Doing some work-related stuff in MS Excel. Discovered a couple weeks ago that you can nest commands rather than corral your information some other way by means of say, place holding cells in an obscure part of the worksheet. “Groovy,” sez I. “And it says here you can nest up to 7 commands in one line. Who in the world would need to nest 7 commands?!”
Heh…read 'em and weep:
=IF(D2>=C2,"",CONCATENATE(“More UNREVIEWED !!! Do “,ROUNDUP(SUM(PRODUCT(PRODUCT(G1,3)-B2)/SUM(G1+1-F1)),0),” per day to catch up”))
What’s your best Excel effort?
Heh, took Pascal & BASIC (back when they were kinda common) and retained just enough programming philosophy to feel kinda dirty about nesting 7 commands into one line. Powerful and efficient, yes. But I couldn’t help feeling like a Programmer would choke on his coffee if he had to work through that kind of code salad on a regular basis.
The combination of the reference of the title of this thread and its nerdly contents, which sadly, I understand and appreciate fully, is making me chortle wildly.
I programmed in several flavours of BASIC back in the day (“the day” being mid-80s onward) so I became very good buddies with spaghetti code. The ultimate antithesis to that came when I picked up 65xx/68xxx assembler. If BASIC was spaghetti, assembler was couscous.
Whoo hoo! I’m nesting too! Ain’t it fun! All the vacuuming, the scrubbing, the organizing (and re-organizing), washing all the cute little baby clothes, packing the hospital bags, sitting in the rocking chair…
What the OP command really does is display either no comment OR a command to review X# more new claims per day to catch up to get on time to meet a monthly quota.
The target goal is a number calculated by and displayed in C2. D2 is the current quota status for the period being monitored. The ensuing math functions calculate where the user should be with his quota, and if he’s behind, how many more he needs to pull on a daily basis to meet the minimum period target goal.
Uses a dropdown menu to select the proper result. Sadly the seven-nested commands wasn’t even enough. That is in cell C222, cell D222 right beside it is:
=IF(C233=9,+O232,IF(C233=10,+O233,IF(C233=11,+O234,+O235)))
Room to accomodate the rest.
And that’s not all, it’s oversimplified. All of those O’s are pointing to a table of sums which could theoretically all be in the formula itself, but I simply couldn’t wrap my brain around that much complication, so I took the above-mentioned route of stashing numbers in out of the way corners of the spreadsheet.
Right now, I’m translating and (very extensively) rewriting a bunch of internal sales guides for one of our clients. This client is very comfortable using Excel. In fact, it seems like it’s the only software he’s comfortable using. This would be ok if he were using Excel to arrange tables of data, but he’s not.
He’s using it as a graphics program. Not pie charts or anything data related, he’s actually using it to produce images. He uses it for word processing, too, blithely ignoring whether any of his text lines up anywhere, or if it’s even visible. He uses it for every possible purpose except the one it was designed for. And every fricken’ page has then been exported to PowerPoint as a separate embedded file and made into a slide presentation.
On one page was a mock-up of a pop-up window that needed its text re-written. When I clicked on the text, the entire image selected. “Great, another embedded Excel file,” I thought, and indeed it was. However, when I tried to select the text within Excel, I discovered that he’d actually made the thing in MS Paint, exported it to Excel, then exported that to PowerPoint. It was garbage wrapped in slime encased in a glistening layer of shit.
Or in other words, keep looking till you find enough inputs to do one of several sums which will give you a wild guess at an approximation to a sensible answer, while never allowing any telltale #N/A!, #DIV/0! or #WTF! messages to appear which might tip off the user what is going on.
Oh man. My sympathies. I have run into things like that. Some finance bod once emailed me a nicely formatted bullet-pointed status update done in Excel. Looked just like a word document when printed out, but hooooooo boy. Individual wingding characters in cells. One cell per line of text. Pages of it. Hours of effort on his part. All needing to be torn apart and redone properly. Oh, the humanity!
One thing I find annoying about Excel is that you sometimes have to waste several of your nested functions (seven isn’t always enough) just to specify that you’d like a “0” or “N/A” cell to display as empty. There should be an option for each cell (probably accessed from the “format” settings) to display nothing in place of any null and/or error messages.
