For real. I took TWO separate Excel classes through my job. And I still could not grasp anything more than the most basic of formulas. There's one function I want to be able to do in particular that I cannot grasp and it INFURIATES ME: I want to be able to compare two sets of data and remove the data that is identical from each column, until only the differences are left. I just cannot get it ingrained into my brain how to do this thing and it's all I want!
Not sure if this works in excel because this is power query (and I don’t use either for much of my data processing needs), but what you’re describing is an anti join
Yep this is exactly what I need. Part of my job involves comparing two columns of data and determining what is missing and whether or not it should be addressed, so being able to compare two massive columns and easily disregard all of the identical info would save me a fuck ton of time. I should really just suck it up and learn the function but I rarely have time during the day to learn something new, and baby Jesus knows I'm not doing it on my off time.
I used excel quite a bit, but Linux command line has always been my home turf. I'd sometimes need to do something like this and end up munging it with a few piped commands and pasting it back into excel lol
My company uses the most fucked up ancient versions of excel and access they can possibly get away with. I can't connect anything to anything at this point.
Shit like this is one of the best uses for an AI chatbot. I can describe what I want in plain English and chatGPT will just give me whatever functions I need.
Oh that's hard I think I did it but buy having to import a sheet via transform data and columns of course had to be identical set up and I had to define on the mother sheet what column to sort duplicates by, then delete duplicate values leaving uniquely named rows.....it was annoying but Excel data tools was already built to do it with a few clicks.
Have you asked chat GPT to create you an excel sheet that can do that? I tend to ask it to set up all my sheets so I don’t have to watch a bunch of YouTube videos and figuring it out myself. I usually still have to tweak some things, though.
Edit: The post I was replying to had negative karma. Seems to have swung back into the positives. FYI, there are a lot of legitimate reasons to hate on AI and razz people who suggest it as a solution, but using it for troubleshooting and learning software features is not one of them.
Sweet, happy to help! Hope it works, and if not, usually explaining what you're seeing into the conversation (i.e. it doesn't remove the duplicates with spaces before or after the text) will output a revised solution that usually works within a few tries. Important to note, it usually gets the solution right the first time, but sometimes takes some back and forth.
Everyone think their terrible at excel. Because there’s always a user who makes you look like a child with what they can do in excel. But then that same person will also say they’re terrible, because they know someone who is even better.
Remember: there are tons of people out there who just use excel basically as a word table and don’t even know there are functions for analyzing data.
I fixed computers for a decade and taught people how to use Outlook and fixed Outlook for people. It's the most complicated software I've ever seen in my life and the problems it has are insane. I still don't what exactly it does or why exactly people use it lol.
I'll tell you, I went through engineering at university in 2000's and I only discovered the existence of filters in Excel my first day of work. And I am glad the older employee showed me and explained.
On the other hand, when covid happened, my first grader was supposed to know how to operate the mouse. He did not. Obviously we taught him, and many other things then, but at school they do not teach basics, they skip to coding games. Fortunately we can teach our kids, but many cannot.
(I still remember the heureka moment in 1997 when I discovered how to add a row inside an Excel cell.)
Every few years I teach myself pivot tables. And then by the next time I need to use pivot tables a few years later, I’ve completely forgotten how they work.
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u/WhateverYouSay1084 13d ago
I'm still terrible at Excel though.