this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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I’m not a power user, so I’m often frustrated by Excel trying to do things I don’t want it to and by its abundance of features that I’ll never use.
And at least at my workplace, a lot of work processes use poorly-designed Excel spreadsheets for critical tasks, because it’s such a simple way to manipulate data.
I also find that when I need to do more complicated data analysis, Excel starts to become limited, and I find Python to be a more powerful and flexible tool.
Capability is a double edged sword. Any tool that is capable of doing something is going to be used by someone to do that thing, regardless of whether it should be. Excel gets abused and used for things that it shouldn't be frequently in corporate environments because of its capabilities. I can understand being frustrated by that.
I use Excel for reporting and analytics because it makes manipulating and visualizing data very easy. Especially if you know what you're doing. No need to write a UI or worry about portability between workstations, etc. At the end of the day it's a tool. A very capable one. Like any tool, it's not the right one for every job.
I use excel because its stupidly easy to output a shitload of objects with properties (computers/hosts in my case) to a CSV via powershell and sort through the data.
ohh I see you can also use some ACL type of application. Excel is amazing but can't handle databasis, it has a very small limit
Dude just ask any advanced LLM how to do what you need to do in excel. The info is out there and they've digested in a million times.
Or, don't. And let your inabilities to do things consume you emotionally. Idgaf.
Edit: Lemmy's hate-boner for AI is dumbfounding. I get that it's a hype train and shoved down your throats but if you ignore that it will get you results way faster than googling ever did you're basically "old". And I say this pushing 40.
Downvote away, but I challenge anyone to give me a db and a desired subset that I can't produce by simply querying a good LLM.
Lol. Don't bother asking Chat GPT for help. You will get so many completely wrong answers. At least the answers will be formatted nicely. Complete bullshit. But easily readable bullshit.
Every time I’ve asked ChatGPT for help coding, I’ve wound up needing to rewrite it all for myself. LLMs make baffling design decisions (because they are just paraphrasing Stack Overflow, not making actual decisions).
I have found them helpful for turning error messages into more legible explanations of what went wrong, but AI-generated code has not been effective, in my experience