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Why and how are spreadsheets useful for a programmer, and should I learn to use Excel?
I've never had a programming job as I'm still pretty noob and still learning, but it looks like, from what I've read online, a lot of programmers use spreadsheets everyday while working. Why? How do they use them? Should I learn how to use Excel? I only tried them a couple of times for some stupid and trivial things, like creating some tables and stuff like that. My guess is that they are used to store some data or keep track of various progress and achievements in a project, but I really have no clue. Sorry if it's a stupid question but I can't understand why are spreadsheets so popular in programming jobs. |
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LOL. My degree is in Accounting, and when I got that degree there were big computers but no desktops; spreadsheet software was still in the future, and to me "spreadsheet" meant a big piece of paper on which I calculated sums. So I get the question.
Yes, spreadsheet apps like Excel were invented to do calculations, but people quickly began using them for all-text tables as well. At my current client, I work pretty often with a set of Audit findings in an Excel workbook; each finding is on a row, and in each column are values such as the date it was first submitted to management, a short title, a short description, a long description, the department responsible for addressing it, the person assigned to fix it, the target date for its resolution, the current status and no doubt other values I've currently mislaid. As progress is made on the task, folks update the descriptions and dates and the details listed in the Status column. Excel has lots of font controls, so the text can be not only in your chosen font but made larger, bold, certain parts underlined, colored or set in special borders and so on. You can set a date in one column automatically to be (say) 60 days after a date in another column, so if you update one date the others that depend on it follow it automatically. You can set up a table in another sheet of (say) employees, with their departments, phone numbers and email addresses, so that when you assign a person to a task Excel can automatically look up the phone and address for that person and add it to the same cell. Excel also does business graphs; feed it a table of numbers and it can more or less automatically create a bar graph, a pie chart or whatever your boss wants. (I say "more or less" because you still have to set up the legend and define the axis labels, details like that.) It does a ton of other stuff that I never use, as well; Excel is a pretty big world to itself. And whatever you think of it, you will discover that your coworkers use it and will be surprised you don't. I'll add, though, that the rudiments are not difficult to learn, and most of your coworkers progress no further than the rudiments. Since you're asking this on the Excel programming forum, though, maybe you're really asking whether you should learn to program in Excel. People pay me to do that, so I consider it worthwhile—and I confess that I love programming, so I'm biased. But it's pretty handy for a client to be able to push a button and get two hundred workbooks which Excel then emails automatically each to its proper recipient. Of course that takes time. But consider how much more time would be needed to do it manually. I have a time sheet I use to track the hours I charge to my clients. Using Excel programming I've taught it to respond to certain "events": When I double-click on a cell in one column and a new row it automatically copies the client code from the previous row and fills in today's date and the current time to start working. Click on another cell and it fills in a stop time for the previous task and the start time for the next task. Saves me some typing, and (more importantly) typos that might lead to my over- or undercharging a client. Another worksheet sums up the hours I worked for one particular client on a daily basis; another sheet helps me keep track of that client's invoices. |
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