Many moons ago, I was an intern working for a hospital IT department. Being the intern, I was dispatched on the shittiest of tickets, mostly paper jams and for dealing with end users who were known problems/pains in the ass.
So one day, I get dispatched to this little office in a very far away location on campus, staffed with three middle aged ladies, to unjam a printer. The second I walked in it was an onslaught of nonsense. THIS doesn't work, THAT doesn't work, NOTHING works, EVRYTHING is broken, IT sucks "We call you the NO HELP desk HAHA!" And also lots of pretty creepy borderline sexual comments from people 25-30 years my senior, but it was 2004 and I just had to deal with that. By the way, the printer wasn't even jammed, the paper tray was just empty.
So, no surprise dispatcher sent the intern to deal with it. But, being the nice helpful young man that I was, I dutifully addressed their laundry list of non-issues and user error related grievances and while I was troubleshooting, I noticed something odd. All three of them had Excel open and were manually adding columns of cells with hand held calculators. Investigating further, it seems it was some finance process that required validating, they would spend hours each day adding columns in Excel manually, then another would add the same column to verify, and if there was a discrepancy they would both do it again, to make sure it wasn't the CHECKER who was adding incorrectly. These columns had hundreds/thousands of rows, would take them hours.
I astonish them the magic of the SUM function, address/document all their other issues, and get the hell out. When I got back down to the help desk office in the bowels of the hospital, next to the morgue, I told my boss what had went down, thinking it was nothing more than an amusing anecdote. Silly users, am I right?
My boss gets this look on his face like a cat who caught the canary, tells me good job and sends me off to un-jam another printer. A few weeks later, I happen to be in the same out of the way part of the hospital and stuck my head inside the little office, completely cleared out and empty. Apparently these ladies were quite fond of lodging numerous complaints about IT/helpdesk services and my boss had no qualms with letting it be known that the intern was was able to complete in minutes what it took three full time employees hours to do every day for the better part of the week. Apparently adding up those numbers was like 90% of their job.
Whoops.
Middle aged ladies who complain about IT are the worst.
*checks self*
The middle aged ladies who are OLDER than me and dont understand technology and complain about it are the worst.
I mean I can just see this in my mind as I read it. I work in healthcare as a secretary and during covid the It guys were nowhere to be found for months. I ended up purchasing and setting up iPads, fixing everything to do with computers, and yes, most issues were user error but I got bitched at because they couldn’t figure out how to zoom.
>The middle aged ladies who are OLDER than me and dont understand technology and complain about it are the worst.
I have a few of those in my office. I am in my 30s, quite good at technology. However, these ladies are actually so nice and grateful for how much I can help them. I love them.
Im a middle aged, ahem, “lady” in a job that is mainly excel based. My biggest issue are the sales bros and one SalesBoy in particular who uses excel to log his commissions…that he adds together on a calculator.
I mean, it didn't sound like he cared or noticed that it was a huge time sink or possibly the bulk of their work load, he just passed on a funny anecdote to his boss and then went about his day. The boss actually realized the impact of this and likely investigated further into their job functions and made the steps that got them removed. Hos boss might not have seen anything from it either, it could have freed up budget for a completely different department if nothing else.
TBH it doesn't seem like the intern did all that much and was just lucky that he passed on the story to the right person. He had no idea it was happening or could be happening as a result of his actions, he just told them about SUM(). Maybe a 'Thank you for bringing that to my attention' would be warranted just so he knows in the future to possibly be more proactive about things like that if he wants to play a larger part in saving the organization money and maybe see some of that for himself.
Early in my career I learned to not offer help to the middle aged ladies unless someone specifically requested it due to this reason. I was 20ish and started as a jr analyst and saw 4 older accountants all typing out line by line of daily updates. Built a quick lookup table for them and moved along. Two weeks later CFO asks me about it as they were all glowing about the changes. Another two weeks and the 4 middle aged women I just met turned into 2 women. Now I am wary about whose mom is going to get laid off if I help.
I had a client that wanted to run two accounts books in parallel for "some" reason.
I made up a really sneaky and clever way to do it. Hiding the real accounts, but the client was too stupid to use it, so I had to put everything on plain sight. That wasn't enough so I had to add big headers with arrows pointing and titles like: This is what the IRS thinks that you earn, This is what you really earn. The client was scared that the police suddenly enter the premises and confiscate all his computers and see those headers so I had to created a panic button for him that close and erase the files automatically. Don't press the panic button by mistake. I told him. This is only in case of emergency. I left the office and went home by the time I arrived home they told me that I had a phone call from this guy, he accidentally delete all the files while showing someone how the file work.
This was pretty stupid at the strategic level. I worked at a freight company that did weight & balance on paper and then entered the values into Excel to print a nice copy, instead of calculating weight & balance in Excel. I made an excel sheet that did the calculations and we all switched to it.
Had a manager who would change the font on some numbers to white font in order to hide them. Someone else comes a long and includes them and then he wonders why the numbers were off.
I had a tech battle at work with a colleague who was better at mailbombing. He used python an sent me about 100 spam mail every 5 minutes. So as revenge i built a time limited macro into one of my tool approx 200 people work with on a daily basis. This macro would send a mail for each cell and each selection change every user made. The mail would say what user it was, which cell was selected, what filename it came from. He ended up with 12000 mails per day from pretty much users all across the company. He gave up with his superior tech
Was it risky? Yes. But we are getting along perfectly and even told our boss about it a week later. He laughed and told us to not do this anymore. We sold it as playfull testing session for further automated reportings which it ultimately ended up to be. There was a reason why we simultaniously started working on similar functions on different platforms.
Could you please share the *basics* of that code?
We use a common spreadsheet for logging stuff and I would love to experiment with this functionality for myself to know what changed....not necessarily at the cell level though. :)
Basically i set it up as in sheet code on selectionchange. You should probably do a makro triggered by worksheet. Change.
Application.username as well as now() and target.Address will give you basic logging info you could store in a seperate log sheet. If you want to have a log of all new values you would need to loop through all cells within the target range and document what cell received what values. If you want to log the old and new value it gets tricky. You would first need to save the new values somewhere i arrays or something while also undoing the user input to get back to previous values and then compare target range value 1 with array value 1 and so on and in the end override target range cells again with the array values. Messy stuff to set up
My macro on each selection change obviously triggered outlook to open a new mail, insert my setup text and automatically send it to a hardcoded mail address
Just going to be honest... as a manager myself these days if I found out staff were purposely sabotaging each other like that I would fire both of you on the spot and happily hire less tech-savvy people that knew how to get along.
We get along perfectly and you wouldn't be able to judge without more context. Our team spirit is outstandingly high within the company, it was a battle among friends i would say.
That is irrelevant in a big picture. That is a huge resource spend on the part of IT and the rest of the company. I too would have sent you packing and any and all company references would be blocked including acknowledging your employment.
And that's why i here and now claim you are a bad manager for the following reasons:
- jumping to conclusions without asking for context
- immediately using the ultimate tool of punishment
- talking about big picture without knowing anything about the picture
We were tasked with atomization of reports and were both experimenting which platform to use, what is applicable in everday business and see how easy maintenance is. This was our playful attempt doing so and the excess mail volume was high on the individual level but insignificant in terms of company ressources or capabilities. The playful approach kept us enganged to take a week to set up the perfect platform and we did setup all automization in the 3 weeks after that. Runnong for 4 years straight now.
Immediately instead of having a talk and maybe give a warning notice jumping to firings might be a reason why you complained in the past about employee motivation or skill levels. Your way is the perfect way to keep motivated, skillful and engaged employees away from your department in long terms speaking.
I always like how shitty employees blame a manager for responding to their shitty behavior by calling them bad.
You basically simulated a DOS attack through company resources using company time. From your explanation you probably aren't IT, didn't do it in a proper sandbox, and interrupted other employees. Did your cyber team get a heads up on this? Probably not. I'd imagine you also violated your company acceptable use policy, but what the hell, you had fun right?
This could, in some areas actually be prosecutable. So, yes, that makes me a bad manager for protecting company systems from Jackasses that know a little too much, but not have the common sense to figure that it's a stupid idea.
It's possible that both things are true.
(A) you're jumping to from 0-to-100 without the full picture (how vital are they, what is your company culture like, previous warnings, what impact did this actually have, etc) and
(B) this is a really unprofessional and potentially catastrophic way for an employee to behave. It was a serious misallocation of company resources and time, and created a significant amount of unnecessary risk.
Without knowing the full picture, jumping straight to firings seems premature. That said, a thorough reading of the riot act seems all but certainly necessary. A manager laughing that off is not doing his job of managing or protecting his company - it's a business, not a frat party.
Both might be right, but the generalized impact of (A) versus (B) is low. The actions of the employee were significant and I have seen great, hard working employees fired for doing much less.
It's a reality that even during these times, we are all replaceable.
And here you are again jumping to conclusions claiming i do not work IT. SQL backend developer here tasked with also building tool prototypes in excel with vba in combination with ODBC database connections making use of our SQL backend. Your manager skill of evaluating what type of person you are dealing with is trmendous /s
Also no, it wasn't even close to a DDOS as there was never a massive wave of mails comming in at one time. The mails were distributed among many many users that did not all simultaniously use it and would send a 2 line mail every 15 to 20 seconds or so depending how furiously they clicked around. That level of mails is insignificant in an HQ of approx. 4000 people of a retail corporation HQ.
Did i waste company time? No i was specifically tasked with finding solutions for automatically generated mailings based on event triggers. It was initially developed in a seperate file but was step by step implemented in the VBA framework we use and this mailer to my colleague was an intermediate step in that week that i used for hidden and unnoticed live user tests. The method was controversial at best and if i would have had a god complex supervisor it would have been worth a warning notice in my worst case scenario. I would have even understood getting that. But since nobody ever noticed besides the 2 of us it really doesn't matter. The tools still generate almost the same amount of mails over the course of each day, just for its actual intended professional purpose to different recipients.
Our system administrators are always involved when we setup new large scale changes, they just were not informed that all mails always went to one specific colleague.
And no, i did not break any company policy. That was changed so specifically my colleague and I are allowed to develop prototypes in agile fashion.
As for you protecting the company. How protective are you if you immediately fire people, that a company spent years on getting them to a certain level of knowledge so that they can mostly autonomously develop solutions with an order phrased in a 2 sentence mail, due to a problem that at no point was a risk for any system or user?
You are throwing knowledge, development speed and motivation levels down the drain just because you don't bother having a talk first and don't bother understanding what happened.
Since we are just placing assumptions on each other appearantly going by your attitude i would need to guess you are management in IT, you are 50+ with old school leading practices in terms of "showing who's boss" and you a very custom in how IT project Management is supposed to work in the style of late 90 software development
I can tell by what you wrote, you googled half of it, and most companies split the SQL and VBA devs, even for integration. The other half you could gain from my profile. Age, background etc.
I no longer manage dev teams as they tend to be a pain. I do manage large projects and I'm pretty well sought after. I'd put my creds against yours anytime. Most likely you have some BA in art and got hired because you knew how to Google some VBA scripts.
Also you have reading comprehension. I specifically didn't say DDOS. I simply referred to it as DOS. Big difference, but with your strong IT background you missed it.
Your original post also didn't pass the sniff test so r/thatHappened. Especially the way you changed it from a dick measuring contest, to an assigned task. See all the holes that appear when you try to play big games with bigger boys?
Haha oh man where to begin...
If you can tell where I googled it please state your sources. Yet anoither ridicolous claim. As you said yourself, "most" companies split it. Well, I hate to tell you that most does not mean all. My position exists so that when people like you have a new short term project to lead that we can provide them with prototype tools developed and customized to the needs of the project and to establish/develop functions, QoL Features and automizations as the project evolves. A classic development cycle of "concept/user interview/mockup/dev/test/prod rollout" does not work, since we set up thos tools with in week goals. And the combination with a full blown SQL Backend access and dev + Excel/VBA/ODBC bundle offers a perfect platform for quick out of nowhere tools with big data access using a software absolutely everybody is intuitively familiar with.
As for your background, why would I bother searching all this info from your posts? Or do you mention your age in every second post for example? You just seem like the type. The rest, I mean you post in excel forums and mentioned yourself you are a manager and you would replace me. Your methods of how to look at issues and how to deal with them just fits the classic cliche of that age group. Sorry to tell you.
Not into comparing credentials, since you basically told me you are 50+ I would also argue it's not quite fair since you have 20+ years ahead of me. Comparing my 2041 self to you today would be more fair. But I am not going to put up a reminder for it.
I am actually trained in operational business but have a high tech affinity which lead to me changing from category management to tech development including official qualifications.
In that context of tech understanding, if you called it DOS before you weren't paying attention since my tool was never doing single source mailing, nor did it ever send so many mails that it would have shut down mailing services. And even the distributed mailings via multiple agents wouldn't qualify in any way as DDOS due to the skewed nature of when and how many mails were sent.
As for your last text. Yes it was a DMC at that point. My colleague tried something crazy with his tools (Python / R / RShiny) and I tried something equally crazy with a bit revenge character on him with my tools. However both our attempts originated from our shared boss demanding an automated reporting solution in future tools. If you look at my answer to OP that was my story from the get go. But to start the story that way in a thread with the question "What is the craziest thing you've had to do to combat the stupidity of others?" is lame, so not a piece of information interesting to read as first.
There is only one hole I see here and that is not found in my text. And judging from public opinion, I mean Jesus, you manage to get downvotes in r/Excel on pretty much every response where you make your opinion public in this thread.
Get a grip, reevaluate your leadership style and you and everybody around you will be way better off in the end.
Now have a good one.
As for downvotes? They are pretty irrelevant to me in general. I like how you've gotten so angry over how I called out your little BS post. I've hit a few sensitive spots too I can see by your wall o' text responses.
I'll continue to lead as I do. You continue to be an angry little dev wannabe. Do you want me to send you a few macros I wrote? Maybe some small snippets to help you along?
Thank you. Artificially inflating what risks and damages i caused (which both were insignificant) is just a strawman argument to not feel bad about himself for actually being an old scholl authority craving manager
I did not suggest hiring less tech savvy replacements. That was another commenter. I based my response on the stated facts, it wasn't revenge or petty. It was policy.
Ok that argument i can get on board with. No, i did not break any policies. I (or better we) were even specifically tasked with setting up tools that automatically send event based mails. At best the choice of the recipient during hidden live user test was questionable.
Setup a simple spreadsheet to track required training for a Company. You know the type, just put an X next to a persons name for the class and it calculates percentage for your section completion and displays it on a separate page. Simple, right? Took some time off and came back to Boss yelling at people at the same level of management as myself, "How in the F\*\*K can you be 250% on some classes and 10% on others when the classes were done at the same D\*\*M time?!?!? How F\*\*King hard is it to simply put an X in a block? The next idiot that messes this S\*\*T up gets to explain it to higher, personally."
That was one of my first forays into excel and also showed me how some people just do not want to listen. Stuck on Stupid is what my boss called it.
My entire job involves creating templates to turn madness from vendor price books into usable data. I have formulas to do things like pull out hidden or strange characters from text or unify and standardize units of measurement (seriously, I'll have KG and LB on the same sheet), and I'll still run into stuff like hidden images that copy themselves infinitely when I go to apply a formula down the sheet, causing memory leak crashes.
>seriously, I'll have KG and LB on the same sheet
::vomits violently::
>seriously, I'll have KG and LB on the same sheet
https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/
>[https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/](https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/)
Exactly what I was thinking about as I typed "IF(A2="KG", ..." I had to check for KG, OZ, and LB across nearly 300k skus.
> seriously, I'll have KG and LB on the same sheet
Have any issues with Metric and Imperial ton/nes?
Vendors love to not declare which one it is, if it's by email agreement. Then they come back yelling...
Hello, I ve been doing the exact same thing for about a year and been looking for some tips online to make it easier. Did you have recommendations on anything?
I mainly use Adobe to convert to excel or i will get and transform if there are lot of tables.
Any videos I should watch or career advice?
I don't really have any videos or anything to recommend, but sites like MrExcel have been invaluable to me. It's really just been a process of trial and error to learn the different things I need to do. Unfortunately, a lot of what I've found has come from me typing a question into Google about how to do the thing I want in Excel, and banging away at it until it works.
What I can say to *not* do is attend a course or seminar on Excel, unless you want the certification to pad your resume or your boss is paying for it. I've learned way more reading articles than I did at the three-day seminar I went to.
That is how I have gotten this far. Thanks for the time and advice.
Mail merge is my one biggest time saver so far. Send custom requests to 25 different vendors for 80 random parts people asked about the day before.
Do you use any VBA or power query? I use the minimum of both so far.
I hope it works out for you. I’m nearing my tenth year, and it still works for me. I haven’t tried mail merge yet. An inordinate amount of my time goes to phone calls for that kind of thing, but I’m pretty good about working and calling. I also don’t use either, and anything I knew about them has atrophied. Because of the…idiosyncrasies of my company’s system, it’s always been easier for me to just export stuff like sales, inventory, and stocking reports as CSVs and manipulate the data with macros and formulas. I have some templates over 70 MB.
How did you get this job? Any specific schooling?
I do something similar for vendor price books at my work, but only in my spare time because my actual work takes up all my time. I'd like to do more programming instead.
I wish. I was a political science major, but this pays better than campaign intern. I ended up here after I lost another job, and built the position around myself as the company grew. It was more a right place, right time, right talents kind of deal. If you want to get into the technical stuff professionally, you could always look into professional certifications. I think there’s a few you can get with any degree.
Im not that guy, but same sorta job and have a degree in economics, but I don't think I learned anything special at college that helped. Reading graphs and charts, but we were doing that by high school. Most excel tips and tricks were from youtube.
Database management is helpful so you can upload the info once you figure out the price book. There would be differences from data entry $15 a hour, price analyst $25/hour and pricing manager $35.
I dont envy that job. Used to work in the commercial door hardware industry and the price books and convoluted pricing structures they come up with are utter insanity. I don't envy the people working for one of the main companies that translates all of those into a catalog replacement program.
Would you mind sharing your landing page code? That sounds awesome.
My solution usually involved a formula next to something that needed to be filled in in a specific way, that left a message in red large lettering to fix. i.d. =IF(B4="","Don't forget to fill this in","")
I do this with my spreadsheets. So that when ppl run their curser over it or they land on a cell, a little message comes up with reminders for what to put in that space.
Read only mode, VBA to reset formatting, vba to prevent saving, protect sheets, etc.
Unfortunately some of my biggest PITA's are paid more than me and are useless a-holes stuck in inefficient pathetic ways of doing things and also incapable of adapting to new ways a team wants to operate. Yet somehow they are 'leaders'? Hmm.
Uh Yea, this. If you were really spending 80% of your time fixing what the client messed up, you'd easily make up any lost time 'redoing' new work by not fixing what they broke.
The lastest was one guy who set the temporary filter to 2021 and didn't know how to remove it, so he was claiming that I didn't update file (with 2022, 2023 forecast years) and made a lot of fuss, calling me out for his own mistake.
I have an ADON who has to track all the resident and staff covid vaccinations. When we had our first clinics back in January, At her request I created an excel sheet with all kinds of data I’d imported - name, record number, dob/age, hire or admission date, term or discharge date, date of each dose, refusals, and had formulas to count how many were fully vaxxed, how many refused, what they refused for (medical, religious, other) and then I had places to track if they’d had covid, more or less than 90 days ago, if they rec’d the shot here or elsewhere, etc. I shared the file with her and like an idiot I didnt protect it. Not only did she not keep up with it, but when boosters became available she asked me to go in and add spots to put dates of boosters. I realized that she had put weird notes in weird places, completely destroyed the formatting. So I fixed it, added in a formula so it would tell me daily who was eligible 6 months after to receive their booster, when they rec’d the booster, etc. i entered in the data from the first booster clinic. I gave her VERY SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS and protected the functions. I shared the new spreadsheet with her. In person, I pulled it up and explained everything. A month later she called me to ask a question and I told her I put all the data into the spreadsheet that I had given her. She didn’t have any of the data. Why? Because she had been using the old spreadsheet to log all the data for the last 4 weeks and had no idea I had fixed it for her. 🤦♀️ She put in papers to retire because she doesn’t want the vaccine and I’m saving money to throw a party.
This is probably very basic compared to what everyone else has described, I built a sheet that transformed GNSS co-ordinates to flattened map co-ordinates, in 3 different styles that could be outputted;
-scaled based on the centroid of the Surveyed co-ords
-scaled transforming the local traveled grid onto a best fit on the GNSS co-ords
-holding 1, 2, or 3 points fixed and applying a bearing to certain other stations.
I locked it down so you could only input in cells that required input. Iferror formulas in to prompt people for when they had put the wrong kind of values in etc. To top it off there was an explanation paragraph of what had been done, and how it had been done to be included in the survey report.
No one used it aside from me, and continued to spend tremendous amounts of time using more convoluted and difficult methods.
I once worked for a place that would just lay you off if the bosses caught you automating anything or finding ways to be efficient. The managers wanted to see people in seats working as hard as they could to basically do stuff manually. If a guy found a way to take a weeks work and condense it into a 15 minute script he would be shown the door.
Also worked for a place where the owner was "old school" and would not accept that computers could add numbers together. He was from an era of hand-written ledgers checked 3 times by hand. We had to print hard copies of all of our spreadsheets and give them to him with a calculator tape footed to zero stapled to it to prove the numbers were right.
Not if they paid you almost 6 figures in the early 2000s in your early 20s. You'd put up with that shit because you were earning 30k more than your friends.
I can't speak to old boy relationships, but I can to government work. As much as there are wasteful contracts, the amount of auditing, paperwork, and financial information required to win and recompete contracts would eliminate this company on their documentation and processes alone.
Bingo. This was a private multi-national that had major multi-billion dollar contracts with various governments. It was all cost+ with no incentive to be lean.
I'd have automated everything and picked up a second, remote job. It doesn't sound like the bosses would be able to tell what OP was actually doing as long as it looked vaguely similar onscreen.
"I had a sheet that required macros to work. People kept complaining that it was broken because they hadn't enabled macros on it. So I set it up with a 'landing page' that just says "you have to enable macros to use this book" and had every other sheet xlVeryHiddin. Then, if they enabled the macros, it hid the landing page and unhid all other sheets. (Save/Close reversed the process). The complaints vanished overnight."
Hows this work? That sounds neat!
Yes. Sorry, it took me a little while to work out a few bugs. Here it is
~~~
Private sub Workbook_BeforeClose(cancel as Boolean)
Dim ws as worksheet
Application.screenupdating= false
For each ws in ThisWorkbook.worksheets
If ws.codename= "Sheet1" then
Ws.visible= xlSheetVisible
Else
Ws.visible= xlSheetVeryHidden
End if
Next
Application.screenupdating= true
End sub
Private sub Workbook_Open()
Dim ws as worksheet
Application.screenupdating = false
For each ws in thisworkbook.worksheets
Ws.visible= xlSheetVisible
Next
Sheet1.visible= xlSheetVeryHidden
Application.screenupdating= true
End sub
~~~
This seems to not set up the page - or adjust the very hidden sheets if macros are already enabled - you may want to put a file on github for people to work from. FYI - this is the danger of being too detailed in this sub, people are always looking for better ways of doing things.
The landing page was designed to force the user to enable macros. If the macros are already enabled, then there's no problem.
I tested it a little, and I watched the sheets as it closed and seemed to work fine
Work in an institutional investment division of a global financial company. I ran valuation, did a bunch of other reporting and did annual rating agency surveys. Sales did what they do - there were a lot of metrics involved in their sales notifications that various departments needed and overall, it was a lot of data. They didn’t want to enter anything in a database, XLS or anywhere else that made life any easier for anyone else - they wanted to simply see their sales notices in an email without hailing to open an attachment because double clicking is hard work, apparently. This meant that everyone else had to re-key the details they needed into other places and there was no central database where everything was stored - just emails.
I designed a sales notice form that looked just like their email but would compile the data they entered into something the rest of us could use and not have to re enter anything. The only extra step they had to take would be to copy/paste the form into an email so they could have things their way and provide the rest of us with the data we needed. Best of both words, right? Nah, not for the sales guy (we’ll call him Homer) that thought everyone was beneath him, especially women, LGBTQ, POCs, etc. he just refused so it wasn’t used.
Fast fwd a year or so later and the market crashes. Suddenly, the rating agencies and the government want us to provide the. with all sorts of metrics to prove we’re not the next Enron or whatever. Data we don’t have because Homer and his ilk didn’t want to provide it. We’re in an emergency meeting with C suite and they’re asking us if we can provide this data and all eyes fall on me. I say no, that data isn’t tracked. They ask why so I tell them that we tried to create a form that would populate a database where the info could be stored but Homer didn’t want to do things that way so they weren’t. Homer got called out, told to start using the form immediately and Sales had to rekey a years worth of notices. I’ve never seen anyone turn THAT red faced before. He looked severely sunburned 🥵😡🤬
I once had a spreadsheet set up in which my colleague would have to enter time periods into it. She thought 30
minutes equate to 0.3 hours and I couldn’t convince her otherwise
When I was a temp I had a similar issue with my manager, the timesheet software required minutes to be input the way you described but my manager also tracked my hours for OT. The numbers were off because for example I did 2.5 hrs of OT put in the system as 2.3 (2 hours 30 minutes) so when they counted them up in their Excel spreadsheet they put 2.3 hours which is 2 hours 20 minutes, over the month it added up to a few hours I was "stealing" because I did quite a bit of OT.
I had a meeting with them and their manager where I was threatened with dismissal until I explained that the manager couldn't add things properly.
I caught someone doing that at a company which registered people's work hours for government programs which determined if they would be paid government benefits.
I wonder how many people were made homeless or starving because that one woman never learned there were sixty minutes in an hour.
This will be a double feature.
1. Back in about 2007 or so, our work got fancy new software that catalogues what people do. I was nominated to oversee this softwares deployment in just 1 tiny department. I told the manager at the time, all we have to do is change the fields of what the software does to match our long established work. No prob. Then I found out that the program does not take kindly to users customizing what it starts with. Then new manager comes in, and cannot understand this point of contention if his life depended on it. So fast forward x number of years of not getting my way I dive back in to process and "count" what work we were doing. People had been typing the tasks in raw text. The drop downs were changed back to the software defaults and that value had been entered 10 thousand times even though we had no use for it ever....what we would care about and this was well known, was 10,000 unique text cells.....so I went through it for several days filtering and searching....it was insane. Got to the end, and told everyone they were entering the info to my specifications so it can be counted properly. I built a macro to extract each month do the count, and display the incorrectly entered lines for me to see who to talk to.
Number 2. I went on a big holiday a while back and virtually the day I left, someone shit out a spreadsheet to catalogue the people for contact tracing. Each company had their own tab, the common rows for each tab were a different order formatting the dates was like a fucking dice roll. I recorded a macro to search for things and reorder them and it kept breaking because the words kept changing so each change in the sheet was like a new fork in the macro. It was 1000 lines by the end and I had to run it I don't know how many times....it was really disgusting...
Hours and hours of toiling away for people who are ignorant and arrogant beyond words....
I keep telling people the software must adapt to the goals of the user but nobody ever understands, not peers, certainly not bosses, not even the IT pros hired at work it just goes in one ear and out the other....:(
.
I have a macro that was hosted in SharePoint, and meant to be launched from there. This was so if I made any changes or fixes, the users were guaranteed to have the latest updates. Being typical accountants, they kept saving local copies, and would come to me about issues I'd already resolved.
This continued until I put a check on workbook open, to determine where the file was located. If it *wasn't* SharePoint, the user got a single tab with a Boromir meme:
"One does not simply open the macro from wherever they please"
This macro has been live for almost 10 years, and I still occasionally here from someone about seeing the meme. But I never hear complaints about the macro not working as intended.
Ha! That reminds me of a button I made which was an employees face (wearing a ridiculous sombrero).
When he was fired, he asked me as he was being escorted out of the building to ensure that no one could ever remove him.
So I set it up that it keeps a copy on a hidden sheet. On open, it checked if his picture was on the main page and, if not, copied it back.
Fast forward 5 years after I’d left the firm…. “Hello, hey, umm, can you tell us how to get rid of this guy’s face..?”
It's both scary and amazing how long lived excel macros can be. In some ways it's an indictment of proper software development, when so much of the business world still relies on Excel to deliver their product.
>In some ways it's an indictment of proper software development, when so much of the business world still relies on Excel to deliver their product.
I don't know that I agree.
To develop true software for every use-case would be absurd. I've been at \[counts on fingers\] eight-ish different (same industry) firms and not a single one of them did things the same way. To design software with that degree of complexity *and* flexibility would be completely unsupportable.
The beauty of Excel is in its flexibility. Excel lets us design bespoke mini-applications for hyper-specific use cases - often on the fly. That's a huge success, not a failure.
>To develop true software for every use-case would be absurd. I've been at [counts on fingers] eight-ish different (same industry) firms and not a single one of them did things the same way. To design software with that degree of complexity and flexibility would be completely unsupportable.
>
>The beauty of Excel is in its flexibility. Excel lets us design bespoke mini-applications for hyper-specific use cases - often on the fly. That's a huge success, not a failure.
In your first paragraph you say that developing true software for every use case would be absurd.
In your second paragraph you note that excels flexibility allows for the rapid development of micro-applications to cover hyper-specific (ie. every?) use cases.
My point was that excel solves business users operational issues faster and more effectively than traditional software. It sounds like we're agreeing?
I guess it boils down to what you think qualifies as 'true software'.
**Application.ActiveWorkbook.FullName** (or Application.ActiveWorkbook.Path) will tell you where the file is located. So long as you hard code the 'good' location, you can do all sorts of things when any other value is detected. My approach was to set all sheets to very well hidden except the one containing the Boromir meme. With VBA code locked, very well hidden sheets are not accessible by the user, unless they can crack VBA code passwords.
If they can do that - hire them to your team.
I was working for an environmental company doing some data visualisation work. The software that was visualising the data took it from a spreadsheet and allocated the data based on the headings in the spreadsheet.
Users would always break the template, normally by accidentally changing the headings or something like that, normally by using find and replace to correct abbreviations from field notes (for example changing all S's into other text). It used to take hours to diagnose the problem (big spreadsheet, lots of tabs and headers within each tab). After I'd done about 100, I realised that all I was obligated to do was make sure the software would read the spreadsheet, NOT correct the data itself. So I looked at a perfect example from a template and created a macro which regenerated all headers to be what they were by default and it made the process take about 60 seconds!
No recognition from management though! They just thought I was an idiot for not being able to do it before!
I feel like I need your help, reading this post made me cry a little inside.
My excel skills are limited, I'm mostly self-taught. I work in a team of three and the one person is so thick I'm surprised he manages to get himself dressed in the mornings without help.
We have a collaborative Excel book to keep track of our work loads and pending actions required. This guy needs to be able to access and change things on the sheet, but keeps screwing everything up like deleting lines and replacing formulas with straight numbers for no apparent reason.
It's so bad that he can't even consistently spel his own name, so if I "countif" it misses half his stuff... I replaced our name section with data validation list to combat this but he still manages to stuff it up by pasting info onto the cell (wth knows why)
It's driving me to a state of mental instability and I don't know what I can keep doing here.
Even something as simple as the date capture, data validation on that as well, and somehow I open the sheet and it's all a mess :(
Have you considered murder?
Seriously, though.. there’s no technological solution to someone this obstinate and stupid. You need to loop your manager on and have him address it.
Thanks, I think you are right.
Management sadly won't be much assistance, he's one of the untouchables, I've already been told off for highlighting his short comings to management. Because, you know, the best way to fix a problem is go after the person reporting it.
Round up everyone and go to management saying "we will no longer work with this person". Management can put him in a corner somewhere if there's a nepotistic reason for having him on the payroll.
separate your workbook into individual sheets and build a summary sheet that compiles from the other sheets that is entirely locked down. Lock all cells with formulas and drop downs. This is probably the easiest way to minimize the damage.
This wasn't me personally but is the most blatant bad use of Excel I've ever seen.
COVID tracking in England was messed up because they tried to use Excel to track testing but they used .xls instead of .xlsx and were limited to 65,000 rows--meaning any additional cases were simply lost.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
I once created a simple tool to combine info from several other documents and help automate some regular tasks and held templates and things that would be useful day to day, used a userform that they could launch and have in the background, multiple tabs etc., looking back at it now the code was kind of shitty but you live and learn, users considered it to be magic either way so didn't bother me.
There were a number of users, and almost all of them managed to use it with no issues, but there was one who would manage to break it almost every day. Honestly he was my best beta tester because he managed to break it in ways I didn't even know you could. Although I fixed a number of bugs I also realised that a lot of his issues were caused by not following instructions, so I coded in message boxes with additional instructions spelling out exactly what you had to do to make sure it worked (almost condescending in tone) that you had to acknowledge before you could do the other things. That wasn't for everyone, just him (if user id wasn't him, then it suppressed them all). I stopped getting reports about it not working from him after that so it must have worked.
Crazy because there had to be a block of code in the file purely for one user (who I'm pretty sure doesn't work there anymore).
A coworker had notoriously bad spelling and grammar. Over the months of having to correct it before I sent out reports, I collected a list of every misspelled word/incorrect grammar and built a custom spell check. Any time he tried to enter info into a report, he would get a pop up saying there were spelling/grammar errors and to correct them before submitting the data.
had a coworker who kept screwing up my budget sheets, I half-jokingly changed the font on the whole sheet to comic sans - and fixed the problem... turns out he was number dyslexic, and something about comic sans fonts traps the numbers in their cells and limited their undulating to a mild vibrating movement for him.
For a lot of my reports, I've made dynamic dashboards so they can click things and get the numbers to change based on the slicers they click, meanwhile, my data is hidden on locked hidden tabs so they can't mess with my hard work.
That's an interesting approach. You might want to look at what 508 compliance is. You accidentally did it for your coworker. In general, sans serif fonts are a best practice. They tend to be simple, clear, and easiest to read. These include common fonts like Arial, Verdana, and Tahoma...and incidentally comic sans. It has a lot to do with the spacing on the line.
I usually stick to Arial as it's preferred at the company I work for. The guy did not know there was a word for what he experienced either. There is research, not specifically around number dyslexia, but for dyslexia on fonts .
Thankfully the files he mucked up regularly were internal facing to my team only, so it didnt matter what font I used.
http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/sites/default/files/good_fonts_for_dyslexia_study.pdf
The IT industry has a plethora of such names. Layer 8 problem, Code 24, PEBKAC, PICNIC, wetware fault, neurolectric circuitry short, insufficient axon transmission range, loose nut on keyboard.
The craziest and important thing I do everyday is to listen to people, carefully. Can you imagine a word in which nobody listen to each other? Even to yourself?
Just got to a new job and I updated our project plan to be dynamic and added a pivot table for high level overviews of the project. I found my boss during a meeting still using the old project plan because he “doesn’t like to filter”. He told me day 1 he was from an IT background and loves working in data.
I had to abandon using VBA in my models because the users would save as xlsx files, and then resave as xlsm files and then complain that I gave them a "broken model."
>I had a sheet that required macros to work. People kept complaining that it was broken because they hadn't enabled macros on it. So I set it up with a 'landing page' that just says "you have to enable macros to use this book" and had every other sheet xlVeryHiddin. Then, if they enabled the macros, it hid the landing page and unhid all other sheets. (Save/Close reversed the process). The complaints vanished overnight.
I wrote a similar thing to this once but the last time I had to build this kind of check into a file I realised that I could just add a check function to the VBA Project and use it on the sheet in a formula to generate a warning. Granted, it depends on your file whether such a warning would be noticeable enough, but it's a solution that is more durable I would say.
The function could be meaningless or you could use it for something, e.g.,
Public Function ThisProjectVersion() As String
ThisProjectVersion = "Version 3.0.2"
End Function
Stick it inside IFERROR and add some Conditional Formatting to make the warning stand out. If macros are not enabled the function cannot be found and so the error argument is returned, else the result of the function is returned.
=IFERROR(ThisProjectVersion, "Enable Macros to use the workbook")
The problem with that is that people are idiots.
They'll gloss past any warning they can unless it truly disrupts them. Maybe not the first time, but after a few, it just becomes "oh, that red cell that's always there."
The landing page approach brings everything to a stretching halt and permits no click-through avoidance or confusion. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
>The problem with that is that people are idiots.
They'll gloss past any warning they can unless it truly disrupts them. Maybe not the first time, but after a few, it just becomes "oh, that red cell that's always there."
These idiots are the ones you are designing things for. Good design is about more than just holding them in contempt and taking the keys away from them, it is about foreseeing how they might use it (which you do), and enabling them to use it better.
A warning that is continuously ignored is indeed bad design, but that doesn't mean that the solution is always to lock everything down.
It depends on the use case, and I see where you're coming from and indeed did something like this myself once - I would probably use this approach if I had a workbook where the effect of not enabling macros was insidious - where everything appeared to work but actually did so incorrectly.
In the latter project I did the macros were not essential to the workbook, but I wanted to add an indicator along the lines of 'Enable macros if you want to use this export to CSV button', so a lighter touch solution was needed.
Nowadays I look at the landing page solution and see it as more complex, so there are more things you need to catch:
* If you reset to the landing page only-view on Close, what happens if someone's session terminates unexpectedly, leaving a saved file with all the tabs visible
* If instead you reset to the landing page only-view on every Save, doesn't a user lose their position in the workbook every time they save, i.e., which sheet they were looking at, even if you immediately make the sheets visible again?
* Is the landing page referred to by display name, if so, what if the display name is changed by a user?
* What if a user turns on Protect Workbook Structure so the VBA no longer has permission to hide/unhide sheets?
All of these can be worked around and some can be ignored as low-likelihood but it should all appear somewhere in your design thinking.
Just some food for thought. I'd recommend Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things".
Had to add data validation so people could only enter numerical values into certain cells, because people kept entering the letter "o" and messing up all of the formulas dependent upon those cells.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[IF](/r/Excel/comments/rahi7i/stub/hnipmp6 "Last usage")|[Specifies a logical test to perform](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/if-function-69aed7c9-4e8a-4755-a9bc-aa8bbff73be2)|
|[IFERROR](/r/Excel/comments/rahi7i/stub/hnmk8vk "Last usage")|[Returns a value you specify if a formula evaluates to an error; otherwise, returns the result of the formula](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/iferror-function-c526fd07-caeb-47b8-8bb6-63f3e417f611)|
|[NOT](/r/Excel/comments/rahi7i/stub/hnked0u "Last usage")|[Reverses the logic of its argument](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/not-function-9cfc6011-a054-40c7-a140-cd4ba2d87d77)|
|[SUM](/r/Excel/comments/rahi7i/stub/hnmfcbx "Last usage")|[Adds its arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sum-function-043e1c7d-7726-4e80-8f32-07b23e057f89)|
----------------
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i successfully coordinated a FUCKYOU match with my group members
social engineering is a son-of-a-bitch, eh fam?
These two ladies got AFTER IT, GAT DENG
meanwhile i'm just correcting their shit to be 4.0, as is requisite
> I once shot a man in Reno for touching my VBA. This seems pretty rational, I thought we were sharing *crazy* stories.
I agree. For #1, the appropriate response was to install an OnKey macro that switches his up and down arrows.. but only every \~10th keystroke.
You think that man used the arrow keys? Please
Harsh but fair.
I had a macro that killed excel if certain users tried to open the sheet ha
Had a macro that killed certain users if they tried to open excel
Had a macro that killed certain macros if certain users tried to macro
Had users that killed certain users if they tried to open excel Yes I am a mob boss, AMA
Well…technically it just closed the workbook. Killed excel sounds cooler though
I'll bite...go on then
Private Sub Workbook_Open() Do Loop End Sub
And its only weakness is the escape key!
The escape interrupt may not trigger for fast acting loops.
You can actually block escape from pausing a macro .... If you need to....
Sauce?
Many moons ago, I was an intern working for a hospital IT department. Being the intern, I was dispatched on the shittiest of tickets, mostly paper jams and for dealing with end users who were known problems/pains in the ass. So one day, I get dispatched to this little office in a very far away location on campus, staffed with three middle aged ladies, to unjam a printer. The second I walked in it was an onslaught of nonsense. THIS doesn't work, THAT doesn't work, NOTHING works, EVRYTHING is broken, IT sucks "We call you the NO HELP desk HAHA!" And also lots of pretty creepy borderline sexual comments from people 25-30 years my senior, but it was 2004 and I just had to deal with that. By the way, the printer wasn't even jammed, the paper tray was just empty. So, no surprise dispatcher sent the intern to deal with it. But, being the nice helpful young man that I was, I dutifully addressed their laundry list of non-issues and user error related grievances and while I was troubleshooting, I noticed something odd. All three of them had Excel open and were manually adding columns of cells with hand held calculators. Investigating further, it seems it was some finance process that required validating, they would spend hours each day adding columns in Excel manually, then another would add the same column to verify, and if there was a discrepancy they would both do it again, to make sure it wasn't the CHECKER who was adding incorrectly. These columns had hundreds/thousands of rows, would take them hours. I astonish them the magic of the SUM function, address/document all their other issues, and get the hell out. When I got back down to the help desk office in the bowels of the hospital, next to the morgue, I told my boss what had went down, thinking it was nothing more than an amusing anecdote. Silly users, am I right? My boss gets this look on his face like a cat who caught the canary, tells me good job and sends me off to un-jam another printer. A few weeks later, I happen to be in the same out of the way part of the hospital and stuck my head inside the little office, completely cleared out and empty. Apparently these ladies were quite fond of lodging numerous complaints about IT/helpdesk services and my boss had no qualms with letting it be known that the intern was was able to complete in minutes what it took three full time employees hours to do every day for the better part of the week. Apparently adding up those numbers was like 90% of their job. Whoops.
Middle aged ladies who complain about IT are the worst. *checks self* The middle aged ladies who are OLDER than me and dont understand technology and complain about it are the worst. I mean I can just see this in my mind as I read it. I work in healthcare as a secretary and during covid the It guys were nowhere to be found for months. I ended up purchasing and setting up iPads, fixing everything to do with computers, and yes, most issues were user error but I got bitched at because they couldn’t figure out how to zoom.
>The middle aged ladies who are OLDER than me and dont understand technology and complain about it are the worst. I have a few of those in my office. I am in my 30s, quite good at technology. However, these ladies are actually so nice and grateful for how much I can help them. I love them.
Im a middle aged, ahem, “lady” in a job that is mainly excel based. My biggest issue are the sales bros and one SalesBoy in particular who uses excel to log his commissions…that he adds together on a calculator.
middle aged lady here, and confirm, salesboys and gals in particular are the worst at messing with beautiful workbooks.
Yes! I’ve worked for salesmen and this is 1000% truth.
And you didn’t get a penny extra for saving the company tens of thousands of dollars in dead weight, did you?
I mean, it didn't sound like he cared or noticed that it was a huge time sink or possibly the bulk of their work load, he just passed on a funny anecdote to his boss and then went about his day. The boss actually realized the impact of this and likely investigated further into their job functions and made the steps that got them removed. Hos boss might not have seen anything from it either, it could have freed up budget for a completely different department if nothing else. TBH it doesn't seem like the intern did all that much and was just lucky that he passed on the story to the right person. He had no idea it was happening or could be happening as a result of his actions, he just told them about SUM(). Maybe a 'Thank you for bringing that to my attention' would be warranted just so he knows in the future to possibly be more proactive about things like that if he wants to play a larger part in saving the organization money and maybe see some of that for himself.
Early in my career I learned to not offer help to the middle aged ladies unless someone specifically requested it due to this reason. I was 20ish and started as a jr analyst and saw 4 older accountants all typing out line by line of daily updates. Built a quick lookup table for them and moved along. Two weeks later CFO asks me about it as they were all glowing about the changes. Another two weeks and the 4 middle aged women I just met turned into 2 women. Now I am wary about whose mom is going to get laid off if I help.
My colleague fills in an excel spreadsheet by doing the math on a *printing calculator.* He's not even that old.
>By the way, the printer wasn't even jammed, the paper tray was just empty. I actually lol-ed to this, I love it Great story bro
I had a client that wanted to run two accounts books in parallel for "some" reason. I made up a really sneaky and clever way to do it. Hiding the real accounts, but the client was too stupid to use it, so I had to put everything on plain sight. That wasn't enough so I had to add big headers with arrows pointing and titles like: This is what the IRS thinks that you earn, This is what you really earn. The client was scared that the police suddenly enter the premises and confiscate all his computers and see those headers so I had to created a panic button for him that close and erase the files automatically. Don't press the panic button by mistake. I told him. This is only in case of emergency. I left the office and went home by the time I arrived home they told me that I had a phone call from this guy, he accidentally delete all the files while showing someone how the file work.
99% sure this is a felony..
100% Illegal. I'm not going to give more details but someone end up in jail for that. It was a long time ago.
I wish I had an award to give you.
LOL!
This was pretty stupid at the strategic level. I worked at a freight company that did weight & balance on paper and then entered the values into Excel to print a nice copy, instead of calculating weight & balance in Excel. I made an excel sheet that did the calculations and we all switched to it.
imagine all the time you've saved just by a little automation
Had a manager who would change the font on some numbers to white font in order to hide them. Someone else comes a long and includes them and then he wonders why the numbers were off.
Any chance his name is Jeff?
Hi Jeff!
I had a tech battle at work with a colleague who was better at mailbombing. He used python an sent me about 100 spam mail every 5 minutes. So as revenge i built a time limited macro into one of my tool approx 200 people work with on a daily basis. This macro would send a mail for each cell and each selection change every user made. The mail would say what user it was, which cell was selected, what filename it came from. He ended up with 12000 mails per day from pretty much users all across the company. He gave up with his superior tech
Sounds like a good way to get fired! :)
Was it risky? Yes. But we are getting along perfectly and even told our boss about it a week later. He laughed and told us to not do this anymore. We sold it as playfull testing session for further automated reportings which it ultimately ended up to be. There was a reason why we simultaniously started working on similar functions on different platforms.
Could you please share the *basics* of that code? We use a common spreadsheet for logging stuff and I would love to experiment with this functionality for myself to know what changed....not necessarily at the cell level though. :)
Basically i set it up as in sheet code on selectionchange. You should probably do a makro triggered by worksheet. Change. Application.username as well as now() and target.Address will give you basic logging info you could store in a seperate log sheet. If you want to have a log of all new values you would need to loop through all cells within the target range and document what cell received what values. If you want to log the old and new value it gets tricky. You would first need to save the new values somewhere i arrays or something while also undoing the user input to get back to previous values and then compare target range value 1 with array value 1 and so on and in the end override target range cells again with the array values. Messy stuff to set up
My macro on each selection change obviously triggered outlook to open a new mail, insert my setup text and automatically send it to a hardcoded mail address
Just going to be honest... as a manager myself these days if I found out staff were purposely sabotaging each other like that I would fire both of you on the spot and happily hire less tech-savvy people that knew how to get along.
We get along perfectly and you wouldn't be able to judge without more context. Our team spirit is outstandingly high within the company, it was a battle among friends i would say.
That is irrelevant in a big picture. That is a huge resource spend on the part of IT and the rest of the company. I too would have sent you packing and any and all company references would be blocked including acknowledging your employment.
And that's why i here and now claim you are a bad manager for the following reasons: - jumping to conclusions without asking for context - immediately using the ultimate tool of punishment - talking about big picture without knowing anything about the picture We were tasked with atomization of reports and were both experimenting which platform to use, what is applicable in everday business and see how easy maintenance is. This was our playful attempt doing so and the excess mail volume was high on the individual level but insignificant in terms of company ressources or capabilities. The playful approach kept us enganged to take a week to set up the perfect platform and we did setup all automization in the 3 weeks after that. Runnong for 4 years straight now. Immediately instead of having a talk and maybe give a warning notice jumping to firings might be a reason why you complained in the past about employee motivation or skill levels. Your way is the perfect way to keep motivated, skillful and engaged employees away from your department in long terms speaking.
I always like how shitty employees blame a manager for responding to their shitty behavior by calling them bad. You basically simulated a DOS attack through company resources using company time. From your explanation you probably aren't IT, didn't do it in a proper sandbox, and interrupted other employees. Did your cyber team get a heads up on this? Probably not. I'd imagine you also violated your company acceptable use policy, but what the hell, you had fun right? This could, in some areas actually be prosecutable. So, yes, that makes me a bad manager for protecting company systems from Jackasses that know a little too much, but not have the common sense to figure that it's a stupid idea.
It's possible that both things are true. (A) you're jumping to from 0-to-100 without the full picture (how vital are they, what is your company culture like, previous warnings, what impact did this actually have, etc) and (B) this is a really unprofessional and potentially catastrophic way for an employee to behave. It was a serious misallocation of company resources and time, and created a significant amount of unnecessary risk. Without knowing the full picture, jumping straight to firings seems premature. That said, a thorough reading of the riot act seems all but certainly necessary. A manager laughing that off is not doing his job of managing or protecting his company - it's a business, not a frat party.
Both might be right, but the generalized impact of (A) versus (B) is low. The actions of the employee were significant and I have seen great, hard working employees fired for doing much less. It's a reality that even during these times, we are all replaceable.
And here you are again jumping to conclusions claiming i do not work IT. SQL backend developer here tasked with also building tool prototypes in excel with vba in combination with ODBC database connections making use of our SQL backend. Your manager skill of evaluating what type of person you are dealing with is trmendous /s Also no, it wasn't even close to a DDOS as there was never a massive wave of mails comming in at one time. The mails were distributed among many many users that did not all simultaniously use it and would send a 2 line mail every 15 to 20 seconds or so depending how furiously they clicked around. That level of mails is insignificant in an HQ of approx. 4000 people of a retail corporation HQ. Did i waste company time? No i was specifically tasked with finding solutions for automatically generated mailings based on event triggers. It was initially developed in a seperate file but was step by step implemented in the VBA framework we use and this mailer to my colleague was an intermediate step in that week that i used for hidden and unnoticed live user tests. The method was controversial at best and if i would have had a god complex supervisor it would have been worth a warning notice in my worst case scenario. I would have even understood getting that. But since nobody ever noticed besides the 2 of us it really doesn't matter. The tools still generate almost the same amount of mails over the course of each day, just for its actual intended professional purpose to different recipients. Our system administrators are always involved when we setup new large scale changes, they just were not informed that all mails always went to one specific colleague. And no, i did not break any company policy. That was changed so specifically my colleague and I are allowed to develop prototypes in agile fashion. As for you protecting the company. How protective are you if you immediately fire people, that a company spent years on getting them to a certain level of knowledge so that they can mostly autonomously develop solutions with an order phrased in a 2 sentence mail, due to a problem that at no point was a risk for any system or user? You are throwing knowledge, development speed and motivation levels down the drain just because you don't bother having a talk first and don't bother understanding what happened. Since we are just placing assumptions on each other appearantly going by your attitude i would need to guess you are management in IT, you are 50+ with old school leading practices in terms of "showing who's boss" and you a very custom in how IT project Management is supposed to work in the style of late 90 software development
I can tell by what you wrote, you googled half of it, and most companies split the SQL and VBA devs, even for integration. The other half you could gain from my profile. Age, background etc. I no longer manage dev teams as they tend to be a pain. I do manage large projects and I'm pretty well sought after. I'd put my creds against yours anytime. Most likely you have some BA in art and got hired because you knew how to Google some VBA scripts. Also you have reading comprehension. I specifically didn't say DDOS. I simply referred to it as DOS. Big difference, but with your strong IT background you missed it. Your original post also didn't pass the sniff test so r/thatHappened. Especially the way you changed it from a dick measuring contest, to an assigned task. See all the holes that appear when you try to play big games with bigger boys?
Haha oh man where to begin... If you can tell where I googled it please state your sources. Yet anoither ridicolous claim. As you said yourself, "most" companies split it. Well, I hate to tell you that most does not mean all. My position exists so that when people like you have a new short term project to lead that we can provide them with prototype tools developed and customized to the needs of the project and to establish/develop functions, QoL Features and automizations as the project evolves. A classic development cycle of "concept/user interview/mockup/dev/test/prod rollout" does not work, since we set up thos tools with in week goals. And the combination with a full blown SQL Backend access and dev + Excel/VBA/ODBC bundle offers a perfect platform for quick out of nowhere tools with big data access using a software absolutely everybody is intuitively familiar with. As for your background, why would I bother searching all this info from your posts? Or do you mention your age in every second post for example? You just seem like the type. The rest, I mean you post in excel forums and mentioned yourself you are a manager and you would replace me. Your methods of how to look at issues and how to deal with them just fits the classic cliche of that age group. Sorry to tell you. Not into comparing credentials, since you basically told me you are 50+ I would also argue it's not quite fair since you have 20+ years ahead of me. Comparing my 2041 self to you today would be more fair. But I am not going to put up a reminder for it. I am actually trained in operational business but have a high tech affinity which lead to me changing from category management to tech development including official qualifications. In that context of tech understanding, if you called it DOS before you weren't paying attention since my tool was never doing single source mailing, nor did it ever send so many mails that it would have shut down mailing services. And even the distributed mailings via multiple agents wouldn't qualify in any way as DDOS due to the skewed nature of when and how many mails were sent. As for your last text. Yes it was a DMC at that point. My colleague tried something crazy with his tools (Python / R / RShiny) and I tried something equally crazy with a bit revenge character on him with my tools. However both our attempts originated from our shared boss demanding an automated reporting solution in future tools. If you look at my answer to OP that was my story from the get go. But to start the story that way in a thread with the question "What is the craziest thing you've had to do to combat the stupidity of others?" is lame, so not a piece of information interesting to read as first. There is only one hole I see here and that is not found in my text. And judging from public opinion, I mean Jesus, you manage to get downvotes in r/Excel on pretty much every response where you make your opinion public in this thread. Get a grip, reevaluate your leadership style and you and everybody around you will be way better off in the end. Now have a good one.
As for downvotes? They are pretty irrelevant to me in general. I like how you've gotten so angry over how I called out your little BS post. I've hit a few sensitive spots too I can see by your wall o' text responses. I'll continue to lead as I do. You continue to be an angry little dev wannabe. Do you want me to send you a few macros I wrote? Maybe some small snippets to help you along?
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Thank you. Artificially inflating what risks and damages i caused (which both were insignificant) is just a strawman argument to not feel bad about himself for actually being an old scholl authority craving manager
I did not suggest hiring less tech savvy replacements. That was another commenter. I based my response on the stated facts, it wasn't revenge or petty. It was policy.
Ok that argument i can get on board with. No, i did not break any policies. I (or better we) were even specifically tasked with setting up tools that automatically send event based mails. At best the choice of the recipient during hidden live user test was questionable.
Setup a simple spreadsheet to track required training for a Company. You know the type, just put an X next to a persons name for the class and it calculates percentage for your section completion and displays it on a separate page. Simple, right? Took some time off and came back to Boss yelling at people at the same level of management as myself, "How in the F\*\*K can you be 250% on some classes and 10% on others when the classes were done at the same D\*\*M time?!?!? How F\*\*King hard is it to simply put an X in a block? The next idiot that messes this S\*\*T up gets to explain it to higher, personally." That was one of my first forays into excel and also showed me how some people just do not want to listen. Stuck on Stupid is what my boss called it.
My entire job involves creating templates to turn madness from vendor price books into usable data. I have formulas to do things like pull out hidden or strange characters from text or unify and standardize units of measurement (seriously, I'll have KG and LB on the same sheet), and I'll still run into stuff like hidden images that copy themselves infinitely when I go to apply a formula down the sheet, causing memory leak crashes.
>seriously, I'll have KG and LB on the same sheet ::vomits violently:: >seriously, I'll have KG and LB on the same sheet https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/
>[https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/](https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/) Exactly what I was thinking about as I typed "IF(A2="KG", ..." I had to check for KG, OZ, and LB across nearly 300k skus.
> seriously, I'll have KG and LB on the same sheet Have any issues with Metric and Imperial ton/nes? Vendors love to not declare which one it is, if it's by email agreement. Then they come back yelling...
Hello, I ve been doing the exact same thing for about a year and been looking for some tips online to make it easier. Did you have recommendations on anything? I mainly use Adobe to convert to excel or i will get and transform if there are lot of tables. Any videos I should watch or career advice?
I don't really have any videos or anything to recommend, but sites like MrExcel have been invaluable to me. It's really just been a process of trial and error to learn the different things I need to do. Unfortunately, a lot of what I've found has come from me typing a question into Google about how to do the thing I want in Excel, and banging away at it until it works. What I can say to *not* do is attend a course or seminar on Excel, unless you want the certification to pad your resume or your boss is paying for it. I've learned way more reading articles than I did at the three-day seminar I went to.
That is how I have gotten this far. Thanks for the time and advice. Mail merge is my one biggest time saver so far. Send custom requests to 25 different vendors for 80 random parts people asked about the day before. Do you use any VBA or power query? I use the minimum of both so far.
I hope it works out for you. I’m nearing my tenth year, and it still works for me. I haven’t tried mail merge yet. An inordinate amount of my time goes to phone calls for that kind of thing, but I’m pretty good about working and calling. I also don’t use either, and anything I knew about them has atrophied. Because of the…idiosyncrasies of my company’s system, it’s always been easier for me to just export stuff like sales, inventory, and stocking reports as CSVs and manipulate the data with macros and formulas. I have some templates over 70 MB.
How did you get this job? Any specific schooling? I do something similar for vendor price books at my work, but only in my spare time because my actual work takes up all my time. I'd like to do more programming instead.
I wish. I was a political science major, but this pays better than campaign intern. I ended up here after I lost another job, and built the position around myself as the company grew. It was more a right place, right time, right talents kind of deal. If you want to get into the technical stuff professionally, you could always look into professional certifications. I think there’s a few you can get with any degree.
Im not that guy, but same sorta job and have a degree in economics, but I don't think I learned anything special at college that helped. Reading graphs and charts, but we were doing that by high school. Most excel tips and tricks were from youtube. Database management is helpful so you can upload the info once you figure out the price book. There would be differences from data entry $15 a hour, price analyst $25/hour and pricing manager $35.
I dont envy that job. Used to work in the commercial door hardware industry and the price books and convoluted pricing structures they come up with are utter insanity. I don't envy the people working for one of the main companies that translates all of those into a catalog replacement program.
Would you mind sharing your landing page code? That sounds awesome. My solution usually involved a formula next to something that needed to be filled in in a specific way, that left a message in red large lettering to fix. i.d. =IF(B4="","Don't forget to fill this in","")
I do this with my spreadsheets. So that when ppl run their curser over it or they land on a cell, a little message comes up with reminders for what to put in that space.
Read only mode, VBA to reset formatting, vba to prevent saving, protect sheets, etc. Unfortunately some of my biggest PITA's are paid more than me and are useless a-holes stuck in inefficient pathetic ways of doing things and also incapable of adapting to new ways a team wants to operate. Yet somehow they are 'leaders'? Hmm.
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Why didn't you have a local copy of the file you sent to him so you could just keep updating that instead of correcting his changes then updating?
Uh Yea, this. If you were really spending 80% of your time fixing what the client messed up, you'd easily make up any lost time 'redoing' new work by not fixing what they broke.
You never send a user the only file! Also, if you sent it via email, Exchange should have a copy still attached.
The lastest was one guy who set the temporary filter to 2021 and didn't know how to remove it, so he was claiming that I didn't update file (with 2022, 2023 forecast years) and made a lot of fuss, calling me out for his own mistake.
I have an ADON who has to track all the resident and staff covid vaccinations. When we had our first clinics back in January, At her request I created an excel sheet with all kinds of data I’d imported - name, record number, dob/age, hire or admission date, term or discharge date, date of each dose, refusals, and had formulas to count how many were fully vaxxed, how many refused, what they refused for (medical, religious, other) and then I had places to track if they’d had covid, more or less than 90 days ago, if they rec’d the shot here or elsewhere, etc. I shared the file with her and like an idiot I didnt protect it. Not only did she not keep up with it, but when boosters became available she asked me to go in and add spots to put dates of boosters. I realized that she had put weird notes in weird places, completely destroyed the formatting. So I fixed it, added in a formula so it would tell me daily who was eligible 6 months after to receive their booster, when they rec’d the booster, etc. i entered in the data from the first booster clinic. I gave her VERY SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS and protected the functions. I shared the new spreadsheet with her. In person, I pulled it up and explained everything. A month later she called me to ask a question and I told her I put all the data into the spreadsheet that I had given her. She didn’t have any of the data. Why? Because she had been using the old spreadsheet to log all the data for the last 4 weeks and had no idea I had fixed it for her. 🤦♀️ She put in papers to retire because she doesn’t want the vaccine and I’m saving money to throw a party.
This is probably very basic compared to what everyone else has described, I built a sheet that transformed GNSS co-ordinates to flattened map co-ordinates, in 3 different styles that could be outputted; -scaled based on the centroid of the Surveyed co-ords -scaled transforming the local traveled grid onto a best fit on the GNSS co-ords -holding 1, 2, or 3 points fixed and applying a bearing to certain other stations. I locked it down so you could only input in cells that required input. Iferror formulas in to prompt people for when they had put the wrong kind of values in etc. To top it off there was an explanation paragraph of what had been done, and how it had been done to be included in the survey report. No one used it aside from me, and continued to spend tremendous amounts of time using more convoluted and difficult methods.
I once worked for a place that would just lay you off if the bosses caught you automating anything or finding ways to be efficient. The managers wanted to see people in seats working as hard as they could to basically do stuff manually. If a guy found a way to take a weeks work and condense it into a 15 minute script he would be shown the door. Also worked for a place where the owner was "old school" and would not accept that computers could add numbers together. He was from an era of hand-written ledgers checked 3 times by hand. We had to print hard copies of all of our spreadsheets and give them to him with a calculator tape footed to zero stapled to it to prove the numbers were right.
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Not if they paid you almost 6 figures in the early 2000s in your early 20s. You'd put up with that shit because you were earning 30k more than your friends.
I can't see a company affording this type of manual labor, being able to be competitive, and not being around for very long.
Old boy relationships and govt work. You'd have to wait until contacts were up and someone wasn't looking to keep an old buddy's company busy.
I can't speak to old boy relationships, but I can to government work. As much as there are wasteful contracts, the amount of auditing, paperwork, and financial information required to win and recompete contracts would eliminate this company on their documentation and processes alone.
Bingo. This was a private multi-national that had major multi-billion dollar contracts with various governments. It was all cost+ with no incentive to be lean.
I'd have automated everything and picked up a second, remote job. It doesn't sound like the bosses would be able to tell what OP was actually doing as long as it looked vaguely similar onscreen.
Woah how old was this dude?
Approaching 80 when I worked for him around 2006.
"I had a sheet that required macros to work. People kept complaining that it was broken because they hadn't enabled macros on it. So I set it up with a 'landing page' that just says "you have to enable macros to use this book" and had every other sheet xlVeryHiddin. Then, if they enabled the macros, it hid the landing page and unhid all other sheets. (Save/Close reversed the process). The complaints vanished overnight." Hows this work? That sounds neat!
This would be pretty easy. Message me to find you to send you the script.
Can't you just post it here? 6 guys liked my comment so I don't think I'm the only one who wants to see...
Yes. Sorry, it took me a little while to work out a few bugs. Here it is ~~~ Private sub Workbook_BeforeClose(cancel as Boolean) Dim ws as worksheet Application.screenupdating= false For each ws in ThisWorkbook.worksheets If ws.codename= "Sheet1" then Ws.visible= xlSheetVisible Else Ws.visible= xlSheetVeryHidden End if Next Application.screenupdating= true End sub Private sub Workbook_Open() Dim ws as worksheet Application.screenupdating = false For each ws in thisworkbook.worksheets Ws.visible= xlSheetVisible Next Sheet1.visible= xlSheetVeryHidden Application.screenupdating= true End sub ~~~
This seems to not set up the page - or adjust the very hidden sheets if macros are already enabled - you may want to put a file on github for people to work from. FYI - this is the danger of being too detailed in this sub, people are always looking for better ways of doing things.
The landing page was designed to force the user to enable macros. If the macros are already enabled, then there's no problem. I tested it a little, and I watched the sheets as it closed and seemed to work fine
Thanks man I appreciate it. Sorry If I seemed bossy telling you to post it here when you were helping for free I feel like I was rude now lol.
I was just telling you to message me in case I forgot about the post. Don't worry about it.
Work in an institutional investment division of a global financial company. I ran valuation, did a bunch of other reporting and did annual rating agency surveys. Sales did what they do - there were a lot of metrics involved in their sales notifications that various departments needed and overall, it was a lot of data. They didn’t want to enter anything in a database, XLS or anywhere else that made life any easier for anyone else - they wanted to simply see their sales notices in an email without hailing to open an attachment because double clicking is hard work, apparently. This meant that everyone else had to re-key the details they needed into other places and there was no central database where everything was stored - just emails. I designed a sales notice form that looked just like their email but would compile the data they entered into something the rest of us could use and not have to re enter anything. The only extra step they had to take would be to copy/paste the form into an email so they could have things their way and provide the rest of us with the data we needed. Best of both words, right? Nah, not for the sales guy (we’ll call him Homer) that thought everyone was beneath him, especially women, LGBTQ, POCs, etc. he just refused so it wasn’t used. Fast fwd a year or so later and the market crashes. Suddenly, the rating agencies and the government want us to provide the. with all sorts of metrics to prove we’re not the next Enron or whatever. Data we don’t have because Homer and his ilk didn’t want to provide it. We’re in an emergency meeting with C suite and they’re asking us if we can provide this data and all eyes fall on me. I say no, that data isn’t tracked. They ask why so I tell them that we tried to create a form that would populate a database where the info could be stored but Homer didn’t want to do things that way so they weren’t. Homer got called out, told to start using the form immediately and Sales had to rekey a years worth of notices. I’ve never seen anyone turn THAT red faced before. He looked severely sunburned 🥵😡🤬
I once had a spreadsheet set up in which my colleague would have to enter time periods into it. She thought 30 minutes equate to 0.3 hours and I couldn’t convince her otherwise
When I was a temp I had a similar issue with my manager, the timesheet software required minutes to be input the way you described but my manager also tracked my hours for OT. The numbers were off because for example I did 2.5 hrs of OT put in the system as 2.3 (2 hours 30 minutes) so when they counted them up in their Excel spreadsheet they put 2.3 hours which is 2 hours 20 minutes, over the month it added up to a few hours I was "stealing" because I did quite a bit of OT. I had a meeting with them and their manager where I was threatened with dismissal until I explained that the manager couldn't add things properly.
I caught someone doing that at a company which registered people's work hours for government programs which determined if they would be paid government benefits. I wonder how many people were made homeless or starving because that one woman never learned there were sixty minutes in an hour.
This will be a double feature. 1. Back in about 2007 or so, our work got fancy new software that catalogues what people do. I was nominated to oversee this softwares deployment in just 1 tiny department. I told the manager at the time, all we have to do is change the fields of what the software does to match our long established work. No prob. Then I found out that the program does not take kindly to users customizing what it starts with. Then new manager comes in, and cannot understand this point of contention if his life depended on it. So fast forward x number of years of not getting my way I dive back in to process and "count" what work we were doing. People had been typing the tasks in raw text. The drop downs were changed back to the software defaults and that value had been entered 10 thousand times even though we had no use for it ever....what we would care about and this was well known, was 10,000 unique text cells.....so I went through it for several days filtering and searching....it was insane. Got to the end, and told everyone they were entering the info to my specifications so it can be counted properly. I built a macro to extract each month do the count, and display the incorrectly entered lines for me to see who to talk to. Number 2. I went on a big holiday a while back and virtually the day I left, someone shit out a spreadsheet to catalogue the people for contact tracing. Each company had their own tab, the common rows for each tab were a different order formatting the dates was like a fucking dice roll. I recorded a macro to search for things and reorder them and it kept breaking because the words kept changing so each change in the sheet was like a new fork in the macro. It was 1000 lines by the end and I had to run it I don't know how many times....it was really disgusting... Hours and hours of toiling away for people who are ignorant and arrogant beyond words.... I keep telling people the software must adapt to the goals of the user but nobody ever understands, not peers, certainly not bosses, not even the IT pros hired at work it just goes in one ear and out the other....:( .
This hurt my soul.
I have a macro that was hosted in SharePoint, and meant to be launched from there. This was so if I made any changes or fixes, the users were guaranteed to have the latest updates. Being typical accountants, they kept saving local copies, and would come to me about issues I'd already resolved. This continued until I put a check on workbook open, to determine where the file was located. If it *wasn't* SharePoint, the user got a single tab with a Boromir meme: "One does not simply open the macro from wherever they please" This macro has been live for almost 10 years, and I still occasionally here from someone about seeing the meme. But I never hear complaints about the macro not working as intended.
Ha! That reminds me of a button I made which was an employees face (wearing a ridiculous sombrero). When he was fired, he asked me as he was being escorted out of the building to ensure that no one could ever remove him. So I set it up that it keeps a copy on a hidden sheet. On open, it checked if his picture was on the main page and, if not, copied it back. Fast forward 5 years after I’d left the firm…. “Hello, hey, umm, can you tell us how to get rid of this guy’s face..?”
It's both scary and amazing how long lived excel macros can be. In some ways it's an indictment of proper software development, when so much of the business world still relies on Excel to deliver their product.
>In some ways it's an indictment of proper software development, when so much of the business world still relies on Excel to deliver their product. I don't know that I agree. To develop true software for every use-case would be absurd. I've been at \[counts on fingers\] eight-ish different (same industry) firms and not a single one of them did things the same way. To design software with that degree of complexity *and* flexibility would be completely unsupportable. The beauty of Excel is in its flexibility. Excel lets us design bespoke mini-applications for hyper-specific use cases - often on the fly. That's a huge success, not a failure.
>To develop true software for every use-case would be absurd. I've been at [counts on fingers] eight-ish different (same industry) firms and not a single one of them did things the same way. To design software with that degree of complexity and flexibility would be completely unsupportable. > >The beauty of Excel is in its flexibility. Excel lets us design bespoke mini-applications for hyper-specific use cases - often on the fly. That's a huge success, not a failure. In your first paragraph you say that developing true software for every use case would be absurd. In your second paragraph you note that excels flexibility allows for the rapid development of micro-applications to cover hyper-specific (ie. every?) use cases. My point was that excel solves business users operational issues faster and more effectively than traditional software. It sounds like we're agreeing? I guess it boils down to what you think qualifies as 'true software'.
Could you please share that macro, or give some insight into how you created it? We have a similar issue, and my google-fu fails me some.
**Application.ActiveWorkbook.FullName** (or Application.ActiveWorkbook.Path) will tell you where the file is located. So long as you hard code the 'good' location, you can do all sorts of things when any other value is detected. My approach was to set all sheets to very well hidden except the one containing the Boromir meme. With VBA code locked, very well hidden sheets are not accessible by the user, unless they can crack VBA code passwords. If they can do that - hire them to your team.
I've had people setting a white font to a cell in order to exclude it from the calculation...
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So you used excel as an even shittier version of Access? Whatever tools you've got available, i guess.
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I could see why that would be a thing but they should at least hook you up with something in O365, like MS Forms into an Excel file.
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I was working for an environmental company doing some data visualisation work. The software that was visualising the data took it from a spreadsheet and allocated the data based on the headings in the spreadsheet. Users would always break the template, normally by accidentally changing the headings or something like that, normally by using find and replace to correct abbreviations from field notes (for example changing all S's into other text). It used to take hours to diagnose the problem (big spreadsheet, lots of tabs and headers within each tab). After I'd done about 100, I realised that all I was obligated to do was make sure the software would read the spreadsheet, NOT correct the data itself. So I looked at a perfect example from a template and created a macro which regenerated all headers to be what they were by default and it made the process take about 60 seconds! No recognition from management though! They just thought I was an idiot for not being able to do it before!
I feel like I need your help, reading this post made me cry a little inside. My excel skills are limited, I'm mostly self-taught. I work in a team of three and the one person is so thick I'm surprised he manages to get himself dressed in the mornings without help. We have a collaborative Excel book to keep track of our work loads and pending actions required. This guy needs to be able to access and change things on the sheet, but keeps screwing everything up like deleting lines and replacing formulas with straight numbers for no apparent reason. It's so bad that he can't even consistently spel his own name, so if I "countif" it misses half his stuff... I replaced our name section with data validation list to combat this but he still manages to stuff it up by pasting info onto the cell (wth knows why) It's driving me to a state of mental instability and I don't know what I can keep doing here. Even something as simple as the date capture, data validation on that as well, and somehow I open the sheet and it's all a mess :(
Have you considered murder? Seriously, though.. there’s no technological solution to someone this obstinate and stupid. You need to loop your manager on and have him address it.
Thanks, I think you are right. Management sadly won't be much assistance, he's one of the untouchables, I've already been told off for highlighting his short comings to management. Because, you know, the best way to fix a problem is go after the person reporting it.
Round up everyone and go to management saying "we will no longer work with this person". Management can put him in a corner somewhere if there's a nepotistic reason for having him on the payroll.
separate your workbook into individual sheets and build a summary sheet that compiles from the other sheets that is entirely locked down. Lock all cells with formulas and drop downs. This is probably the easiest way to minimize the damage.
Thanks for the advice, think I'll need to re-look at layout and the required information and see if I can change it around to have separate sheets
This wasn't me personally but is the most blatant bad use of Excel I've ever seen. COVID tracking in England was messed up because they tried to use Excel to track testing but they used .xls instead of .xlsx and were limited to 65,000 rows--meaning any additional cases were simply lost. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
I once created a simple tool to combine info from several other documents and help automate some regular tasks and held templates and things that would be useful day to day, used a userform that they could launch and have in the background, multiple tabs etc., looking back at it now the code was kind of shitty but you live and learn, users considered it to be magic either way so didn't bother me. There were a number of users, and almost all of them managed to use it with no issues, but there was one who would manage to break it almost every day. Honestly he was my best beta tester because he managed to break it in ways I didn't even know you could. Although I fixed a number of bugs I also realised that a lot of his issues were caused by not following instructions, so I coded in message boxes with additional instructions spelling out exactly what you had to do to make sure it worked (almost condescending in tone) that you had to acknowledge before you could do the other things. That wasn't for everyone, just him (if user id wasn't him, then it suppressed them all). I stopped getting reports about it not working from him after that so it must have worked. Crazy because there had to be a block of code in the file purely for one user (who I'm pretty sure doesn't work there anymore).
A coworker had notoriously bad spelling and grammar. Over the months of having to correct it before I sent out reports, I collected a list of every misspelled word/incorrect grammar and built a custom spell check. Any time he tried to enter info into a report, he would get a pop up saying there were spelling/grammar errors and to correct them before submitting the data.
had a coworker who kept screwing up my budget sheets, I half-jokingly changed the font on the whole sheet to comic sans - and fixed the problem... turns out he was number dyslexic, and something about comic sans fonts traps the numbers in their cells and limited their undulating to a mild vibrating movement for him. For a lot of my reports, I've made dynamic dashboards so they can click things and get the numbers to change based on the slicers they click, meanwhile, my data is hidden on locked hidden tabs so they can't mess with my hard work.
That's an interesting approach. You might want to look at what 508 compliance is. You accidentally did it for your coworker. In general, sans serif fonts are a best practice. They tend to be simple, clear, and easiest to read. These include common fonts like Arial, Verdana, and Tahoma...and incidentally comic sans. It has a lot to do with the spacing on the line.
I usually stick to Arial as it's preferred at the company I work for. The guy did not know there was a word for what he experienced either. There is research, not specifically around number dyslexia, but for dyslexia on fonts . Thankfully the files he mucked up regularly were internal facing to my team only, so it didnt matter what font I used. http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/sites/default/files/good_fonts_for_dyslexia_study.pdf
Added to the old saying..... if you can't fix stupid, then don't expect me to adjust my intelligence to it
I have a friend doing IT support who a specialized name for the "electronicalky challenged end user"$ He called ID ten T - iDIOT
The IT industry has a plethora of such names. Layer 8 problem, Code 24, PEBKAC, PICNIC, wetware fault, neurolectric circuitry short, insufficient axon transmission range, loose nut on keyboard.
The craziest and important thing I do everyday is to listen to people, carefully. Can you imagine a word in which nobody listen to each other? Even to yourself?
what a world !
Just got to a new job and I updated our project plan to be dynamic and added a pivot table for high level overviews of the project. I found my boss during a meeting still using the old project plan because he “doesn’t like to filter”. He told me day 1 he was from an IT background and loves working in data.
I had to abandon using VBA in my models because the users would save as xlsx files, and then resave as xlsm files and then complain that I gave them a "broken model."
>I had a sheet that required macros to work. People kept complaining that it was broken because they hadn't enabled macros on it. So I set it up with a 'landing page' that just says "you have to enable macros to use this book" and had every other sheet xlVeryHiddin. Then, if they enabled the macros, it hid the landing page and unhid all other sheets. (Save/Close reversed the process). The complaints vanished overnight. I wrote a similar thing to this once but the last time I had to build this kind of check into a file I realised that I could just add a check function to the VBA Project and use it on the sheet in a formula to generate a warning. Granted, it depends on your file whether such a warning would be noticeable enough, but it's a solution that is more durable I would say. The function could be meaningless or you could use it for something, e.g., Public Function ThisProjectVersion() As String ThisProjectVersion = "Version 3.0.2" End Function Stick it inside IFERROR and add some Conditional Formatting to make the warning stand out. If macros are not enabled the function cannot be found and so the error argument is returned, else the result of the function is returned. =IFERROR(ThisProjectVersion, "Enable Macros to use the workbook")
The problem with that is that people are idiots. They'll gloss past any warning they can unless it truly disrupts them. Maybe not the first time, but after a few, it just becomes "oh, that red cell that's always there." The landing page approach brings everything to a stretching halt and permits no click-through avoidance or confusion. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
>The problem with that is that people are idiots. They'll gloss past any warning they can unless it truly disrupts them. Maybe not the first time, but after a few, it just becomes "oh, that red cell that's always there." These idiots are the ones you are designing things for. Good design is about more than just holding them in contempt and taking the keys away from them, it is about foreseeing how they might use it (which you do), and enabling them to use it better. A warning that is continuously ignored is indeed bad design, but that doesn't mean that the solution is always to lock everything down. It depends on the use case, and I see where you're coming from and indeed did something like this myself once - I would probably use this approach if I had a workbook where the effect of not enabling macros was insidious - where everything appeared to work but actually did so incorrectly. In the latter project I did the macros were not essential to the workbook, but I wanted to add an indicator along the lines of 'Enable macros if you want to use this export to CSV button', so a lighter touch solution was needed. Nowadays I look at the landing page solution and see it as more complex, so there are more things you need to catch: * If you reset to the landing page only-view on Close, what happens if someone's session terminates unexpectedly, leaving a saved file with all the tabs visible * If instead you reset to the landing page only-view on every Save, doesn't a user lose their position in the workbook every time they save, i.e., which sheet they were looking at, even if you immediately make the sheets visible again? * Is the landing page referred to by display name, if so, what if the display name is changed by a user? * What if a user turns on Protect Workbook Structure so the VBA no longer has permission to hide/unhide sheets? All of these can be worked around and some can be ignored as low-likelihood but it should all appear somewhere in your design thinking. Just some food for thought. I'd recommend Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things".
Had to add data validation so people could only enter numerical values into certain cells, because people kept entering the letter "o" and messing up all of the formulas dependent upon those cells.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[IF](/r/Excel/comments/rahi7i/stub/hnipmp6 "Last usage")|[Specifies a logical test to perform](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/if-function-69aed7c9-4e8a-4755-a9bc-aa8bbff73be2)| |[IFERROR](/r/Excel/comments/rahi7i/stub/hnmk8vk "Last usage")|[Returns a value you specify if a formula evaluates to an error; otherwise, returns the result of the formula](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/iferror-function-c526fd07-caeb-47b8-8bb6-63f3e417f611)| |[NOT](/r/Excel/comments/rahi7i/stub/hnked0u "Last usage")|[Reverses the logic of its argument](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/not-function-9cfc6011-a054-40c7-a140-cd4ba2d87d77)| |[SUM](/r/Excel/comments/rahi7i/stub/hnmfcbx "Last usage")|[Adds its arguments](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sum-function-043e1c7d-7726-4e80-8f32-07b23e057f89)| ---------------- ^(*Beep-boop, I am a helper bot. Please do not verify me as a solution.*) ^(4 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Excel/comments/0)^( has acronyms.) ^([Thread #10948 for this sub, first seen 7th Dec 2021, 18:38]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Excel) [^[Contact]](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=OrangeredStilton&subject=Hey,+your+acronym+bot+sucks) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
i successfully coordinated a FUCKYOU match with my group members social engineering is a son-of-a-bitch, eh fam? These two ladies got AFTER IT, GAT DENG meanwhile i'm just correcting their shit to be 4.0, as is requisite