The Glade 4.0

Excel 2003 Bible

Because I can write code that uses an embedded button to launch a simple form which feeds data to a script that systematically filecopies a single Word document to several new locations (based on hyperlinks stripped from the spreadsheet) with new names conditionally determined by data in the spreadsheet; then opens those files, populates them by inserting data from the spreadsheet at various locations identified by a series of enclosing bookmarks, uses looping DIR statements to attach an undetermined number of files meeting specific naming criteria at other bookmarked locations after consulting the registry for the location and index number of the default icons for each filetype; and finally saves an additional copy of this updated document to a shared drive before automatically sending a link to that shared copy via Outlook to another department (and displays a progress window to the user with contextual statements such as "copying template", "inserting data" and "attaching files" throughout the entire process) ... but I don't know what a frakkin' pivot table is!

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

By the way, my macro tends to get slower and slower the longer it runs. The 10th Word doc copied, populated and saved goes noticably more slowly than the 1st. Should I be killing my Word.Application after closing each document instead of leaving it open? I had thought that things would proceed more smoothly if I left the app open while opening/closing a series of documents rather than looping through the steps of "open app, open doc, close doc, close app" but it positively crawls by the 20th iteration and I need it to work through 60+.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra

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Enroll in a Linear Algebra course at your local community college.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

That ... that's helpful. Really.

For the record, I've had varying degrees of "prior exposure" to:
BASIC
Pascal
Visual Basic
Delphi (which might as well just be called Visual Pascal)
Visual C++
COBOL

plus HTML, SQL and Excel formulas which, while not programming languages, have a language and logic all their own.
Personally, I don't think I've been "mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration" by any of the above, although I must say switching gears from one to another has given me a bit of a beating here and there along the way.
I'll take that into consideration but there's gotta be a better way. Honestly, take *yet another* math class to understand a feature of a productivity application? Isn't that a bit of overkill?

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

No clue. I'm not a computer programmer. Pivot table just sounds to me to be derived from a pivot point. It stands to reason, as many other elements of computer programming are derived from the algebra of matrices.

I'm also not sure what you mean by taking "*yet another* math class." Did someone force you to take trigonometry or calculus recently? Were you coerced into taking finite or discrete mathematics against your will? Because math below trig and finite math falls under the blanket header if, "You must be this tall to call yourself a reasonably educated adult."

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_table ?

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Thanks, Moo.
Coro, I think that it should behoove you when telling someone that they're not allowed to consider themselves a reasonably educated adult to eliminate simple grammatical and typographical errors from your own post.

Ultimately, I suppose the feedback I've received is my own fault for using literal language to express a less than literal concept. I did not intend to simply communicate "I don't know what a pivot table is"; but that I am amassing knowledge of the advanced scripting functionality while continuing to remain ignorant of many of the basic tools and features.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

I think that came across, Shel, which was probably why Coro suggested you enroll in a class that will teach a great many of the basics.

Linear Algebra is considered a core class for anyone doing programming at all the universities I've seen.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Which would make perfect sense if I was well-grounded in the basics of spreadsheet usage/manipulation and was having trouble moving into the scripting language, but that's not the case here. In point of fact, I attended college in pursuit of a degree in programming. The thing that I have so far been ignoring/overlooking is basic spreadsheet usage. I'm programming Excel without ever having spent time using it to make charts and graphs, so I picked up a book on the subject to close a gap in my knowledge. Why is everybody suggesting a means by which to accomplish that which I am already doing?

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

You may notice that at no point on the Glade have I ever expressed my righteous indignation at someone having the audacity to require me to take English classes, just like I noticed that my typographical error and my sin of beginning a sentence with the word "because" in a casual, informal setting did not sufficiently hinder your understanding of my post to prevent you from taking umbrage at having your e-peen impugned. Contrast this with your earlier objection to being required to learn something that may not be directly related to your field of interest. The manner of your objection was precisely the same as the typical algebra student that I encounter everyday - the student who has just discovered that they have to take two or three semesters of remedial mathematics courses before they can take the minimum level algebra course for a college degree. You, however, are not an eighteen or nineteen year-old kid with a chip on his shoulder because he just graduated from high school only to find that he isn't done with school. You are a grown man trying to acquire a new skill on your own initiative.

Had you been griping about having been required to take trig and calculus, I could have perhaps been sympathetic. They are not the minimum requirement for earning a college degree - those courses are above and beyond the call of duty for the vast majority of majors. Furthermore, for a lot of the programs that do require those classes, they are somewhat pointless. Most students in non-technical fields are too offended at being forced to take math classes to actually learn it, and so when they do need it, they don't know it well enough to apply it. The irony of math is that you have to think of using it before the math you learned will do you any good.

I would further go on to point out that, if you were indeed pursuing a course in computer programming, you should have been aware that computer programming is, in fact, a math-intensive field of study. It isn't math-intensive in the same way that engineering is, however. A computer programmer deals with math in more abstract concepts. Every program is a function. It maps domain values to range values. Programs are further composed of procedures, which themselves are functions, and make the larger program a composite function. You may also be required to write code that undoes certain procedures - in other words, an inverse function. Universities require computer programmers to take calculus, not so much because calculus itself is necessary for their field of study (although it could be), but rather because the vast majority of algebra concepts don't finally make it through a student's thick skull until he's forced to start using it in calculus. Computer programmers may often be required to take multivariable calculus, because that's the first time we really talk about multivariable functions. (Procedures with multiple inputs, perhaps?)

So to return to your original question, no it isn't overkill. Programming is far more math-intensive than you seem to think. Math is about more than just crunching numbers. Linear Algebra might be the first course you'd take that's actually directly applicable to what you want to do. All spreadsheets are matrices, which is the primary topic of interest in Linear Algebra. The underlying theory for everything you want to do is probably in that one course. The bone is, it has a prerequisite of Calculus & Analytic Geometry I (perhaps II, depending on which school you're looking at). There are certain things that we just can't teach a student until he's ready to look at math as a tool to be used rather than just some **** that an ******* in advising is forcing him to take.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

e-peen!

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The Dude abides.

Coro, either pay some attention to what's being discussed or leave the conversation, please? I have repeatedly attempted to steer the course of this conversation away from the erroneously introduced topic of how to expand on my programming skills and back to the simple fact that I picked up a book for the express purpose of improving my familiarity with basic spreadsheet functionality and you seem powerfully intent upon missing the damn point.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

I think his point is that linear algebra (which I opted not to take) is incredibly applicable to Excel. If you learn how to do Guassian eliminations and row reduction, you can fully employ pivot tables to what they are capable of doing. This is why pivot tables are structured why they are; they are based on matrix theory. Someone didn't make pivot tables and then come up with simultaneous equations, it's the other way around.

Basically, yes you can blast through the wall to get to perception by slowly and tediously experimenting with Pivot Tables to perform functions for which they are complete overkill. You posit that pivot tables are a part of basic spreadsheet functionality, but they are quite a bit more than that.

I had to write some VB-Basic scripts in Excel once in my job using what I had learned in C++ for Engineers (and C++ from my high school) and they were brute, clunky and ugly. They worked. But they didn't increase my understanding at all. I think that is the dilemma you must consider.

Also, here you go:

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

My point is a little more blunt than that.

Shelgeyr, you claim to have at one point been going to college to learn computer programming, and yet the list of languages you purport to have experience with is, with the exception of COBOL, no more diverse than two years of high school computer science. You started a thread with the apparent purpose of bragging about your new book. (If this thread existed to answer your questions about spreadsheeting, you'd have used a different title.) I understand now you're not looking to improve your programming skills. That's very apparent in the direction this thread took. In return, I would request that you please understand how, when you start threads about your forays into writing programs, the rest of us might mistakenly assume that you were interested in learning to write code better.

As an aside, even for someone only interested in learning basic spreadsheet functionality, the advice I gave you at the beginning of the thread is still very sound. It may not be what you wanted to hear, but that doesn't make it any less relevant to your query. Furthermore, it would answer future questions about spreadsheet and Excel functionality that you haven't even thought to ask, yet. Some of the responses you got in this thread have been rather dickish, and I must confess that any further replies I make will be likewise, but let it not be said that I did not genuinely and sincerely attempt to help you.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

This is the sort of explanation that I could have accepted constructively several posts ago here. Thank you for putting it in these terms, especially after how heated I've gotten in this thread.I can most certainly identify with having written clunky and ugly code, but I cannot recall having yet failed to write anything that I didn't learn something from along the way. So far, that's only happened when I basically copy/paste someone else's code, which is why I tend to avoid doing so as much as humanly possible.To be fair, assuming you can find it in you to be so, my programming experience began with an experimental High School class that I took in 1986 and continued in an Associate's program in 1998-2000. What schooling I've taken in the area was done before these classes to which you refer would have even existed.Yeah, this thread was pretty much intended as a Tweet.Actually, that's not even remotely true. I have quite a bit of interest in improving my coding skills. That just wasn't the specific intent of the discussion at hand. My immediate interest in this area is to increase my familiarity with the "no code required" spreadsheet functions so that I don't get myself into a position of writing code to do what the spreadsheet already does.That may well be true but do please try to understand that from my point of view, "I'm not a computer programmer" and "pivot table just sounds to me to be derived from a pivot point" (which essentially translates to "I don't know what a pivot table is" and effectively invalidates any advice you might offer on the subject), to say nothing of the high-handed snobbery of "You must learn trig and finite math to call yourself a reasonably educated adult" aren't just "hard pills to swallow", they're slaps to the face that have in them no dignity whatsoever.From where I'm standing, the fact that what you said has any bearing, relevance or validity is purely coincidental and your *** is just lucky you guessed in the ballpark and luck doesn't make you a good advisor.I'll grant that you genuinely attempted to pull off the appearance of making a sincere attempt at helping me, but honestly ... being given advice from someone who talks down to my education level while admitting no knowledge of the subject matter at hand doesn't play well in my worldview.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister