Most people view Microsoft’s Excel as a simple “spreadsheet program” that’s rapidly being eclipsed by free web-based apps that run on any cheap laptop.
Well think again. Modern-day Excel is an advanced analytics tool that can push today’s fastest hardware to their limits, and it’s sexy enough that it rates its own eSports coverage. No joke—thousands tuned in live to watch the Financial Modelling World Cup that was broadcast by ESPN.
Editor’s note: This story first ran on February 4, 2022, but with ESPN airing an Excel esports: All-Star Battle on ESPN 8: The Ocho over the weekend of August 5, we’re republishing it for spreadsheet enthusiasts who missed the fascinating discussion the first time. If you’re interested in testing your mettle against Excel masters, you can register for the 2022 Financial Modelling World Cup Open, taking place beginning October 8. The $50 entry fee has been temporarily reduced to $25 to celebrate the sport’s ESPN 8: The Ocho moment. Our original interview continues below.
Intrigued by the interest of “gamers” and curious to see just how hard advanced Excel users are pushing the application, PCWorld decided to interview spreadsheet superstar Jason Moore. Moore is the head of analytics and data at an investment firm, and semi-finalist who won cold, hard cash in December’s Financial Modeling World Cup. Moore is also the same Excel expert who provided PCWorld with a workbook that we used to test the the latest and greatest laptop CPUs.
To find out how much hardware you need to push spreadsheets to their limits, what it’s like to be an Excel esports player, and just why Excel is so powerful, read on.
If you think a Core i3 laptop with 8GB of RAM is all you need to run Excel hard, think again. To drive Excel like a real pro competitor, you need as many CPU cores as you can get and a ton of RAM too.
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PCW: A lot of people have a hard time believing that Excel is an esport—is this for real?
Jason Moore: I still can’t believe it, but the comments from the >300,000 YouTube viewers that watched the FMWC finals don’t lie. The challenges were engaging and well designed; and everyone can appreciate a well-designed Excel formula.
PCW: How did you get into Excel as an esport?
Jason Moore: LinkedIn advertisement that asked “Are you the go-to Excel person at work?” Uh…yeah, sign me up!
PCW: What do you do for a day job?
Jason Moore: The company I work for invests in commercial real estate stocks (apartments, hotels, shopping centers, etc.). As the Head of Data/Analytics, I build processes that analyze and present data to the team. For example, each night we track nightly rates at most US hotels for the upcoming six months. Excel is the final stop on that data’s journey to becoming actionable intelligence (i.e., charts that help us understand which companies or markets are doing better or worse than expected).
Jason Moore works as the head of analytics and data at an investment firm and uses five PCs to drive Excel which he says are never fast enough.
Jason Moore
PCW: So you actually drive Excel for a living. Can you describe what Excel is for people who still think of it as a simple spreadsheet application?
Jason Moore: My Excel skills are the differentiator between myself and others in finance, thus it absolutely pays the bills. Excel combines the basic functions of a database (e.g., SQL), a programming language (e.g., Python), and visual analytics (e.g., Tableau) into one powerful platform. Don’t get me wrong, we utilize all those other tools and more, but Excel is the most productive.
PCW: Would you say there’s any particular functions that are the most popular tools you use in Excel more often?
Jason Moore: Besides the obvious basic functions (SUM, AVERAGE, etc.), my go-to functions are AVERAGEIFS, IFERROR, IF, FIND, OFFSET, INDEX-MATCH, and even old school “ctrl-shift” arrays to find weighted averages based on multiple parameters. Although I’d say VBA is the most powerful “tool” in Excel.
Q: Is it fast enough for you? A: Never, which is why I use five PCs.
PCW: Do you use a lot of VBA other scripting or programming languages in Excel?
Jason Moore: In my opinion, VBA is what makes Excel the best programming tool in the world. Using the record macro tool, VBA allows anyone to become a programmer; it’s how I learned to code. From simple task automation, to complex IF-THEN process trees, interacting with external databases, and navigating websites before grabbing their underlying data. VBA can do almost anything while the familiar Excel grid is right there to display your data at each step. We use Python and Alteryx to prep massive datasets, but nothing beats Excel for that “last mile” of delivery. Tableau comes close in certain situations, but Excel wins 9 of 10 times.
PCW: There seems to be this tension between people who think a database is a better use than Excel for very large data sets. Do you agree?
Jason Moore: Define very large. To some a 500,000-record table (20 columns wide) is very large, but Excel crushes a database for extracting insight from that size table. Formatting, searching, sorting, filtering, and charting are all easier in Excel. We have a billion records in a SQL warehouse, but most of those records originate and/or terminate in a spreadsheet (e.g., charts). Obviously databases are better for storing data, and vaults are better for storing money, but not when you actually need to use it. Excel makes it easy enough to pull just the data you need from almost any warehouse.
PCW: You provided PCWorld with a real-world Excel Workbook that we recently used to review laptop CPUs. Can you tell us a little about it?
Jason Moore: That workbook was built in March 2020 to track COVID cases, hospitalizations, deaths, and vaccination rates from thousands of jurisdictions around the world. It also tracks reopening indicators from Google, OpenTable, the TSA, etc. and sends everyone summary charts each morning. It’s half work, half personal to be honest. Investment professionals are trained not to trust anyone, so analyzing real-time data from various unrelated parties helped us filter out the noise fairly quickly, spotting trends and inflections before most others. Although helpful, it’s the only major spreadsheet I don’t want to survive forever; hoping to retire it soon.
PCW: Can you describe the kinds of things you can use Excel to analyze?
Jason Moore: Let’s say you wanted to track the tenants at 3,000 major shopping centers across the U.S. The goal is to understand which retailers are expanding/contracting and which landlords are doing better/worse.
You write numerous Python scripts that scrape tenant lists from the property websites each night (property, tenant, unit, square feet), uploading them to a SQL database. It’s at this stage that Excel becomes a critical differentiator. The data is messy! You’d be surprised how many ways Best Buy is spelled, or how often shopping centers change their name. Sure, Python can attempt to handle it with some fuzzy math algos, or a developer can build a GUI in C++… but I’m not a coder and good luck making either of those transparent to the end user (a financial analyst who works in Excel all day).
So we built spreadsheets that interact with the database (using macros), allowing a person to spot-check and correct various abnormalities once per week in just 10 minutes for all 3,000 shopping centers. Another macro assembles the cleansed data for each landlord’s portfolio, quantifying various metrics over time, compares it to company-reported data and our internal models, then sends an email with summary charts & tables and a link to the raw data should the analyst wish to dig deeper.
P.S., Excel can also scrape the tenant lists from the websites.
No joke: Here’s Excel using all 36-threads of a Core i9 and nearly 64GB or RAM too. (Right click on image and select open in new tab to view original image.)
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The hardware you need to drive Excel hard
PCW: There’s a belief that Excel doesn’t need much hardware to run, can you describe the computer, or PCs you use for Excel? Such as what kind of CPU and how many RAM and storage?
Jason Moore: The latest build (June 2020) is a Core i9-10900X with 256GB of Samsung DDR4-2666 RAM and a 2TB Samsung 983 Enterprise SSD. Some spreadsheets run the CPU at 100 percent for hours, so it has an Asetek 650LS 120mm CPU Cooler. Having as many cores as possible and at least 64GB of RAM is key.
PCW: How large do your spreadsheets get?
Jason Moore: My current record is a 2.3GB stock-picking algorithm. It’s 95 percent calculations, not just a giant warehouse. I’d say my average size is 50 MBs. We had to upgrade everyone’s office PCs so my colleagues could open my spreadsheets; 16GB of RAM isn’t enough if you’re a heavy Excel user (or know someone who is).
PCW: Since you’re a “gamer,” do you run RGB on your builds?
Jason Moore: Haha, no, I had to Google what you meant by that. I’ll talk to Puget Systems, perhaps we can build one that lights up green for “buy” and red for “sell.”
Jason Moore: Never, which is why I have five PCs. I use LogMeIn to access four of them each day, along with dozens of scheduled tasks to fire programs at certain times.
PCW: What kind of monitor do you run and what resolution? Do you run multiple monitors?
Jason Moore: I’ve learned with Excel you want to be consistent with monitor resolution. If you set row height on a 2k resolution monitor it will look squished on a 1080p monitor. Given my numerous PCs I’m still running 1080p until we can switch everything at once.
PCW: What about keyboard and mouse? Mechanical switches or dome switches? Is it a full keyboard or compressed without 10-key?
Jason Moore: Your standard Logitech keyboard with 10-key and normal wheel mouse. You gotta have a 10-key.
Excel eSports player don’t require mechanical keyboards but the 10-key is a must.
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Microsoft Excel versus Google Sheets, and what skills you need
PCW: Excel vs. Google Sheets: Which wins, and will Sheets ever compete with Excel?
Jason Moore: I’ve worked in finance almost 18 years and have never seen a Google Sheet. My kids use Sheets (middle and high school), but anyone serious about working in finance will want to move on sooner than later. There were moments when I thought Microsoft was dumbing down Excel and considered trying Sheets, but I ended up just using Excel 2010 for about 10 years (it remains their most stable version IMO). Security concerns are the only reason I’m now using Microsoft 365.
PCW: What are some tips for someone who wants to get into your line of work as far as education or skills to acquire?
Jason Moore: Build a spreadsheet to analyze your monthly spending, your daily electrical usage and/or solar production, local crime statistics, government budgets, inflation metrics, home sales, your investment portfolio, sports stats… you get the picture. Make a simple spreadsheet about a topic that interests you, then tweak it, add more data, record a macro, then more data. There are terabytes of free data available to everyone (e.g., data.gov, NYC Open Data, BLS, BEA, Census Bureau, etc.). OzGrid.com is my go-to Excel resource.
PCW: What’s your best advice for someone getting into advanced Excel techniques?
Jason Moore: Purchase some case studies from Financial Modeling World Cup; solve them yourself then do it again six months later. Watch the YouTube videos from FMWC champ Diarmuid Early, or MrExcel’s Bill Jelen. Join a community of like-minded people on LinkedIn and share your modeling approaches.
PCW: Is there anything you think we should cover that we didn’t cover or—that you want people to know about potential Excel esports players or heavy Excel users?
Jason Moore: Excel doesn’t get enough credit because most people have never actually seen what it’s capable of, even those who have used it for decades. In a messy world it enables an ideal blend of man and machine, hard-coded history and an unscripted future, data and insight…
Users of the Google Pixel 7 and 7 Pro devices will be able to secure their data without the need to pay for an additional Android VPN after the company said it would be including its Google One VPN service at no extra cost.
The move will make the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro the first smartphones to include a free VPN connection.
The offer is restricted to just some countries, though – and what’s more, some data won’t be secured inside the VPN tunnel.
Peace of mind when you connect online ✨Later this year, #Pixel7 and 7 Pro will be the only phones with a VPN by Google One—at no extra cost.¹#MadeByGoogle¹See image for more info pic.twitter.com/P7lzyoMdekOctober 6, 2022
See more
Google Pixel 7 VPN
Despite the aforementioned limits, the big tech giant assures that the VPN software won’t associate users’ app and browsing data with users’ accounts.
Google One VPN typically costs around $10 per month as part of the company’s Premium One plan, which also comes with a 2TB of cloud storage on top.
This decision is the latest move to bring Google’s mobile data security to the next level. Not too long ago, the company made Google One VPN available also for iOS devices, and also introduced the option of having an always-on VPN across its latest smartphones.
Google promises that its secure VPN software will shield your phone against hackers on unsecure networks, like public Wi-Fi. It will also hide your IP address so that third parties won’t be able to track your location.
Shorter for virtual private network, a VPN is exactly the tool you want to shield your sensitive data as it masks your real location and encrypts all your data in transit. Beside privacy, it can allow you to bypass geo-restrictions and other online blocks.
Chiara is a multimedia journalist, with a special eye for latest trends and issues in cybersecurity. She is a Staff Writer at Future with a focus on VPNs. She mainly writes news and features about data privacy, online censorship and digital rights for TechRadar, Tom’s Guide and T3. With a passion for digital storytelling in all its forms, she also loves photography, video making and podcasting. Originally from Milan in Italy, she is now based in Bristol, UK, since 2018.
After months of waiting and delays, Valve has finally announced that the Steam Deck dock is available for purchase on its official site.
Not only that but, according to Valve, the dock will ship out in an incredibly fast one to two weeks, which pairs with the fact that the Steam Deck itself is now shipping with no wait time (not to mention that it’s incredibly easy to set up). The port selection is pretty solid as well, with the dock featuring three USB-A 3.1 gen 1 ports, one Ethernet port, a DisplayPort 1.4, and an HDMI 2.0 port. And for its power supply, it uses a USB-C passthrough delivery.
A Steam Deck dock will run you $90 (around £81 / AU$140), which is a bit steeper than most third-party options on the market right now. But for those waiting it out for an official product until now, price most likely will not be an issue.
Is it worth buying?
Considering that even Steam Decks themselves are shipping without a queue and that the dock has such a quick turnaround to delivery, it seems that the supply chain issues that had been gripping Valve are loosening considerably.
However, the deck itself is far from perfect. Because of the fact that it uses USB-C for the display port, a third-party USB-C dock that uses its own power supply and video out will output the display of the official dock.
And as mentioned before, the price of the official Steam Deck dock is steeper than many third-party options on the market, meaning that those who are on a budget might pass this product up in favor of a lower-priced one.
There are also some bugs that Valve is working on fixing at this time, including one involving compatibility with LG displays. According to the FAQ, if the “Docking Station is connected via HDMI, sleep/wake can result in visual noise.”
It might be worth waiting for Valve to work out the kinks of its dock before investing in one. And while you’re waiting, research other options that might better suit your needs.
Allisa has been freelancing at TechRadar for nine months before joining as a Computing Staff Writer. She mainly covers breaking news and rumors in the computing industry, and does reviews and featured articles for the site. In her spare time you can find her chatting it up on her two podcasts, Megaten Marathon and Combo Chain, as well as playing any JRPGs she can get her hands on.
Why doesn’t set -e (or set -o errexit, or trap ERR) do what I expected?
set -e was an attempt to add “automatic error detection” to the shell. Its goal was to cause the shell to abort any time an error occurred, so you don’t have to put || exit 1 after each important command. This does not work well in practice.
The goal of automatic error detection is a noble one, but it requires the ability to tell when an error actually occurred. In modern high-level languages, most tasks are performed by using the language’s builtin commands or features. The language knows whether (for example) you tried to divide by zero, or open a file that you can’t open, and so on. It can take action based on this knowledge.
But in the shell, most of the tasks you actually care about are done by external programs. The shell can’t tell whether an external program encountered something that it considers an error — and even if it could, it wouldn’t know whether the error is an important one, worthy of aborting the entire program, or whether it should carry on.
The only information conveyed to the shell by the external program is an exit status — by convention, 0 for success, and non-zero for “some kind of error”. The developers of the original Bourne shell decided that they would create a feature that would allow the shell to check the exit status of every command that it runs, and abort if one of them returns non-zero. Thus, set -e was born.
But many commands return non-zero even when there wasn’t an error. For example,
if [ -d /foo ]; then ...; else ...; fi
If the directory doesn’t exist, the [ command returns non-zero. Clearly we don’t want to abort when that happens — our script wants to handle that in the else part. So the shell implementors made a bunch of special rules, like “commands that are part of an if test are immune”, and “commands in a pipeline, other than the last one, are immune”.
These rules are extremely convoluted, and they still fail to catch even some remarkably simple cases. Even worse, the rules change from one Bash version to another, as Bash attempts to track the extremely slippery POSIX definition of this “feature”. When a SubShell is involved, it gets worse still — the behavior changes depending on whether Bash is invoked in POSIX mode. Another wiki has a page that covers this in more detail. Be sure to check the caveats.
Consider this allegory, originally posted to bug-bash:
Once upon a time, a man with a dirty lab coat and long, uncombed hairshowed up at the town police station, demanding to see the chief ofpolice. "I've done it!" he exclaimed. "I've built the perfectcriminal-catching robot!"The police chief was skeptical, but decided that it might be worththe time to see what the man had invented. Also, he secretly thought,it might be a somewhat unwise move to completely alienate the madscientist and his army of hunter robots.So, the man explained to the police chief how his invention could tellthe difference between a criminal and law-abiding citizen using aseries of heuristics. "It's especially good at spotting recentlyescaped prisoners!" he said. "Guaranteed non-lethal restraints!"Frowning and increasingly skeptical, the police chief neverthelessallowed the man to demonstrate one robot for a week. They decided thatthe robot should patrol around the jail. Sure enough, there was ajailbreak a few days later, and an inmate digging up through theground outside of the prison facility was grabbed by the robot andcarried back inside the prison.The surprised police chief allowed the robot to patrol a wider area.The next day, the chief received an angry call from the zookeeper.It seems the robot had cut through the bars of one of the animal cages,grabbed the animal, and delivered it to the prison.The chief confronted the robot's inventor, who asked what animal itwas. "A zebra," replied the police chief. The man slapped his head andexclaimed, "Curses! It was fooled by the black and white stripes!I shall have to recalibrate!" And so the man set about rewriting therobot's code. Black and white stripes would indicate an escapedinmate UNLESS the inmate had more than two legs. Then it should beleft alone.The robot was redeployed with the updated code, and seemed to beoperating well enough for a few days. Then on Saturday, a mob ofchildren in soccer clothing, followed by their parents, descendedon the police station. After the chaos subsided, the chief was toldthat the robot had absconded with the referee right in the middle ofa soccer game.Scowling, the chief reported this to the scientist, who performed asecond calibration. Black and white stripes would indicate an escapedinmate UNLESS the inmate had more than two legs OR had a whistle ona necklace.Despite the second calibration, the police chief declared that the robotwould no longer be allowed to operate in his town. However, the newsof the robot had spread, and requests from many larger cities werepouring in. The inventor made dozens more robots, and shipped them offto eager police stations around the nation. Every time a robot grabbedsomething that wasn't an escaped inmate, the scientist was consulted,and the robot was recalibrated.Unfortunately, the inventor was just one man, and he didn't have thetime or the resources to recalibrate EVERY robot whenever one of themwent awry. The robot in Shangri-La was recalibrated not to grab agrave-digger working on a cold winter night while wearing a ski mask,and the robot in Xanadu was recalibrated not to capture a black andwhite television set that showed a movie about a prison break, and soon. But the robot in Xanadu would still grab grave-diggers with skimasks (which it turns out was not common due to Xanadu's warmer climate),and the robot in Shangri-La was still a menace to old televisions (ofwhich there were very few, the people of Shangri-La being on the averagemore wealthy than those of Xanadu).So, after a few years, there were different revisions of thecriminal-catching robot in most of the major cities. In some places,a clever criminal could avoid capture by wearing a whistle on a stringaround the neck. In others, one would be well-advised not to wear orangeclothing in certain rural areas, no matter how close to the HarvestFestival it was, unless one also wore the traditional black triangulareye-paint of the Pumpkin King.Many people thought, "This is lunacy!" But others thought the robotsdid more good than harm, all things considered, and so in some placesthe robots are used, while in other places they are shunned.The end.
Exercises
Or, “so you think set -e is OK, huh?”
Exercise 1: why doesn’t this example print anything?
Another pitfall associated with set -e occurs when you use commands that look like assignments but aren’t, such as export, declare, typeset or local.
1set -e 2f() { localvar=$(somecommand that fails); } 3f 4 5g() { local var; var=$(somecommand that fails); } 6g
In function f, the exit status of somecommand is discarded. It won’t trigger the set -e because the exit status of local masks it (the assignment to the variable succeeds, so local returns status 0). In function g, the set -e is triggered because it uses a real assignment which returns the exit status of somecommand.
A particularly dangerous pitfall with set -e is combining functions with conditionals. The following snippets will not behave the same way:
As soon as a function is used as a conditional (in a list or with a conditional test or loop) set -e stops being applied within the function. This may not only cause code to unexpectedly start executing in the function but also change its return status!
Using Process substitution, the exit code is also discarded as it is not visible from the main script:
1set -e 2cat <(somecommand that fails) 3echo survived
Using a pipe makes no difference, as only the rightmost process is considered:
1set -e 2somecommand that fails | cat - 3echo survived
set -o pipefail is a workaround by returning the exit code of the first failed process:
though with pipefail in effect, code like this will sometimes cause an error, depending on whether the output of somecmd exceeds the size of the pipe buffer or not:
In the mid 2010s, some people decided that the combination of set -e, set -u and set -o pipefail should be used by default in all new shell scripts. They call this unofficial bash strict mode, and they claim that it “makes many classes of subtle bugs impossible” and that if you follow this policy, you will “spend much less time debugging, and also avoid having unexpected complications in production”.
As we’ve already seen in the exercises above, these claims are dubious at best. The behavior of set -e is quite unpredictable. If you choose to use it, you will have to be hyper-aware of all the false positives that can cause it to trigger, and work around them by “marking” every line that’s allowed to fail with something like ||true.
Conclusions
GreyCat‘s personal recommendation is simple: don’t use set -e. Add your own error checking instead.
rking’s personal recommendation is to go ahead and use set -e, but beware of possible gotchas. It has useful semantics, so to exclude it from the toolbox is to give into FUD.
geirha’s personal recommendation is to handle errors properly and not rely on the unreliable set -e.
