All Things Excel
So, this is an inauspicious start to a group blog…but here’s my post. As an introduction, I’ll mostly be posting about banking and music – two things I feel moderately qualified to talk about. The posts, for the most part, will be the same as the posts on my blog, however I do foresee giving you guys updates on my life, as I assume you’re interested. If you’re not interested, then fuck you, Charles, I’m too busy to return your phone calls too.
On to the post.
I’ve definitely learned a lot in my one-and-a-half years on this job. Right up there on my list of accomplishments is an extreme proficiency for Microsoft Excel. Like, I’m really good with it. Like, remember how good Charles was at looking stressed? Or how good Will and Stoops were that one year at stacking beer cans in the shape of Richard Jeni’s face? Like, that’s how good I am at it. In banking, we refer to such abilities as “mad skillz” and usually follow-up the description with a high-five and “boo-yah”. Then we usually go home and weep. But that’s a story for another day.
Anyway, about three weeks ago I was sitting in my cube and thinking, how can I use my Excel skills to make me a better person? What area of my life can benefit from the ability to model and predict future performance based on a large amount of historical data. And then it hit me: Fantasy-Fucking-Baseball.
So I set about copy-and-pasting all the ESPN.com tables and historical stats and merged them with Yahoo’s Fantasy Draft template to give me a decent model to draft my team. Then I started tracking my player’s performance, by week, as well as the players I dropped, the players I want to pick to up, and the overall performance of the fantasy league. This way, I’m able to evaluate how my team is doing on a per-player basis, and see if I can track any rise or decline in the standings based on moves I made or should have made.
Plus, the best thing about this is, when I have this spreadsheet open, it is virtually indiscernible from any other spreadsheet I may be working on. So when superiors walk past and glance at my computer screen, it appears that I’m working diligently. (As an aside, for this same reason I’ve gotten very good at the Alt+Tab keystroke).
And at the end of the day, I can rest confidently knowing that all this just makes me a bigger tool. But, as I said from the start, I wanted to give you guys an idea of what banking is like, beyond the horror stories or the money driven panic panic or condescension for all things non-banking. And thus, behold the compulsive need to translate any large amount of data into something meaningful in Excel.
As a member of that crowd that doesn’t necessarily see sunlight, we try to weave what pleasure we can into our daily grind. This is not meant to be a complaint – I suspect all working stiffs do it – just an observation that some do it with “creative” lunches, still others try their hand at insider trading. I just happen to read a lot of ESPN.
On to the post.
I’ve definitely learned a lot in my one-and-a-half years on this job. Right up there on my list of accomplishments is an extreme proficiency for Microsoft Excel. Like, I’m really good with it. Like, remember how good Charles was at looking stressed? Or how good Will and Stoops were that one year at stacking beer cans in the shape of Richard Jeni’s face? Like, that’s how good I am at it. In banking, we refer to such abilities as “mad skillz” and usually follow-up the description with a high-five and “boo-yah”. Then we usually go home and weep. But that’s a story for another day.
Anyway, about three weeks ago I was sitting in my cube and thinking, how can I use my Excel skills to make me a better person? What area of my life can benefit from the ability to model and predict future performance based on a large amount of historical data. And then it hit me: Fantasy-Fucking-Baseball.
So I set about copy-and-pasting all the ESPN.com tables and historical stats and merged them with Yahoo’s Fantasy Draft template to give me a decent model to draft my team. Then I started tracking my player’s performance, by week, as well as the players I dropped, the players I want to pick to up, and the overall performance of the fantasy league. This way, I’m able to evaluate how my team is doing on a per-player basis, and see if I can track any rise or decline in the standings based on moves I made or should have made.
Plus, the best thing about this is, when I have this spreadsheet open, it is virtually indiscernible from any other spreadsheet I may be working on. So when superiors walk past and glance at my computer screen, it appears that I’m working diligently. (As an aside, for this same reason I’ve gotten very good at the Alt+Tab keystroke).
And at the end of the day, I can rest confidently knowing that all this just makes me a bigger tool. But, as I said from the start, I wanted to give you guys an idea of what banking is like, beyond the horror stories or the money driven panic panic or condescension for all things non-banking. And thus, behold the compulsive need to translate any large amount of data into something meaningful in Excel.
As a member of that crowd that doesn’t necessarily see sunlight, we try to weave what pleasure we can into our daily grind. This is not meant to be a complaint – I suspect all working stiffs do it – just an observation that some do it with “creative” lunches, still others try their hand at insider trading. I just happen to read a lot of ESPN.
posted by half & half at
3:55 PM
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