Excel: am I hopelessly old-fashioned?
Posted: September 30th, 2021, 5:58 pm
My spreadsheet usage dates back to the Visicalc era, before Lotus 123.
When I was employed by two of the Big Six consulting firms in the 80s and very early 90s, Lotus 123 ruled, although Excel was on the horizon. I remained a Lotus 123 user for many years, once I'd left the corporate world, and probably didn't start moving in earnest to Excel until I had to, because clients were sending me Excel spreadsheets, or occasionally wanting analyses done using Excel spreadsheets. In 2009 I took a fairly serious Excel course, and have since taken quite a few more. I'm comfortable with macros, and as some here know, my VBA skills (while limited), have enabled me to write and develop some user-defined functions to undertake logarithmic linear least squares regression. (A shout-out here to user IAAG, who helped me over one or two stumbling blocks with that.)
All of which is intended to persuade you all that I'm not a complete Excel numpty. Although you may yet change your mind...
So: what does 'best-practice' or at least common-practice Excel actually look like these days?
Because I'm increasingly seeing spreadsheets on the Internet that are in table format -- you know: sortable columns, green-and-white bands etc. Is that now the standard? Is that what happens in the corporate world?
I'm asking partly because I've been importing the data from IAAG's regular IT posts, and that's the mode it gets transferred over in. I routinely remove all that formatting, but should I be leaving it in, and moving with the times? Certainly, the green-and-white lines aid readability, and reading IAAG's header data into the column headings isn't difficult. I could certainly get used to it.
So, in essence, what I'm asking is: what does good-practice corporate Excel look like these days?
MDW1954
When I was employed by two of the Big Six consulting firms in the 80s and very early 90s, Lotus 123 ruled, although Excel was on the horizon. I remained a Lotus 123 user for many years, once I'd left the corporate world, and probably didn't start moving in earnest to Excel until I had to, because clients were sending me Excel spreadsheets, or occasionally wanting analyses done using Excel spreadsheets. In 2009 I took a fairly serious Excel course, and have since taken quite a few more. I'm comfortable with macros, and as some here know, my VBA skills (while limited), have enabled me to write and develop some user-defined functions to undertake logarithmic linear least squares regression. (A shout-out here to user IAAG, who helped me over one or two stumbling blocks with that.)
All of which is intended to persuade you all that I'm not a complete Excel numpty. Although you may yet change your mind...
So: what does 'best-practice' or at least common-practice Excel actually look like these days?
Because I'm increasingly seeing spreadsheets on the Internet that are in table format -- you know: sortable columns, green-and-white bands etc. Is that now the standard? Is that what happens in the corporate world?
I'm asking partly because I've been importing the data from IAAG's regular IT posts, and that's the mode it gets transferred over in. I routinely remove all that formatting, but should I be leaving it in, and moving with the times? Certainly, the green-and-white lines aid readability, and reading IAAG's header data into the column headings isn't difficult. I could certainly get used to it.
So, in essence, what I'm asking is: what does good-practice corporate Excel look like these days?
MDW1954