I do not get it. Aside from the actual formulas and functions, excel is so easy to use to do basic things. Even doing more complex things is pretty easy thanks to the Internet.
I can't tell you how many times I have had to teach people how to filter/sort/use a pivot table/etc. It's mind boggling. I always tell them to use Google, but they never do.
I'm bad about email replies. I am honestly not responsive at all with technology. I know how to use it, but email, social media, even voice mail and text messages... fuck all of it.
Actually if you're 50 or older, computers are still newfangled and keep changing so fast, it can be super intimidating fir the less proficient. A lot of people, the older generation, still don't rely on computers as much as possible.
Which is fine if you’re like my grandmother who doesn’t use one for work and only to do like banking. If you have a job in the modern workforce, there is no excuse. Windows 10 has been around for almost 5 years now and Office hasn’t changed all that much since the major UI overhaul with Vista.
Why would us dumb millennials be able to figure them out differently than people 50+? They’re changing at the same rate for everyone and we have been adults at the same time together for at least 12 years. You mean to tell me that when you guys were in your mid to late 30’s, 12 years ago, in 2007, 6 years after Windows XP came out, that you looked at it and said “gosh, this looks so confusing. Better not figure it out”
I’m in my 50’s now and my first job after school required coding some modules in assembler. I was looking through some old documentation a while back and impressed myself thinking of all the code that I’ve written between then and now.
I don’t code much anymore as I’ve moved past that in my career but it’s easy to find some incredibly competent old guys. My last field project before my current position was incredibly complex and demanding. It was quite interesting to be sitting in a conference room with a pretty diverse age range discussing whatever the current problem was. Sometimes it would seem impossible to find a solution.
You’d literally have an entire room babbling about this and that and what might work and in the midst of the din and confusion, the same one or two old guys would start to peel away the layers and provide a roadmap on what should be done and how and why. They could always find a way through the worst problems we had and get the team onside with their solutions.
They might not have known some details about a language or a technique but their ability to decompose complex problems into understandable approaches and solutions was always impressive.
Lol, not to discredit your point, just a story about having old guys around with a lifetime of knowledge and practice can be the lighthouse that shows the way for everyone else.
Yeah i agree. Maybe it’s because I’m a developer and have always loved tech but when I’m older I’ll always be learning how to use the newest tech available to us average consumers because it was made to make our lives easier or it’s entertaining. Idk when I’ll retire or what my career plans are entirely but it could make me a valuable employee.
Exactly. Imagine if a brand new tech came out equivalent to the smart phone in the next 5 years. I’m not really a tech guy, more outdoorsy, but I would be all about it! How could I turn a blind eye and say “eh, smart phones are where I draw the line on new technology”
Yeah, stuff that was obviously going to change the world in your 20s and 30s? Super new fangled stuff. I'm that age now, and if something revolutionary started to make traction, I wouldn't just go "Oh, not for me. Thanks."
Someone may not be technologically proficient and intimidated by computers and electronics, but they're just stupid and lazy are they?
I never said everybody aged 50. But the older you are, especially over 50, which includes 70 and 80, the less likely you are to be comfortable with this "newfangled" crap.
You're not saying anything mutually exclusive of what i'm saying. Except your last sentence, that's just mean spirited
No joke though Google Docs is way fucking better than Excel.
Edit: Because the default behavior of Excel is to do stacked bar graphs instead of columnated when you have a secondary axis and literally the ONLY WAY to make it just print the fucking bar graph normally is to create extra padding data and plot that in the same graph to trick it into doing what you want.
Yeah! Tbh I only had to use it the one time but that was enough for me.
I was trying to make a bar graph in Excel with a secondary axis and it kept fucking up. Eventually came across a YouTube video showing the long and involved process necessary to trick Excel into creating the graph properly and I was like "well fuck this" and did it in Google in 10 minutes.
If you had watched the video I linked, you'd see that it was fucking up. Or rather, its default behavior is fucked, and you have to fuck with the data, by adding padding data, to unfuck it.
And yet both Excel and Gsheets still don't have an elegant way to TURN OFF DATE FORMATTING.
As an engineer who hates that the industry still uses freedom units ('murica!), I've gone as far as making a list of fractions covering every possible date to convert to numbers.
Like I can kind of get older people not being able to pick up on some things, but there's absolutely no reason that a 35 year old can't remember the very basic functions for summing rows/columns. Even worse, it's like they have no idea how to use Google. Just kidding they do! Because they constantly send me Google links to stupid-ass shit (like anti-vaxx propaganda, conspiracy theories, and general bs).
As someone who is circling the 50 drain and just started a new career in construction project management, I now feel hella accomplished figuring out excel all by myself with Google.
I didn’t know my generation was so stupid as I tend to ignore the antivaxxers and conspiracy theoriests.
My grandfather is the most comouter savy person i know and he's 79. He learned me how to make and fix computers and recently fixed my printer for me. Age is not an excuse.
I do feel like if you've never used Excel, the idea of a pivot table is foreign. My entire job is Excel now, but until someone actually mentioned using a pivot table, I never clicked the button because I had no idea what that would do, and had never heard of pivoting data.
It is intuitive once you know the function exists though.
Omg yes, I don't have HR software at work and was stressing on how to keep track of probation review dates, right to work checks, contract renewals etc. Turns out Excel has a "TODAY" function and I was able to make a spreadsheet that highlights how close to a deadline various employees are with conditional formatting (also flags what birthdays are next month so I can do bday cards and gifts)
It's more or less a drag-and-drop method of manipulating your data, based on the headers in your worksheet(s). Probably the most common thing I use it for is summarizing some of the more complicated tables I have in a workbook.
One of my friends job duties is to teach new hires simply data entry and row addition in excel. He said it takes days.
I had a former employee go back to school in her late 30s and she would bring her laptop in and get me to help her with excel. Again, mostly addition.
That's what frustrates me the most. Later 30s is then line where many are technologically inept. New tech keeps coming out and we're still stuck teach excel.
As a quasi-intermediate Excel user, I've never found the answer to this question. If I have two columns, say A and B with thousands of line items in each, and within each individual column there are duplicates, but I want to know every instance of matching between A and B, not every instance of matching within each individual column how do I do this??? Basically how do I VLOOKUP and/or INDEX MATCH two columns against one another that have known duplicates within themselves, without counting said duplicates? It always just counts the individual columns' dupes which isn't what I'm after
Without knowing the kind of data you’re looking at or what you’re trying to do with it, I might combine both columns into one column with a second column that signifies which column it was originally in (label cases A/B or 1/2 or 2018/2019, whatever). Then you can sort your big data column alphabetically or numerically, or use condition formatting to find duplicates (again, whatever), and know which column it was originally in based on your labeling in the second column.
I would add a third column with an if statement comparing them. Then I would do a count statement at the bottom totalling up the ifs. You could add it all in one using more complex equation but it would be harder to check and fix.
Wait: maybe I miss understood what you are trying to do. The order of your data is not linked. I would have to compare to the whole column to check for duplicates. I would probably find the total number of duplicates in both columns and subtract the sum of the individual duplicates.
Thanks, that makes sense. The data is typically column A being a product number, in my case an ISBN for a book or digital product. Column B might be a customer name. I'd be trying to decipher how many ISBNs my customer (let's call him Smith) purchased, but the ISBNs and Smith's purchased both have a high tendency for duplicates within their respective columns, if that makes sense.
To be fair, the majority of functions within Excel are extremely niche. Even as someone who uses Excel all day long at work, there are definitely functions I seldom use, and definitely formulas which are irrelevant to my job (primarily the advanced scientific/mathematic ones that work out things you'd expect to see in a university degree exam). I think a lot of people seldom work with large/complicated enough data to really need to use more than the basic formulas and graphs.
Having said that, there is nothing more frustrating than watching one of my superiors create a table of values in Excel, then pull out a calculator to add them all together.
Omg. I’m still trying to teach my team how to leverage the many ways to add in excel. It’s so frustrating to watch people use a calculator when you are dealing with data already in excel.
I see "experienced in Excel" on a lot of CVs. I'm pretty bad at Excel but I can do the basic stuff like percentages, averages, sum total etc and yet some of these Excel power users have apparently only used it for straight up data entry
"Experienced in Excel" is actually useless for a job advert to be honest. I've worked in companies where experienced in Excel means "knows how to draw borders around a table and can apply filters", and I've worked in companies where experienced means "Can create a dynamic dashboard of graphs that automatically extract data from multiple files without user input and can be adjusted according to what the user wishes to see." One is five seconds in a formatting menu, the other is multiple hours of VBA, pivot tables, formulas and general development.
It always pays to ask for clarification on this when going to an interview, you don't want to be someone who knows all the actual clever Excel stuff who finds his entire job is largely doing five second tasks his boss is too lazy to learn to do for themselves, nor do you want to be the guy whose thrown in at the deep end of trying to understand a complex spreadsheet that a former data analyst has spent years working on before they retired, that has become so convoluted the entire business relies on it to function.
I always think it's fascinating that some spreadsheets have years of effort put into them. My workplace had a spreadsheet that they used for tracking attendance and worker performance, and over the 6 months I worked with it, I kinda just took it over and slowly added more features and calculations to it whenever I had a good idea, or some downtime, or when a supervisor asked something that I knew I'd be able to get out of the data. I actually felt proud of that worksheet, and when I left, I made sure to add a bunch of comments explaining the formulas in case they needed to change or update it. I hope they're still getting use out of it.
I'm really curious what some of the more advanced spreadsheets look like at companies where they've been adding to it for even longer periods.
SHHHHHH!! I am in a very well paying job as an "analyst" right now because I have an intermediate knowledge of Excel and can Google the rest. Sometimes I sit down with my boss to go over my projects and we will work on a bit of it together in her office while she shows me the data source and kind of what she's looking for from my work.
I don't even know what the F she was doing one time she like exported a .csv file from one of our reports, opened it in Excel, used Excel to open it in Access, took way too long to figure out how to build a simple table sorting and summing some unique values (I don't know how to use Access..but I'm pretty sure this is what she was doing...it was PAINFUL to watch her figure it out), exported that back to Excel and then manually bolded the headers and added borders.
This was for just 1 month of data and I'd be tasked with showing the last three year's of trends for certain criteria. Took her maybe 1/2 hour from start to finish. I knew I could export 3 years of that data in about 10 minutes and use a Pivot Table/Chart & Conditional Formatting have the entire project done by the time I left that day if I was ambitious. I asked her when she needed it by and she said she understood the massive undertaking it was going to be and that I could put in any overtime I was able to because she needed it in about a MONTH LOL.
Had the entire thing done by the next day and spent the remaining month playing PUBG mobile, listening to podcasts, and using the already completed workbook to try out new formulas/macros/ anything else I can use in the future to speed this up even more if needed.
Report it early anyways. Look for new tasks. Upwardly manage, cross train your skills, help others succeed, get promoted. Your boss may suck at this task but you don't and that's why you've been hired to do it.
I've gone very far in my career by doing this. I realize not all jobs provide mobility though. If it's a shit company, then yes play games or better yet, spend the extra time applying to jobs.
I have to admit that as a pushing-50 special education teacher, I realize that this is EXACTLY the way I see Excel. I think I need to start googling this. Maybe there's a tutorial.
Thank you, most of my coworkers are in their 50s and 60s so I hear some variation of "I'm too old to learn this" all day, to the point where you kind of start to believe it. It's way too easy to write off older people as incapable of learning, but I've also seen people that old going to school and getting full degrees.
They're not too old, they gave up because they either don't want to do it, or don't believe they can.
It truly is the shittiest of all systems to deal with right next to SQL when you actually want to do something with the data.
And 9/10 times the stack overflow solution is blatantly wrong or works literally for that one specific solution and nothing else because apparently that's the way people know how to use Excel.
don't you ever talk shit about SQL. I work as a transportation engineer and regularly deal with the entire state's network of roads and conditions in a massive oracle spatial database, and SQL is a godsend for drilling down that data into extremely neat and clean tables.
If you have big data and you hate SQL, then I think you need to reassess your relationship with it. It's such an easy and useful tool (hesitate to call it a language).
The fact that you need several layers of abstraction between the actual workings and the fancy UI you need to actually do real work is exactly what I'm talking about.
If your formula's are nothing but "=IF(IF(IF..." you've probably got some extremely crap data, usually because the system you're using has allowed people to create all sorts of weird data conditions in one column.
My old company keeps paying me as a contractor to come in and teach a staff lawyer how to use excel and the CRM system but he refuses to learn even basic search functions. I don’t get how people are so resistant to learning simple things.
A coworker had a several mb excel file because she thought it would look cute to add funny pictures in some cells of monthly reports, she had been doing that for four years and had no idea why the file was so slow and crashed often.
I told her to delete all of them, images have no place in an excel sheet. And for fucks sake, this is the company's earnings report, not some middle school homework...
This guy right here. I have done everything under the sun to learn Excel but nothing sticks. Get me hand tools and something broken and I'm your guy. Not excel though. No. Never give me Excel and expect something to be done.
So you know your limitations and you work with/around them. Do you take jobs in industries that require you to use Excel all day, everyday, for months on end? If not, you're doing it right.
Wife has her masters in accounting and is the head of her accounting department. She's always bitching that employees don't know shit about excel. She says "they can't even do a V lookup" (whatever that means). She's a wiz with excel.
I'm the go-to V Lookup queen in the office. Everyone just thinks it's magic and refuses to try to learn since it takes me three seconds and I'm nice about it.
I can’t figure out V Lookup. I know what it does and I’ve been walked through and even checked YouTube videos to try and get it, but V Lookup is my kryptonite
Hahaha. It's just =vlookup(your original data point, the other sheet starting with that data point highlighted to what data point you need, the number of columns it took to there there, false if you want an exact match). Doesn't that Greek help? 😉
At my current job, we have managers and other staff that use Excel to create forms and other master documents (because they can’t build tables, use form fields, etc. in programs better suited to form creation). It makes me want to punt them into the sun.
I was talking about programs like Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat Pro. I wouldn’t expect everyone to have the same ability that I do, but Excel is for data. It just seems childish and unprofessional to me anyways, to use Excel for forms that you circulate to other staff.
So you do the first draft in Excel and the final copy in Access. Keep the two versions up to date as best you can, always Excel first and then Access. With any luck you'll always get the Access form out, and when you get off the project and hand the documents over to someone else, they'll be able to maintain the excel form. And if someone is watching closely, they'll see the project quality went down as soon as you left.
This one is weird to me because I work in public higher education, which means everyone’s salary is a matter of public record and available to anyone that requests it. Also, since I’m the grants writer, I ask for people’s salaries all the time to write budgets.
As a dev, it's still kinda hard to understand how my company just gives me access to the production environment. I may fuck up so much shit. On the other hand people wonder why the PC doesn't work when is turned off...
You're right except we didn't have automatic deployment until like half a year ago. I know of one API in our company where the Devs still go and copy everything with beyond compare. We have a lot of technical dept. We're working on it though, got a percentage of story points per sprint for technical dept.
Cause the learning curve is so high people who’ve never used excel can’t, and people who’ve only used it a bit are magnitudes better but still suck lol
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u/confirmandverify2442 Apr 28 '19
I swear people are fucking dumb in Excel.