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Beyond Number

My former co-worker C is an Excel artist too just that he uses it in more conventional ways as a data scientist. When I first started in that team, I was introduced to C as the one with all the answers and the reasons for those answers. It sounded cryptic at the time but I understood why that was said of him within a couple of months. If you did not understand a number and asked C for help, you would get a deep-dive that would leave you deeply impressed. He knew so many layers of detail about every cell of the summary tab of his fabled spreadsheet, that you would leave dazzled. 

And there was always more to add if you came back with another question another time. It was if we were looking at the spreadsheet in completely different ways. He probably saw shape, form, color, and texture in each cell where someone like me only saw numbers. That was the only way to explain how he explained things. When C moved on to bigger, better things, he was replaced by someone more "traditional". A sharp data science guy who saw the numbers, could make sense of it all, and could competently do the job. None of us has any complaints about him but this was no artist like C for sure. We learn to adjust our expectations with time. 

“I never used Excel at work but I saw other people making pretty graphs and thought, ‘I could probably draw with that,’” says 73-year old Tatsuo Horiuchi. About 13 years ago, shortly before retiring, Horiuchi decide he needed a new challenge in his life. So he bought a computer and began experimenting with Excel. “Graphics software is expensive but Excel comes pre-installed in most computers,” explained Horiuchi. “And it has more functions and is easier to use than [Microsoft] Paint.”


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