excel projects

[apoyusiken]

idk if it is luck or unluck i have never really had to use a spreadsheet and would like to actually, is there cool projects you know i can do?

[RONOTHAN##]

What kind are we talking? You could do something useful like budgeting your household, or because Excel is Turing complete you can do something dumb like program a solitaire bot. 

 

I don't really see the point in using it just because though. 

[apoyusiken]

4 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

What kind are we talking? You could do something useful like budgeting your household, or because Excel is Turing complete you can do something dumb like program a solitaire bot. 

 

I don't really see the point in using it just because though. 

i'd like to incorporate scripting but not just doing a script i could do without a spreadsheet.

 

point is entertainment + education

[manikyath]

if you've never had to use a spreadsheet, you've never had to collect data in a visually representative way.

 

if you wonder what excel can be used for, i have two examples:

- the "PSU tier list" is currently maintained in a google sheet.

- there's this train game i dont want to name, because the devs dont deserve the free advertising.. but it implements a quite accurate model of locomotive torque, car weights, and the impact of rail incline.. so the community built an excel sheet that lets you input your cargo arrangement and max incline of the track, and it spits out your required motive power. - or, you give it your motive power and max incline, and tells you how much you can bring.

 

if you bring scripting into the mix.. i've once made a cookie clicker clone in excel, but VBA is quite deprecated...

[Pusbucket]

for years I used an Excel spreadsheet for our home business that tracked product expenditures/costs and receipts, tied to a separate sheet that tracked our student enrollments/payments and then fed that data to a sheet for our profit/loss and that was fed to a sheet I made for doing our taxes.

Inputting info in the first one updated the others and made tax time a lot easier.

 

No idea what Office365 has to offer now or if it's all AI scripts.

[BiotechBen]

I've used a very involved spreadsheet for Fantasy football. Even got league rules written because of it. 

It's a very intertwined system, very good at data analysis. Won't make a decision for you, but can help you make an informed one if you know nothing about how Fantasy football works.

 

It does have some quirks, and there IS some fragility to how it moves the data around, each update requires manual validation of correct references for a few of the spots that like to move around 

[apoyusiken]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

if you've never had to use a spreadsheet, you've never had to collect data in a visually representative way.

 

if you wonder what excel can be used for, i have two examples:

- the "PSU tier list" is currently maintained in a google sheet.

- there's this train game i dont want to name, because the devs dont deserve the free advertising.. but it implements a quite accurate model of locomotive torque, car weights, and the impact of rail incline.. so the community built an excel sheet that lets you input your cargo arrangement and max incline of the track, and it spits out your required motive power. - or, you give it your motive power and max incline, and tells you how much you can bring.

 

if you bring scripting into the mix.. i've once made a cookie clicker clone in excel, but VBA is quite deprecated...

for instance once i tracked the books i read on excel but i dont really like tracking most of the things i do. 

yea i play games like factorio and oni but never made a spreadsheet for those

[IkeaGnome]

2 hours ago, apoyusiken said:

i'd like to incorporate scripting but not just doing a script i could do without a spreadsheet.

 

point is entertainment + education

Wait until you hear that you can use Visual Basic in Excel.

Spoiler

 

[apoyusiken]

17 minutes ago, IkeaGnome said:

Wait until you hear that you can use Visual Basic in Excel.

  Hide contents

 

i know but id rather use python. i know its available in excel but im on linux

[spacepickle]

Certain games, especially MMOs, have lots of numbers and data. Perhaps you play Eve Online or OSRS and want a quick way to calculate how much you can sell something. Eve even has an official Excel extension if that's what you're into. And it could be pretty much any game. Maybe you're interested in data-mining an fps and finding an easy way to calculate individual attachments' affect on damage or something like that.

[FAZIN]

11 hours ago, BiotechBen said:

I've used a very involved spreadsheet for Fantasy football. Even got league rules written because of it. 

It's a very intertwined system, very good at data analysis. Won't make a decision for you, but can help you make an informed one if you know nothing about how Fantasy football works.

 

It does have some quirks, and there IS some fragility to how it moves the data around, each update requires manual validation of correct references for a few of the spots that like to move around 

I've got one for my works Hockey pool. We pick teams with a budget system and I use it to keep track of the value I get out of my picks to see if I should take them again the following year. 4 years in now and I've been steadily climbing our rankings towards a decent prize so I'd say it's working out for me lol

[Avocado Diaboli]

What exactly would you expect a spreadsheet to do? It's mostly just tables and ways to do automatic calculations, maybe a bit of conditional formatting and generating graphs based on the data you have. You can do more, much more, but since you can't use VBA, that's a bit of a limiting factor. And if you want to use Python, you're probably better served with a real database to begin with.

 

This isn't intended to diminish Excel, I used it extensively at work and I've built a number of applications where I basically abuse Excel to be a database. I've made tools for inventory tracking, project management and HR planning, all with bespoke user-interfaces that allow for a variety of data imports and exports.

 

If you want to do something that can be done entirely without VBA, make a task tracking tool. Ideally make it two tiered, so you have a list of projects and a list of tasks associated with each project. Track the status of each task and have it calculate the percentage of completed tasks. Use conditional formatting to highlight pending and completed tasks in different colors. If you can do that, you should have a fairly decent understanding of how to operate within Excel.

[apoyusiken]

29 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

What exactly would you expect a spreadsheet to do? It's mostly just tables and ways to do automatic calculations, maybe a bit of conditional formatting and generating graphs based on the data you have. You can do more, much more, but since you can't use VBA, that's a bit of a limiting factor. And if you want to use Python, you're probably better served with a real database to begin with.

 

This isn't intended to diminish Excel, I used it extensively at work and I've built a number of applications where I basically abuse Excel to be a database. I've made tools for inventory tracking, project management and HR planning, all with bespoke user-interfaces that allow for a variety of data imports and exports.

 

If you want to do something that can be done entirely without VBA, make a task tracking tool. Ideally make it two tiered, so you have a list of projects and a list of tasks associated with each project. Track the status of each task and have it calculate the percentage of completed tasks. Use conditional formatting to highlight pending and completed tasks in different colors. If you can do that, you should have a fairly decent understanding of how to operate within Excel.

yea the problem is excel is probably mostly for people that dont know how to code. actually i have done smt similar to that, im not completely oblivious to excel just not only have found great practical value and i know i can probably incorporate it to my life, i think setting up some tables might be fun before they turn tedious.

[BiotechBen]

6 hours ago, FAZIN said:

I've got one for my works Hockey pool. We pick teams with a budget system and I use it to keep track of the value I get out of my picks to see if I should take them again the following year. 4 years in now and I've been steadily climbing our rankings towards a decent prize so I'd say it's working out for me lol

I knew literally nothing about fantasy, so I just made a moneyball Excel sheet, and to the ire of the rest of the league: basically ran the table yr 1 and won, yr 2 I barely lost the championship.

Now it's a draft guide that must be made available no sooner than 24 hrs before the draft, and weekly "scouting reports" must be made available before the Wednesday waiver wire. 

 

Rules made because of me:

-Ben Rule: All materials must be freely available to anyone in the league

-Chiefs Rule: no 3-peats allowed, back-to-back league wins result in 1 yr suspension 

-Great Equalizer: back-to-back Superbowl appearances trigger a ghost draft (offense players no better than rank 50, position players no greater than rank 25) which was only a moderate penalty for me, I just missed the last playoff spot, and one friend has still yet to beat me (he lost a total of 3 matchups last season, 2 of them were me)

[FAZIN]

17 hours ago, BiotechBen said:

I knew literally nothing about fantasy

I find the people who are more distanced from the sport tend to do better on average. When you actively watch and cheer for a team, your picks are going to be biased towards players you like and not necessarily players that are going to do the best.