Comment on Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it

DrCake@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I did and it’s awesome. People like to shit on Excel, but there is a reason why every business on earth runs on Excel. It’s a great tool and if you really learn it, you can do great things with it.

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  • aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s just a generic table thing mostly. Turns out tables are a good way to lay out a bunch of different information.

    Somehow nobody has made a similar generic application to allow you to work with nested list, outline, or tree style structures, which I think are equally if not more useful structures to lay out certain types of information.

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    • pycorax@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Tables isn’t what make Excel or it’s alternatives excel at tasks. If that’s all it were, it’d be easily replaced. The formulas and all the other features that help you format, arrange and represent that data is what really makes it good.

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      • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I remember in college we would use it to run Monte Carlo simulations, which I thought was cool.

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      • aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        It’s not 100% of it, but it’s a large portion.

        Excel isn’t replaced because your company already bought it. There are many alternatives to Excel and most of them are acceptable to the overwhelming majority of people who use Excel (people using it for tables and basic graphs) and none of them have displaced Excel.

        I mean look at Word. It absolutely sucks and yet it’s standard anyway. Same with Outlook.

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  • JTode@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Hi, occasional spreadsheet user here who cannot tell the difference between Excel and, say, LibreOffice Calc (which is what I use, disclosed). Why is Excel specifically better? No troll.

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    • JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Just to give you two examples of stuff I used today:

      Excel has PowerQuery, which is a really fancy and nice way of importing data into your spreadsheet. You can import data from another spreadsheet, from an CSV, a database or from websites and update them with one click. You can also transform that data during import. So if you want to just use two columns of that spreadsheet from accounting, you can import them in the format you need. And if accounting updates their spreadsheet, you can update yours with one click. LibreOffice doesn’t have this as far as I know with that power.

      The other one is simply plugins for nearly every other business system in the world. I have this nice BI plugin which gives me a pivot table of our sales data. So if I want to know how my revenue was yesterday, I can update my spreadsheet with one click. I can also jack into our CRM and get f.e. visit data from our sales reps.

      So in this case I can take some data that is sitting somewhere on the company drive, import & transform it and then mash it up with sales data from BI and CRM. So building a quick report like “which accounts were created last year and have no sales and have no visit from sales reps” is quite easy. And if I want I can also set this up to create this with PowerQuery & Co so that I can do this report monthly/weekly without having to copy & paste data every time. That’s not really possible with LibreOffice right now.

      There will be comments that this is not a job for Excel and that you should use Python/SQL queries/whatever for that task, but Excel is what most companies have. I could do it with Python, but it is not installed on my business computer and people are used to Excel and are not trained in Python. There is a reason why businesses are using Excel for everything and that is because it is easy, quick and gets shit done

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• Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Funny thing about “AI skills” that I’ve noticed so far is that they are actually just skills in the thing you’re trying to get AI to help with. If you’re good at that, you can often (though not always) get an effective result. Mostly because you can talk about it at a deeper level and catch mistakes the AI makes.

  If you have no idea about the thing, it might look competent to you, but you just won’t be catching the mistakes.

  In that context, I would call them thought amplifiers and pretty effective at the whole “talking about something can help debug the problem, even if the other person doesn’t contribute anything of value because you have to look at the problem differently to explain it and that different perspective might make the solution more visible”, while also being able to contribute some valueable pieces.

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  • Zink@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Holy crap, I think you’ve cracked it.

    LLM AI is the trillion collar costing, terawatt consuming rubber ducky for the new millennium!

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    • criscodisco@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You forgot water stealing and methane spewing

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• MBech@feddit.dk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Excel depends on the usage. Way too many people want to use it for what it’s bad at, but technically can do, instead of using it for what it’s good at.

  I’m fairly decent at using Excel, and have automated some database dependent tasks for my coworkers through it, which saves us a lot of time doing menial tasks no one actually wants to do.

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• DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I willingly learned excel in the past 15 years!

  I have since moved on to open source replacements.

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• JackBinimbul@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I love excel, personally. I’m a big ol’ nerd and love putting shit in a spreadsheet.

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• Digit@lemmy.wtf ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  How about we get “Universal Basic Income”, to respect all the unpaid work?

  That’d make my choice of not using Excel (at the expense of risking not getting work) more worthwhile.

  … And surviving genocide when welfare was stripped away, fraudulently re-labelling as “fit to work”, killing over 130,000 disabled people in Britain from 2010 to 2019, a more worthwhile struggle too.

  Otherwise, it seems even if AI does not take jobs, most work done with AI will be unpaid.

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• mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  how else are you going to perform, document, and communicate engineering calculations in a format that is simple, intuitive, flexible, and easy to iterate upon?

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• jj4211@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yeah, very good analogy actually…

  I remember back in the day people putting stuff like ‘Microsoft Word’ under ‘skills’. Instead of thinking ‘oh good, they will be able to use Word competently’, the impression was ‘my god, they think Word is a skill worth bragging about, I’m inclined to believe they have no useful skills’.

  ‘Excel skills’ on a resume is just so vague, people put it down when they just figured out they can click and put things into a table, some people will be able to quickly roll some complicated formula, which is at least more of a skill (I’d rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I’ve seen in excel sheets).

  Using an LLM is not a skill with a significant acquisition cost. To the extent that it does or does not work, it doesn’t really need learning. If anything people who overthink the ‘skill’ of writing a prompt just end up with stupid superstitions that don’t work, and when they first find out that it doesn’t work, they just grow new prompt superstitions to add to it to ‘fix’ the problem.

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  • shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Skill in Excel is wholly different than skills in other Office products. But if Excel is on your resume, your better expand and show what real use you’ve made of it. Otherwise it comes off just as you said.

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  • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’d rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I’ve seen in excel sheets

    That’s the way I also think about learning fancy spreadsheet stuff. Spreadsheets are good for putting data into a graph. They’re good for basic numeric stuff where there’s a simple pattern that repeats. But, pretty soon you’re in a situation where you should either have a real database or a real program. If you’re doing a lot of manipulation of data, you should have a program with loops, conditionals, errors, exceptions, etc. and most importantly with comments. If you’re storing a lot of data, you should be using a real database, not hundreds of lines in a spreadsheet.

    If, at the end, you do want something visual, and don’t feel like dealing with a graphics library, you can always export the data to a CSV and import that into a spreadsheet.

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  • Feyd@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Microsoft Word’ under ‘skills’.

    Way back in the day a bunch of people endorsed me on linkedin for a bunch of nonsense like that and I manually hid all of it lol

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• comfy@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’ve willingly learned Calc (LibreOffice’s open-source spreadsheet tool) because I’ve made spreadsheets for my own needs. But to “become employable”? No way.

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• shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I do. Got a free license from my last job and Excel blows the doors off Calc, or anything else. For business, Excel is moat of the reason they’re so tied into Office.

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• ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I did take a few courses on excel over the last 25 years. I don’t use excel that much but most features will never be used by most people.

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