this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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Yeah, very good analogy actually...
I remember back in the day people putting stuff like 'Microsoft Word' under 'skills'. Instead of thinking 'oh good, they will be able to use Word competently', the impression was 'my god, they think Word is a skill worth bragging about, I'm inclined to believe they have no useful skills'.
'Excel skills' on a resume is just so vague, people put it down when they just figured out they can click and put things into a table, some people will be able to quickly roll some complicated formula, which is at least more of a skill (I'd rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I've seen in excel sheets).
Using an LLM is not a skill with a significant acquisition cost. To the extent that it does or does not work, it doesn't really need learning. If anything people who overthink the 'skill' of writing a prompt just end up with stupid superstitions that don't work, and when they first find out that it doesn't work, they just grow new prompt superstitions to add to it to 'fix' the problem.
Skill in Excel is wholly different than skills in other Office products. But if Excel is on your resume, your better expand and show what real use you've made of it. Otherwise it comes off just as you said.
That's the way I also think about learning fancy spreadsheet stuff. Spreadsheets are good for putting data into a graph. They're good for basic numeric stuff where there's a simple pattern that repeats. But, pretty soon you're in a situation where you should either have a real database or a real program. If you're doing a lot of manipulation of data, you should have a program with loops, conditionals, errors, exceptions, etc. and most importantly with comments. If you're storing a lot of data, you should be using a real database, not hundreds of lines in a spreadsheet.
If, at the end, you do want something visual, and don't feel like dealing with a graphics library, you can always export the data to a CSV and import that into a spreadsheet.
Way back in the day a bunch of people endorsed me on linkedin for a bunch of nonsense like that and I manually hid all of it lol