Re: The problem with not owning the software

On Thu, 1/2/2025 5:05 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 2 Jan 2025 12:09:28 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote:
 

... suggests that people don't do much other than open up Word and
Excel.

>
In the professional world that's pretty accurate.

 
Doesn’t sound like that adjective “professional” extends to the actual
quality of results, then.
 

People using Office, there is an amazing range of skills.

We make fun of the people, who can barely tie their own
shoe laces using computers. But there are also those,
who win programming contests, who can run circles around you.

Sales people sending materials to me at work, they always
sent them in .docx (not PDF) and the documents were always three pages
long. You had to wonder why all the documents were three pages
long... I bet there is a funny story involved there.

We had a senior manager, who could rewrite any procedural language
problem you brought to him, in Excel. One of our guys, a masters grad,
was using Fortran and Numerical Recipes and had been at that for
six weeks, and was having trouble finishing it. The senior manager
overheard the conversation, about how hard this was to do in
Fortran, he came out of his office, got the details (he's actually
a Radio/Microwave engineer) and in *two days* he wrote an Excel
spreadsheet following the requirements, and the spreadsheet added
datapoints to an electrical waveform plot, as the program
calculated them (in real time). I didn't watch this, but someone
who got a demo of this, was blown away by it.

These are the people we waste in offices, shuffling papers.

That's also the kind of person, who could put an AI into
an Excel spreadsheet. That would be a perfect problem for
our guy. I bet he'd enjoy that. (There was a Tomshardware
article about someone releasing an AI demo, which was
controlled from Excel, but it used VBA so I couldn't
run it in LO.)

Portions of Excel, can run on more than one thread, so you
can get a slight speedup from your multi-core processor.
But it can't use all your cores, so it does not have
infinite scaling. As far as I know, the capability is
"two core max". It then depends on the characteristics
of the spreadsheet (VBA or no VBA maybe), as to whether
it will switch to two core mode.

   Paul