Ew, you wrote a blog about Excel?
Yes I did. Sort of.
This is a blog about data, and interesting ways of exploring and understanding it. I do that (mostly) by building models. I’ve built financial models to figure out what a company is worth or how much I could afford to borrow for a mortgage, but I use the term much more broadly than that. Here are a few examples of models I’ve built:
- A model of a TV gameshow, to figure out how much it would pay out on average. It never launched, unfortunately, but they did build a set and film a pilot with Carol Vorderman, which was pretty cool for a nerdy guy like me…
- A model that analysed the distribution of winning margins in every (soccer) World Cup game to help me make predictions for a pool. Unfortunately, the 2014 World Cup had more goals per group stage game than any for decades, so I didn’t win the pool…
- Lots of models for games – e.g. one that solves Mastermind, one that solves mazes, and one that can play Battleship.
I’ve also built plenty that are more open-ended – trying to figure out what some set of data means, or find an interesting story (my first few posts will be about such models).
My preferred tool for modeling, at least for now, is Microsoft Excel – it’s incredibly powerful (far more than most people realize), almost universally available, and so widely used that 3 minutes on Google will answer almost any how-to question, even ones that feel really obscure. All the models mentioned above, and most of the ones I’ll write about here, were built in Excel.
If you’re wondering, the name of blog is taken from a song I wrote many years ago which set the names of many (not all!) of the functions in Excel to the tune of Tom Lehrer’s ‘The Elements‘. If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, you should probably find another blog…
The Excelements 