Excel
This is just a link dump of all the resources I point my students to when I teach Excel usage.
These resources are not about Excel, but about the adjacent topics one should delve into in order to use Excel effectively.
- Plotting:
- Seaborn is a Python graph library with beautiful and sensible defaults. The graph gallery can serve as an inspiration and a catalog.
- A layered grammar for graphics explains the vocabulary of graphs and how these words articulates with one another to construct meaningful graphs.
- https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/top/?sort=top&t=all Get some inspiration. Read the comments.
- Read Edward Tufte's books, espcially
- The visual display of quantitative information
- Beautiful evidence
- Envisionning information
- Tidy data explains why one row per event/object is the way to live.
- Time
- Macs used to have an apple of the command key.
- Programming as theory building can be applied to building excel sheets as well as programs.
- Naming things
- Constraint optimization:
- See some examples of easy business problems to turn into constraints here https://www.purplemath.com/modules/linprog2.htm
- See more academic/pedagogical examples, but with a straightforward industrial flavor here https://github.com/Alexander-Schiendorfer/cp-examples
- Hakank's page is full of links and resources about Constraint programming:
- http://www.hakank.org/
- He's also an active user on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hakank https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=hakank
- The theory of constraints builds on the idea that only one constraint is binding at a time, and one should focus on identifying and removing it. A gentle introduction can be found in novelized form
- The following series of courses on Coursera will let you deep dive on the topic. They do not use Python but what you will learn will be transferable to ORtools easily. I took those courses and I can't recommend them enough, they are very well made and enjoyable ! They are masters-level classes, and the difficulty is increasing, so check them out, but don't beat yourselves up if you can't solve everything easily !