I’ve talked a lot about how I got into technology and other miscellaneous topics on my desire to go back to learn computer science. But I should also talk about how I got into, well, programming on the software side instead of particularly hardware related things, right?
Excel – this program was my gateway.
In my previous degree, I have worked a lot of data and doing analysis using Excel – even my Stats class tested us on some of the various functions used. This did translate well into my job – in fact, a little too well.
We all know Excel as a spreadsheet program but it has something special in its sleeve – it can execute functions and also execute code called Visual Basic under the name Macros.
In fact, knowing linear algebra, philosophy of logic, and applying the various concepts in addition to some of the basics to programming found from online tutorials was deemed quite useful.
The Excel Guru
Funny, at my workplaces, I was known as someone who was extremely good at Excel. But all I did was, as listed earlier, linear algebra, philosophy of logic, and basic concepts of programming from tutorials applied all together – if(Boolean, this, that) or Index(array,match(value, matching_array, true)).
Whenever I needed to create a new formula, I kind of refer back to these topics learned from school in order to make something that I needed, only to look online for specific syntax as needed.
Truth Tables
Before taking discrete structures (discrete math), I only took philosophy of logic because I was planning to go into law before I switched over to the economics field during my initial degree because of how little the opportunity it is after graduating law school based on stories from real law graduates. As such, I stopped pursuing that path yet what was taught during that initial journey was truth tables and converting statements into symbols and alike (Literally similar to CS 225 without any proofs or math – just reading and logic analysis).
This Boolean logic translated really well to Excel – in fact, you can construct a truth table in excel using the AND, OR, and NOT functions as you can also do with the operators in programming.
Linear Algebra
I was thinking about going into graduate school in economics so I took this class. I was not particular the best at mathematics but if I had to do something, I will do something for what it takes. Think of matrices – the 2D array or table. Do you understand how the cells would look like after you transpose from a vertical table into a horizontal one? This is where linear algebra and all its table like glory kicks in such as the dot product on an array of numbers. This translated to the special function called Sumproduct in excel!
Other Math – Differential Equations
Differential equations, like calculus, was pointless but I only took it so I can take Linear Algebra. However, there is a concept called “super position” where you have the homogeneous and auxiliary equations “added” together! This relates to Excel where I have a main function finding a certain value acting as the homogeneous equation and then the correction function acting as the auxiliary equation. This certainly helped me make and solve some insane problems on my job working in finance like what if a consumer bought our product if we change these certain aspects on the cost of the product?
Macros
Once I was starting me initial career, I got sick of doing the same spreadsheet formatting and calculations repeatedly. So, I looked into what I can do to simplify my work. Macros was the solution, it used Visual Basic as the language so I spent some of my evenings after work and weekends to learn the language on my own to automate some of the monotonous workload that I had to do.
My visual basic code, reflecting back, was horrendous and procedural but it did get the job done. All I did was look for the vital code that I needed and build on that accordingly. After that, rather than spending on an average of 8 or more hours a day (depending on the time of year), my time working decreased to about 4 hours of work load per day so stress levels were decreased significantly.
I understand the power of coding and this actually piqued my interest in learning more of programming. In fact, there are a lot of talks about how my job was going to be automated away in the future so the choice is to look into ways to get into the field.
Recall that I went back to community college to learn basic coding? This was the cause of it. Obviously, community college classes did not have the upper division classes so I did not pursue further there until I learned of OSU.
At the end
Although I cannot show the formulas that I have made in the past from work since all that are a part of those long spreadsheets, I can say that it did help me build some of the intuition and programming logic early as I continued to move on my career.
Obviously, at the end, I did not go into graduate school as you can refer back to my blog on my technology experience (Blog 5). Regardless, Excel is great! It uses a lot of the background that I have learned at my original undergraduate university and it got my hands wet to prepare me for the postbacc CS degree here at OSU.
