How important are Excel forum's?

[Jon von der Heyden]

Do you get feedback on how they are going after they attend your courses? Do many of them use your course as a springboard?

Good question. Yes I keep in touch with many. I think my course is very effective (of course I would); because it has a good balance of power tips but also covers so many concepts required to advance ones knowledge properly. The biggest improvement I see is the use of query tables to avoid having cumbersome copy&paste processes. QT's I notice are often ordered, as I prescribed, in many instances enabling binary lookups. But this is one part I drill in very hard and it's nice to see implemented.

A few students are showing real progress. They use the forums and they bug me regularly! The best I can do is encourage the serious learner to start using the forums!

 

[MrExcel]

It is all about making people aware of what they don't know. It is so easy to spend 40 hours a week "using Excel" by doing things the hard way, when a VLOOKUP or a Pivot Table would solve the problem in minutes instead of hours.

Nothing makes you aware of how much you don't know about Excel than reading a few dozen threads here. For the last year, I've been promoting daily 5 hot topics from this board on the top of the right column at the MrExcel home page... hoping I can interest people in watching how the community here solves difficult problems. (If anyone wants to re-use this box on their blog or website, the instructions are here).

In my live Excel seminars, I have either 3.5 or 7 hours to make people aware of the powerful tools available in Excel. I am hoping the people in the seminar will find the one item that is currently causing them the most pain in Excel can be dramatically simplified. I am hoping to save them an hour a week and get them hooked on learning more. In the seminar and in my books, I always promote this forum as an amazing resource.

Bill

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

Nice idea Bill. The code seems to mess with my theme and so my pages look awful (Wordpress Tempera - quite a common theme). I'll see if I can find some sort of fix.

 

[Colin Legg]

I'd be way behind the curve without the forums so I'd rate them as very important.

A word of caution to learners though: they can be a wonderful source of information but they can also be a source of misinformation.

 

[Smitty]

It is all about making people aware of what they don't know.

Training can tend to get overwhelming for most people and I let them know that I don't expect them to retain anything right up front because of overload. But if in a few days, weeks, months they find themselves in a position to utilize something that they "heard", then at least they know it exists and (maybe) where to look.

In our training I always point people to the board, as well as encourage them to contact me anytime in the future.

I remember one time a while back when Bill posted a question (rare enough that he posts), and got a response in a few minutes. The question was nonsense, but he was hosting a seminar and wanted to show the crowd how fast people here will respond.

 

[Rockminer]

If it wasn't for the board regulars and moderators on this site, I would not have been able to complete several of the tasks that I needed to do. I looked in books for answers as well as online instructions however, this site is BY FAR THE BEST PLACE to get the answers needed to remedy excel problems.

 

[J.Ty.]

Perhaps 99% of my activity here is solving problems rather than searching for help. Still, I have learned a lot by observing solutions posted by others.

Next, I do research in computer science, and observing questions is very interesting for me, because it indicates what people are trying to do in Excel. Recently, I started adding references to posts in this forum to my research papers. They serve as use cases and justify my research direction: "I encode algorithm doing X in Excel, because there are posts in MrExcel forum, where people request help in doing X in Excel".

J.Ty.

 

[Aladin Akyurek]

Perhaps 99% of my activity here is solving problems rather than searching for help. Still, I have learned a lot by observing solutions posted by others.

Next, I do research in computer science, and observing questions is very interesting for me, because it indicates what people are trying to do in Excel. Recently, I started adding references to posts in this forum to my research papers. They serve as use cases and justify my research direction: "I encode algorithm doing X in Excel, because there are posts in MrExcel forum, where people request help in doing X in Excel".

J.Ty.

If it's in English (I presume it is), I'd be interested to receive copies of the papers you might have.

Regards,
Aladin

 

[J.Ty.]

If it's in English (I presume it is), I'd be interested to receive copies of the papers you might have.

Regards,
Aladin

Here you are:

1.The one where I referred to MrExcel threads is here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.2103;
Its predecessor was Spreadsheet as a relational database engine

2. An older one, with no references to MrExcel is [1211.6781] User Defined Spreadsheet Functions in Excel

3. And this one is still in preparation: [1307.7261] The Power of Spreadsheet Computations


J.Ty.

 

[zrx1200]

This is very important for those wishing to extend ones capability's in excel!

Not to often when I post question do I wait for a reply.

Great thread by the way.