Didn’t know they were having an Eve Online event.
The fact that Eve was a sponsor was perfect
If the earliest sports were a way to practice skills needed for hunting or warfare, then making an e-sport out of spreadsheets is going back to the roots of sports. It’s practicing skills needed for your daily job.
The other day I couldn’t get my VLOOKUP function to work because the table I was trying to query hadn’t been designated “Table2” but “Table14” because…? Company laptop was dangerously close to putting a small dent in the closest brick wall. Doing this for fun? What?
I think at certain point you’re kind of expected to switch to INDEX & MATCH. I did plenty of Excel macros for work back in the day and at similar point I just switched to doing things in Python.
I just cannot imagine any task you can do in excel that isn’t easier to do with Python/Pandas. The simplest manipulations of an excel sheet pretty much require you to chain an ungodly list of arcane commands that are completely unreadable, and god forbid you need to work with data from several workbooks at the same time…
If you’re reliant on third party add-ons you don’t have a choice. Bloomberg and Eikon are two examples that didn’t have a good Python API back then. Even after I started to use Python more sometimes I had to script opening up Excel itself, forcing formula refresh and exporting that.
You also need to consider that average Joe at a big financial corporation knows Excel so he uses that for everything. People that know Python are more expensive.
At that point you should just use a database.
There are environments where Excel is used as glue that does faux-ETL for very unpredictable data which is so small in volume you don’t even consider a database. Also, database would mean MS Access which is just icky so it was used only when necessary.
Here’s a great video by People Male Games about this!