techhub.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A hub primarily for passionate technologists, but everyone is welcome

Administered by:

Server stats:

4.6K
active users

#excel

12 posts11 participants0 posts today

I hate #Excel. I am a self-described Excel idiot. It really bugged me that (for years) I could not figure out how to do something moderately complex in Excel.

I finally asked #ChatGPT to fix it. It gave me an almost right answer, but I was able to figure out what was wrong manually after that and do what I needed to do.

I guess I am okay with #AI as long as it helps me do painfully horrible things like debugging spreadsheets.

Argh!!!

Classic #Microsoft fail move. Exporting an #Excel spreadsheet to CSV (for further processing later via Python scripts), I've found a niggling `\ufeff` character leading it off, which has bombed my pipelines. It looks like this zero-width, non-breaking space is used as a BOM (byte order mark) by Excel (though explicitly exporting to UTF-8).

Unfortunately the Unicode spec clearly discourages this strongly:

> The serialized order of the bytes must not depart from the order defined by the UTF-8 encoding form. Use of a BOM is neither required nor recommended for UTF-8

Why does this evil empire have to make everything unnecessarily difficult???

Can someone suggest VBA and Python resources specifically for Excel?

I'm helping someone from the Windows world upskill. Her biggest technical skill is Excel, so we're staring with that.

I can point her towards a Byte of Python for starters, but it has nothing about Excel integration and I really want to cover that. Thanks, folks.

#Excel#VBA#Python