08-29-2008, 04:08 PM
You are using a computer made after 1985, aren't you?
Please do not put blank lines in your spreadsheets, and please do not put more than one kind of information in a column.
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08-29-2008, 04:08 PM
You are using a computer made after 1985, aren't you?
08-29-2008, 04:24 PM
When I worked at Arthur Andersen in 1983, the managers were under pressure from above to use the IBM PCs they'd recently been given. So my manager would type her weekly status reports, eight characters to a cell, into VisiCalc. Then if she needed anything changed, she'd have me do the work of taking the last two characters from each cell and making them the first two characters of the next one, all across the page.
08-29-2008, 04:42 PM
I just automatically do a find for double spaces when i get a document for my newsletter or other project. There's no way to get people to stop putting a double space after each sentence.
08-29-2008, 05:33 PM
[quote cbelt3]Seriously, Greg. Your data is the product of 40+ year old accountants, right ? They never learned that the best way to handle data is.. as if it was a database.
30-year old engineers. :-) It's not that they should know better; they're knowledgeable about their stuff, as I am about mine. However, I would like to see our company develop a culture where, when an engineer needs to know the best way to arrange complicated data, they can feel free to ask for advice, not stumble through themselves.
08-29-2008, 05:34 PM
I feel your pain. I work at a (supposedly) science/engineering office. We have to do a lot of data graphing. The staff is constantly finding new and exciting ways to bugger up the spreadsheets (asterisks, text formatting, wrong date system) so as to make it impossible to graph. Oh, and to counter the suggestion that it's the old people who screw these things up, I'm in my 50s and it's all the 20 and 30 somethings who are clueless about how to properly use a spreadsheet.
08-29-2008, 05:40 PM
A while back I asked about how to get the SUM of all yellow cells. The Spreadsheet was made by committee, and horrible. I ended up making a new column, copying the yellow colored cells.
What really gets me is the terrible formatting of downloaded main frame databases into spreadsheets.
08-29-2008, 05:55 PM
In most companies the engineers are beaten up and told to 'figure it out themselves'. In fact it may bt the nature of the engineering persona- I know I still have trouble asking for help, even when I'm flailing around like a person trying to swat a mosquito in the dark.
08-29-2008, 07:54 PM
...and why is it such a problem?
08-29-2008, 07:58 PM
Blank lines are inserted as a visual cue for the user. However, in many of its operations, Excel considers that to be end of a block of information, even if it's really not.
In general, because Excel is a tool for calculations, information ought to be arranged in formats that are logical both to the machine and to the eye. Otherwise, while your data might be nice and pretty, performing operations on it can be a nightmare.
08-29-2008, 09:48 PM
[quote Greg the dogsitter]In general, because Excel is a tool for calculations...
There's your problem right there. Although Visicalc/Lotus/Excel were initially purely calculational tools, a lot of people found the later WYSIWYG/GUI iterations to be very useful for putting together nicely formatted but dumb tables. It may be a spreadsheet program, but it can be used for two separate functions, to make spreadsheets or to make dumb tables. The problem arises when somebody thinks that because they put a nice table (not a spreadsheet) together in Excel, then it automatically becomes a spreadsheet, usable as a calculational tool. What often happens is that the clueless person who made the original (nonspreadsheet) table, then asks a knowledgeable Excel user to do calculations using their nonspreadsheet. My usual response to such things is "Sorry, no can do...this is not a spreadsheet...make me a spreadsheet and I'll be perfectly happy to help you with calculations". |
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