I’ve been travelling all week, and am glad to be home again. It’s a long weekend in Canada, with Thanksgiving on Monday, but no twitters about that yet. However, clogging up the Excel Twitter search this week was the Excel Centre in London. This twitter explains it: “Three conferences at the Excel Centre: Web Apps, UK church youth, and Organic food vendors. Makes for interesting hallway conversations.”

Despite that interference, I found a few twitters that explain what people are doing with Excel this week, why they love it, and a few hints that Excel could be improved.

Nerdy and Proud

• i’m glad that i get to do some interesting work! it sounds super nerdy, but i love getting to just tinker around in excel.
• Is it sad that i’m REALLY excited about is the fact that i learned how to do drop-down dependencies in excel? answer: probably
• i love excel spreadsheets. i derive an insane amount of pleasure from learning/utilizing new formulas. It’s embarrassing.
• just discovered SUMIFS in Excel 2007. this, my friends, is spreadsheeting we can believe in.
• John Walkenbach has a new Excel 2007 & VBA book. Wonder if there’s anything in it I don’t know. Prolly not given I did my 1st VB app in 1995

Strange Uses

• Currently consolidating all the recommended wedding planning timelines into Excel (much needed). Including bridesmaids’ and groom’s tasks.
• I’m creating an Excel spreadsheet that can “manage” thousands of servers. Talk about complex!
• is your handwashing log excel spreadsheet not working anymore?
• service planning the Library Helpdesk. Trying to decide which Excel chart to use to show peaks and troughs in enquiries throughout the day
• And Tweeps laughed at my idea about putting my blog posts in Excel by topic ~ date ~ URL ~ it comes in handy for reference!

At Work and Home

• my wife was counting numbers on the screen of an excel spreadsheet. What’s the point of excel when you do that?
• Trying to figure out what type of graph my boss drew (on a legal pad) so I can plot it in Excel (like someone in the 21st century might).
• Watching your coworkers attempt to get Excel’s formatting and the office printer to work together is always a joy

Excel Hell

• Excel goes out of its way to be annoying. There really must be code in place to screw with people - it couldn’t be this stupid by accident.
• 2M rows a good thing? If you have 2M rows of data, shouldn’t those reside in a different app than Excel?
• I cannot understand for the life of me why Excel will not let you freeze both the top and the bottom rows of a spreadsheet.
• True, but interestingly even Stephen Elop, after all President Microsoft Business Division, acknowledges the existence of “Excel hell”. (Ed. note: In his speech at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference.)

Filed under: Excel, Twitter