You know, I realize I am an official Excel geek. I love Excel. I love learning new ways of solving problems and articulating solutions using Excel. I love functions and the process by which I unravel them in order to learn how to do something new and creative.
I mention this as I am experimenting with “Bubble graphs” which have long eluded me and have a huge grin on my face.
My name is Solai, and I am an Excel geek.
(the support group responds) “Hi Solai”
I only got into Excel when I started work (the bosses required analytics) and discovered that I geek out on the formulas! I loved going down to the granular level of data and extrapolate trends based on that. I loved being able to make forecasts and plan accordingly.
I geek out on Excel, and I’m proud of it!
I still haven’t figured out how to make Macros, Pivot tables and VLookups though…
Just don’t ever send a print job out formated in Excel.
I’d hate to have to kill you.
But I will.
Yeah that’s one the big plus’s that Open Office has over Microsoft Office: it comes with a built-in PDF exporter.
I spend most of my day (well, most days) in Microsoft Word.
Can Word geeks and Excel geeks really truly ever get along?
Can we at least agree that the PowerPoint geeks are our sworn enemy?
Macros are over-rated and only useful for actions you find yourself doing over and over. I haven’t built a macro in 10 years but recently found myself customizing a graph over and over due to a limitation of Excel (did you know if you customize a graph it loses it customization when you refresh? How stupid!) Because the customizing was about 10 steps I recorded a macro as a time saver. Vlookups are incredibly powerful once you get your head wrapped around them as well as pivot tables. The secret to both is having well constructed tables. Tables with empty rows or missing headers will create havoc.
My favorite resource for questions is: http://www.techonthenet.com/. Excellent website for Excel and Access.
No. Excel geeks are superior.
No. Powerpoint geeks make us all look good. Plus there is the added bonus of more work in PowerPoint means less work in Word. 
Thanks for the link! I will check it out.
Macros - I need to understand how it’s done because I have daily reports that have the same format, with hundreds of pieces of data each time. I rely on another reports group to put it together, but I’d like to know how myself, you know?
Vlookups and Pivot tables - I can’t seem to get the Search function right when the file is on Pivot or Vlookup somehow. Or I can’t sort ascending/descending correctly when it’s in Pivot format (I like stack ranking too). Maybe it’s human error (me)? Both of them are on my To Learn list this quarter.
But the I agree on this - they all have to come from clean and properly labeled tables and target to the right cells/rows/columns. I hate seeing “DIV!” signs!
I was a Word geek all throughout High School and College (Liberal Arts rocks!). I have a long lasting affection for Word. 
Speaking of MS Word, would you remember Wordstar? I still remember some of the commands :o ^KB ^KK!
from Pike
Just don’t ever send a print job out formated in Excel.I’d hate to have to kill you.
But I will.
Aww. Excel has “Fit to Size” and “Select Print Area” ! Word doesn’t have that! You’d have to keep on adjusting the font size and the spacing. With Excel, you just need to put in the % scale 
from GalaxyRanger
Yeah that’s one the big plus’s that Open Office has over Microsoft Office: it comes with a built-in PDF exporter.
Big Bad Microsoft and Adobe don’t wanna play nice with each other 
The world would be a whole lot happier if we can Save As PDF all over again…
Yes!
I was too young to need to use a word-processor myself, but I observed my dad using it on our first PC, an Intel 80386 with DOS 6.0 and Win 3.11.
I used to play Battle Chess on that PC.
Oh yeah I remember Wordstar. Just the mention of it evokes a memory of 5 inch floppy disk drives whirring. My apologies to any twenty-somethings who may be reading this. I know you have no idea what a floppy drive is.
Not true. I’m a twenty-something and I remember floppy disks very vividly. Not the 5 inch ones, though, but the smaller ones. In the early through mid-90s, I had all kinds of games on floppy disks. Dune II, Monkey Island, X-Wing, Maniac Mansion, Commander Keen etc.
Ooops. Sorry I meant to say 3 inch floppy disks (but I do remember the 5 inch too.) Galaxy, I’m no Excel geek so I ain’t one for crunching the numbers–so the math here is eluding me, so answer me this: If you’re in your twenties now, how old were you at the time you had those games on floppy disks?
Oh, I was about nine or ten years old. It was the last couple of years that they released games primarily on floppy disks. Then there was a time during the 90s when games came out on floppies AND CD-ROMs and then after '95 or so, everything was on CD-ROMs.
Oh boy, those were the days, when I was 14 or so, all my friends would bring their PCs over on the weekends (monitor, tower, keyboard, mouse, joystick, everything - our parents sometimes felt like FedEx, driving all our PC gear through town) and we’d play HalfLife, Starfleet Academy, Battle Isle all night and day, we seriously sometimes never slept. But I stopped keeping up with PC games after high school, it was just too expensive to always have the latest equipment. But I enjoy some nice retro-gaming once in a while.
On a sidenote, here comes a nice little geek story:
In 10th grade or so, I had the hots for a girl in my class, so I gave her a floppy disk, I don’t remember it very clearly, I must have made up a story about a cool new mouse driver or something, anyway, what she didn’t know was that the file “mouse.bat” didn’t install a new mouse driver, but did, in fact, rename her c:\windows directory to something else (I used to be pretty good with DOS commands), so that her computer wouldn’t boot anymore and she would call me in a frenzy to fix her computer and I’d be her hero. Well, she did indeed call me and I had to tell her how to restore the original directory, but … yeah, not so much with the hero part. Not at all. :o
I’m twenty-something and I remember using 5-inch floppies during Computer class.
I remember taking a QBasic class in 7th grade.
I had to teach myself Excel, because the first spreadsheet program I learned (and the only one my university had at the time) was Lotus 1-2-3. And I learned word processing on Word Perfect. My first college math class was Basic programming, complete with flowcharts and algorhythms and double-sided double-density 5 1/4 inch floppies and 14 inch wide green bar paper.
pause holy frakkin baltar. I just realized I started college 16 years ago. Granted, I was barely 17, but… whimper Man I feel old…
I love creating excel spreadsheets. I am fortunate that I have a job that allows me to listen to music and work on excel all day.
Now that the shock of everything looking different in Microsoft Excel 2007 is starting to wear off I’m starting to like it better than 2003.
I also remember 5 inch floppy disks, quick basic and Ami Pro. I don’t care for Microsoft Word because it seems to have problems with simple things like bullets but maybe that is just me.
~rav
well, i’m showing my age here, my first computer had cassette tape storage! It was really cool when modems stopped being classified by “baud rate” and we had geeky computer clubs.
Also, I remember excel had this game hidden in it by the programmers, kinda like castle wolfenstein that you could only access by entering certain key combinations in certain cells.
O.M.G. My husband could have written this post. I hate Excel and can only do the most rudimentary things with it. On the other hand, I love Word!
-K