Tag: Excel

Top Excel experts will battle it out in an esports-like competition this weekend

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.pcworld.com/article/559001/the-future-of-esports-is-microsoft-excel-and-its-on-espn.html

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Move over, League of Legends. Does anyone even care about Overwatch? No, the real future of esports is spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel. Don’t believe us? Then tune in to ESPN3 or YouTube this weekend to find out.

No, this isn’t a joke. The Financial Modeling World Cup will be held this weekend entirely in Microsoft Excel. And the finals (the quarterfinals, semifinals, and the final match) will all be broadcast live as they happen at 9 AM PT. Everyone’s playing for a total prize of $10,000 — funded by Microsoft, of course.

Author(s):Mark Hachman

Publication Date: 10 Dec 2021

Publication Site: PC World

Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4

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In 2016, Mark Ziemann and his colleagues at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, quantified the problem. They found that one-fifth of papers in top genomics journals contained gene-name conversion errors in Excel spreadsheets published as supplementary data2. These data sets are frequently accessed and used by other geneticists, so errors can perpetuate and distort further analyses.

However, despite the issue being brought to the attention of researchers — and steps being taken to fix it — the problem is still rife, according to an updated and larger analysis led by Ziemann, now at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia3. His team found that almost one-third of more than 11,000 articles with supplementary Excel gene lists published between 2014 and 2020 contained gene-name errors (see ‘A growing problem’).

Simple checks can detect autocorrect errors, says Ziemann, who researches computational reproducibility in genetics. But without those checks, the errors can easily go unnoticed because of the volume of data in spreadsheets.

Author(s): Dyani Lewis

Publication Date: 13 August 2021

Publication Site: nature

Have Fun With Approximations!

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/have-fun-approximations-mary-pat-campbell/

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Pdf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByabEDuWaN6FNmZhTDBYeEVrNVE/view?resourcekey=0-U4GI2_9zn4UQdWza1bq95w

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In the pre-computer days, people used these approximations due to having to do all calculations by hand or with the help of tables. Of course, many approximations are done by computers themselves — the way computers calculate functions such as sine() and exp() involves approaches like Taylor series expansions.

The specific approximation techniques I try (1 “exact” and 6 different approximation… including the final ones where I put approximations within approximations just because I can) are not important. But the concept that you should know how to try out and test approximation approaches in case you need them is important for those doing numerical computing.

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 3 February 2016 (updated for links 2021)

Publication Site: LinkedIn, CompAct, Society of Actuaries

Cell Maps – Critical Comments

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://logiccomppeople.blogspot.com/2021/04/cell-maps-critical-comments.html

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Cell maps are intended as tools for reviewing spreadsheets. If you spot an error or an inconsistency in the cell map this should be recorded and, if practicable, corrected.

The cell mapping software provides a method for recording a reviewer’s comments. All comments are linked to a specific map (or data table), The comments for a workbook under review are collated in a single worksheet.

Publication Date: 18 April 2021

Publication Site: Logic, Computing, and People

Excel Never Dies: The Spreadsheet That Launched A Million Companies

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies

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Excel may be the most influential software ever built. It is a canonical example of Steve Job’s bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers. Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve problems in a seemingly limitless number of domains. These programs often serve as high-fidelity prototypes of domain specific applications just begging to be brought to market in a more polished form. 

If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today. Excel’s success has inspired the creation of software whose combined enterprise value dwarfs that of Excel alone.

Author(s): Packy McCormick

Publication Date: 8 March 2021

Publication Site: Not Boring

Analyzing Census Data in Excel

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.census.gov/data/academy/courses/excel.html

Description

Excel is a very popular tool among all data users. It can be leveraged to unlock the value of open data of all kinds, and it is particularly well-suited to transforming, analyzing, and visualizing Census data. This course will show how to use Excel to access, manipulate, and visualize Census data.  It will also tools for doing advanced statistical analysis.

After completing this course, you will be able to:
    ✓    Access data from the Census Bureau using the American FactFinder
    ✓    Format tables for data analysis
    ✓    Perform basic and advanced analysis of Census data using Excel
    ✓    Create data visualizations such as sparklines, hierarchical charts, and histograms

Author(s): Andy Hecktman, Alexandra Barker

Date Accessed: 27 February 2021

Publication Site: U.S. Census Bureau

Improving on perfection — where next for the spreadsheet?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://medium.com/dawn-capital/improving-on-perfection-where-next-for-the-spreadsheet-7e15c99e7e5c

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The sheer versatility and accessibility of the spreadsheet has made it the Swiss Army Knife of modern day productivity, inserting itself into almost every workflow across every industry. Over the past three decades, spreadsheets have become the de facto way for information to be collected, distributed and analysed.

But, as our operational and computational needs become ever greater, the limits of Excel become clear, and opportunities emerge for companies and tools to replace the spreadsheet.

Author(s): Dawn Capital

Publication Date: 16 December 2021

Publication Site: Medium

Spreadsheet Wars: Excel vs Lotus 1-2-3

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://archive.org/details/CC606_spreadsheet_wars

Excerpt:

Excel now dominates the spreadsheet world, but once upon a time there was actual competition among spreadsheet products. This program looks at Quattro 1.0, Allways 1.0, Lotus 1-2-3 3.0, Ashton-Tate’s Full Impact, and Excel 2.1. Guests include Gary Kildall, Jan Lewis, and Jared Taylor of PC Magazine. Originally broadcast in 1988.

Author(s): PBS – Computer Chronicles

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Chronicles

Publication Date: 1988

Publication Site: PBS at archive.org

The Cycle Plot

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://policyviz.com/2021/02/09/the-cycle-plot/

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Two primary things came out of last week’s video from Kennedy Elliott about the cycle plot. First, Naomi Robbins shared the original paper where the cycle plot was introduced, which I hadn’t seen before. In William S. Cleveland & Irma J. Terpenning’s Graphical Methods for Seasonal Adjustment (1982) paper, they focus on the importance of seasonal adjustments in various data series and how graphs and charts should be a routine part of the process of seasonally adjusting data.

Spreadsheet link: https://policyviz.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SeaIceIndex_to_share.xlsx

Publication Date: 9 February 2021

Publication Site: PolicyViz