stack Overflow.

        This has been greatly helpful for getting good jobs and moving up. One time a couple of coworkers said they would need 60 hours over the course of 4 months to manually match two 10,000 row columns together, and just waiting 4 months would have been a bigger problem. It took me like 2 hours to figure out how to do it instantly. Excel fuzzy logic plugin.

        Most people can't use them to save their life. They can like, click the cell, edit the cell. Maybe 50% of people I've run into are at the level of like, "=A2+B2".