5 posts tagged “excel”
2025
I'm worried that they put co-pilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy and do you know who has tamed that beast?
Brenda.
Who is Brenda?
She is a mid-level employee in every finance department, in every business across this stupid nation and the Excel goddess herself descended from the heavens, kissed Brenda on her forehead and the sweat from Brenda's brow is what allows us to do capitalism. [...]
She's gonna birth that formula for a financial report and then she's gonna send that financial report to a higher up and he's gonna need to make a change to the report and normally he would have sent it back to Brenda but he's like oh I have AI and AI is probably like smarter than Brenda and then the AI is gonna fuck it up real bad and he won't be able to recognize it because he doesn't understand Excel because AI hallucinates.
You know who's not hallucinating?
Brenda.
— Ada James, @belligerentbarbies on TikTok
2024
So VisiCalc came and went, but the software genre it pioneered – the spreadsheet – endured to become arguably the most influential type of code ever written, at least in the sense of touching the lives of millions of office workers. I’ve never worked in an organisation in which spreadsheet software was not at the heart of most accounting, budgeting and planning activities. I’ve even known professionals for whom it’s the only piece of PC software they’ve ever used: one elderly accountant of my acquaintance, for example, used Excel even for his correspondence; he simply widened column A to 80 characters, typed his text in descending cells and hit the “print” key.
Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing "what-if" analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.
Fastest Way to Read Excel in Python (via) Haki Benita produced a meticulously researched and written exploration of the options for reading a large Excel spreadsheet into Python. He explored Pandas, Tablib, Openpyxl, shelling out to LibreOffice, DuckDB and python-calamine (a Python wrapper of a Rust library). Calamine was the winner, taking 3.58s to read 500,00 rows—compared to Pandas in last place at 32.98s.
2008
UnicodeDictWriter—write unicode strings out to Excel compatible CSV files using Python. Stuart Langridge and I spent quite a while this morning battling with Excel. The magic combination for storing unicode text in a CSV file such that Excel correctly reads it is UTF-16, a byte order mark and tab delimiters rather than commas.