# Venting!



## Brian from Maui (Feb 1, 2012)

I work for a State Government.  While I love working with Excel, almost all of the departments use Excel for a fillable form, rather than using Word.  I politely e-mail those in charge that while Excel is a useful and powerful program, fillable forms are better suited in Word.

I spent about an 15 minutes converting a form created in Excel to a sample, fillable Word doc.  You couldn't tell the difference when printed.  For the end user, it's much easier than navigating a Excel file with all those merged cells.

Whoever created that form in Excel must have spent hours getting the formatting right with all those merged cells and different row heights and column widths.

I receive a e-mail saying, after a staff meeting, we have decided to stick with the Excel file.

WTH!!!!!


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## SydneyGeek (Feb 1, 2012)

So...
Do they have some snazzy routine for harvesting the results from the messy Excel template? Or is it just too hard to change to a more efficient option for fear of offending the person who built the original?

Denis


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## Brian from Maui (Feb 1, 2012)

SydneyGeek said:


> So...
> Do they have some snazzy routine for harvesting the results from the messy Excel template? Or is it just too hard to change to a more efficient option for fear of offending the person who built the original?
> 
> Denis



Yeah, they print the form out. 

Call me naive, but I just can't imagine the powers to be are that clueless and have no vision what so ever.

Plus I'm a end user.  

The person that created that Excel template MUST have spent hours creating it.

Go figure!

Thanks for letting me VENT!


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## Jaye7 (Feb 1, 2012)

The powers that be in companies do some really dumb things.

At my work I use excel and a macro recorder program to key barcodes into our system which they could have all the barcodes loaded instantly if they paid $700 to the company that owns our software.

My boss says that it gives me something to do.

They think that I have been manually keying barcodes for over six months now, whereas my computer has been doing it for me, I key one barcode my recorder does the rest.


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## Beezkneez (Feb 1, 2012)

It never ceases to amaze me some of the things companies come up with.
Last year, I was asked to build a workflow system in Excel as an exercise to justify not spending money on buying workflow software.  The system would have had thousands of users over multiple geographic sites, and countries.
I laughed and told them that if they thought building workflow in Excel would work, then they didn't understand what workflow was.

Yes, Excel CAN do pretty much anything.  But that doesn't mean it should.


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## Jon von der Heyden (Feb 2, 2012)

Brian from Maui said:


> I receive a e-mail saying, after a staff meeting, we have decided to stick with the Excel file.
> 
> WTH!!!!!



Sheesh!


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## mikerickson (Feb 2, 2012)

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

If what they have now works, they're going to stick with what works.


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## alansidman (Feb 2, 2012)

Fear of Change is a great motivator for staying with the existing.  I never really worry about it to much so long as the checks continue to have my name on them as the payee.

Alan


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## mikerickson (Feb 2, 2012)

"The better is the enemy of the good."


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## Atroxell (Feb 2, 2012)

Brian--

Your frustration is understandable. I worked for 10 years at a State vendor here in CA. While I was not working directly for the State, much of what I did had to pass through review with them.

The inefficiencies of government and attitudes towards anything new drove me crazy. In the end, the only thing I could do was to ensure that I did my job to the best of my abilities and ensure that anything new that I built was as good as the present technology allowed. You can't fight the whole system, but you can control your section of it.

I don't claim that I or anything I did was a game-changer--but I did change a small corner of the game. And when it came time for me to leave I left with a clear conscience. With government related jobs, doing your job well has to be the reward you want and need.

And the greatest reward of all for me? The Marketing database/web reporting system I helped build is still in use today---6 years later--and is still growing because of its ease of use, ease of programming and scalability.

Hang in there!


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## diddi (Feb 2, 2012)

the mechanations of an organisation can be fascinating...

recently at one place i have built some software, one staff member was telling me she had just found out that another (recently employed 'mover and shaker' ) staff member had gained a lot of weekend overtime retyping data out of the software i built onto a flat excel sheet for some odd request from those who know best.

then she asked "cant you just use the <export data> button?" to which i happily relied "thats what is there for!"  and we both had a little chortle (at the boss's expense).

to my knowledge the data hasnt been used LOL


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## MARK858 (Feb 2, 2012)

I have a couple of bits to add from my experiences...

1) At work my IT department now don't bother putting Access on any PC they upgrade unless someone requests it because they know that there are so few people who will use it.

2) About 4 months ago a more senior manager asked me to write a macro for a sheet that about 10 people were to use. I told him that bar the text file import it could all be done with formulas and  got a "No,No I want a macro". 

So now they have a macro that imports the text file and then fills 5 columns down approx 22,000 rows with formula (3 of the columns are just various forms of lookups and the the others a sum and a datediff formula). I also by accident left the screenupdating on (I think actually they are fascinated watching the flicker).

I had a mate of mine down from our IT dept. who saw someone using it and asked me "Don't tell me you wrote that?" and I replied "He asked for a macro so I gave him one". He thinks I'm nasty.
But they are still happily using it now....


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## Michael M (Feb 2, 2012)

FWIW
Senior member of staff brings me a worksheet with 2500 lines of data 22 columns...demands that I fix it, as the results are wrong !!

On looking at the bottom of each column, I see a number....no formula, no code, just a number....
I ask, "How did you get this result ?".....dumb look....."Duh !!....I added them up"

Almost ALL columns required a very simple SUMIF function...function written, copied across, job done...correct answers........"Wow, how did you do that !!"

Can you imagine the look, when I whipped up a Pivot table for him with all the data ready to go !!


Yep..."I added them up"....on the calculator !!
Find the data, scroll across, add the number, back to data, find,scroll, add..........


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## MARK858 (Feb 2, 2012)

We have a guy in one of our branches who still hand draws basic line graphs... he says its quicker (having said that I have seen him using his PC and he is probably right...bless him). 
Nice man though.


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## Jon von der Heyden (Feb 3, 2012)

I worked with a guy about thirteen years ago that thought the mouse was called a 'moose'.  That's because his son gave him a crash-course in computers when the firm he was working for finally gave up paper ledgers and thought it would be fun to mess with the jargon.

I thought it was so hilarious that I cut out antlers from some brown cardboard and stuck it to his 'moose'!


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## PaddyD (Feb 3, 2012)

"He asked for a macro so I gave him one". 

That could be interpreted in a number of ways.


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## MARK858 (Feb 3, 2012)

So it can. At least it was interpreted right at the time.


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## diddi (Feb 3, 2012)

Jon von der Heyden said:


> I thought it was so hilarious that I cut out antlers from some brown cardboard and stuck it to his 'moose'!



i think i want to make some antlers right now


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## Brian from Maui (Feb 3, 2012)

One of my more disappointing momnets were with my former airline company.  I have devised a backup weight and balance system in Excel to mimic a mainframe.  This system calculated the center of gravity of an aircraft among other things.  Without those calculations the plane doesn't fly.

BTW, my system was approved by the FAA as a back up system in case the main frame went down, which it did on a dialy basis.

It was deemd by the higher ups that doing this with paper and pencil, plotting graphs and rules were safer for the traveling public.  The error of margin for this process was 20%, versus the Excel version of Zero.

BTW, the aircraft were widebody ones like the 767's Airbus DC-10 and smaller 717's.

Go figure.


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## T. Valko (Feb 3, 2012)

Back in the mid/late 80's I was working in a chemistry lab where we were just starting to use Excel extensively (thanks to me for getting the ball rolling!).

I got promoted to a supervisory position in the process department where they had no idea what a spreadsheet was or how it could be used.

The very first thing I did was redesign all of our reporting forms. And I used Excel!!! We even had form making software.


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## Smitty (Feb 3, 2012)

When I was transferred to Northern California we had a lot of restructuring to do, including configuring potential new offices, so I'd use Visio to lay out office configurations based on realtor floor plans, plug in pricing for workstations, et. al., and come up with efficiency diagrams, etc.  

Corporate, in their infinite wisdom, decided to go with the facility manager's hand drawn (pencil & graph paper) renderings instead.  And this was (not anymore) a Fortune 500, $1BB/year company, who is a Microsoft partner!  

Granted, Visio isn't my forte, but it's incredibly powerful, much more so than graph paper.  

That's one of the reasons I left....


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## SuperFerret (Feb 4, 2012)

Our last office reorganisation was based on a drawing done in Paint...none of the 'desks' were even the same size (I still doubt they even used the Rectangle drawing tool to draw them) and they wondered why they had to make some last minute changes when moving day came because nothing would fit where they thought it would...


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## mole999 (Feb 4, 2012)

MARK858 said:


> . I also by accident left the screenupdating on (I think actually they are fascinated watching the flicker).




I leave screenupdating on for anything that runs more than about 20 seconds (well its on and off in places)

otherwise they play with buttons and try crashing out because they think its not doing anything.

Ironically they sat and waited for someone elses six minute code, which I squashed to 30 seconds


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## MARK858 (Feb 4, 2012)

> (well its on and off in places)


If I am writing a program properly that I know is going to run for a while then I normally do something similar (strictly speaking off and on as I only turn it on to change the screen) or sometimes I change the status bar which most of the people I work with do seem to take notice of.



> Ironically they sat and waited for someone elses six minute code, which I squashed to 30 seconds



Haven't had the patience to see how long this one runs for. The guy who asked for it did say it seemed to take a long time to run. I told him it had to do a lot of calculations (which was true) and he went away. 
One day I might alter it a bit as because with the number of formulas the screenupdating is annoying (but not soon) or you never know he might even ask for it to be done properly rather than via a macro.


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## mole999 (Feb 4, 2012)

when i'm testing i tend to somewhere unobtrusive

range("a1") = now() at the very beginning of the code
range("a2") = now() at the end of the code
then just do  a2-a1 on the sheet 

or create a page for the stages, and atleast I can see where the delays are and work to optimize them.

I do use the status line to show what's its doing, though means more to me than most of the users


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## jeffreybrown (Feb 4, 2012)

Many moons ago I put together a spreadsheet we use for collecting work measurement data (with a lot of help from you guys…thank you ).  As time moved, on I left and other people preformed any upkeep to this spreadsheet which was minimal.

When I left the sheet was unprotected (or at least this is what I remembered), but just the other day somebody meet with the big boss and immediately after called me and said, "the boss said YOU will unlock that spreadsheet and give us the password".  It had been so long I honestly could not remember if I had actually protected the workbook.  I said give me a few minutes to remember and I call you back.

I opened the spreadsheet, selected the Review tab and then selected Unprotect Sheet…presto.  No password…go figure.

Now that wasn’t so hard was it and I live another day to collect another paycheck.  Life is good


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## MARK858 (Feb 4, 2012)

Being honest I have never thought about timing it that way. When I test I use a timer. Something like...

```
Dim t As Double
t = Timer
```
at the start of the sub and

```
MsgBox "Code took " & Format(Timer - t, "0.00 secs")
```
at the end or wherever.

The only reason the people I work with pay attention to the status line is that I have convinced them to do so. At one time the only way they were happy was to have a progress bar on every macro and I hate putting in progress bars.

My next big task is convince them not to use merge cells. But that will be a bit harder.ray:


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## mole999 (Feb 4, 2012)

merge cells, i would reserve that for when someone says this dosen't work when they have been playing.

then sit down with them and get them to make the changes, as we debugger (sic) it together


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## shift-del (Feb 11, 2012)

MARK858 said:


> My next big task is convince them not to use merge cells. But that will be a bit harder.ray:


Some of my colleagues center each and every cell in the spreadsheet. And I can't talk them out of it.
It drives me nuts.


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## Atroxell (Feb 11, 2012)

Shift-del,

I see that almost every day. Why on earth would every single column have to be centered? And no one seems to listen when you tell them it's really not necessary. I was once told that centering "gives the eye enough white space to see the data more clearly." Really? Because the default alignment won't?

Another one I see from time to time is people using calculators to enter data into a spreadsheet. I have seen this peeve multiple times on this forum, so I won't elaborate beyond saying that I have seen it done mostly in the Accounting Departments.

Since we're venting...

I recently built a workbook for my daughter. She teaches and the school she's at had a workbook to track special needs students, grade 1-8. At first it was pretty straight forward and required a little macro writing to make it more user friendly. Once all of the universe of variations were taken into account, it ran  well. Except for the times when someone (after the completion) comes up to her and says, "Oh, I forgot to tell you I also do this with it and it needs some changes." It is for my daughter though, so I am happy to do it.

And to my daughter's credit, the last email I got on it from her was to tell me about how the macro had "failed" for one of the teachers. She was determined not to "bother" me again about this workbook, so after much head scratching she discovered that the teacher had actually deleted 4 columns of data (but not everywhere applicable and not correctly) and then discovered the macro would not work for some reason. Hmmm...imagine that! We had designed the whole thing to be flexible enough to adjust for such corrections, but it required a specific set of editing to maintain integrity.

My daughter, who has no prior experience with macro writing, dug through my code and figured out where and how to modify it to run in the new design. She gave credit to my excessive commenting (I'm one of _those_ people ) in the code for helping her to figure it out, but I think she's pretty smart to be able to do that. 

And yes, I did leave the project unlocked. It was for a school and I am a ****** for kids and teachers. (Probably should not post that tidbit--now every teacher on the board will be emailing me. ) But I often wonder if I should have locked the worksheets to make my/my daughter's life easier. There are no bigger kids or tougher students than teachers...


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## Smitty (Feb 11, 2012)

> There are no bigger kids or tougher students than teachers...


 
That is so true...<!-- / message --><!-- sig -->


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## MARK858 (Feb 11, 2012)

> Some of my colleagues center each and every cell in the spreadsheet. And I can't talk them out of it.
> It drives me nuts.


1) Correct response to that is when they hit problems is to send it back to them saying you aren't touching it

2) A less correct response is if "1)" really isn't possible is to run the  "Unmerge_CenterAcross" macro someone wrote a while back on the sheet (afraid I can't remember who wrote it). If you haven't got it I can repost it for you. 
It un-merges the cells and then centres the text horizontally across the cell.

P.S. Option 1 is far and away the better option in my opinion


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## ward376 (Feb 11, 2012)

MARK858 said:


> by accident left the screenupdating on (I think actually they are fascinated watching the flicker).



Hehe, yes I have seen first-hand that users are happier to giggle and watch flickering for some unnecessary 'select every row' loop rather than have the actions performed instantly in memory and go on to the next task.

Curse merged cells! 
Clean up your recorded code!
Centering hinders data type identification and makes it HARDER to read!


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## shift-del (Feb 12, 2012)

MARK858 said:


> "Unmerge_CenterAcross" macro
> It un-merges the cells and then centres the text horizontally across the cell.


I didn't mean merged cells that are centered but single cells that are centered.
You get that terrible zigzag pattern.

Another bad habit is opening about ten to twenty workbooks on Monday morning and closing them on Friday afternoon - thus leaving them constantly open.
To let someone else edit those workbooks, they are _shared_.


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## MARK858 (Feb 12, 2012)

shift-del said:


> I didn't mean merged cells that are centered but single cells that are centered.
> You get that terrible zigzag pattern.


I am happy now. Something in this thread where I can say well at least my lot don't do that...YET


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## Atroxell (Feb 18, 2012)

Okay, I just remembered another thing. It's not Excel, but it bugs the heck out of me and I watched someone do it (yet again ) yesterday at work.

Why on earth can people not get it through their thick skulls that you do not have to type the desired address into the google search first?

I have seen people go to google, type an address into the search and then click on the link when the results come up. Why not just type it into the address bar?


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## diddi (Feb 18, 2012)

i install the google toolbar for my customers and set startup page to about:blank

i am amazed at the number of people who either type google.com and then when it loads do their search, or complain that they want google as their homepage, so they can wait for it to load exactly the same functionality that is already in the toolbar in front of them.


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## RobMatthews (Feb 19, 2012)

Atroxell said:


> Okay, I just remembered another thing. It's not Excel, but it bugs the heck out of me and I watched someone do it (yet again ) yesterday at work.
> 
> Why on earth can people not get it through their thick skulls that you do not have to type the desired address into the google search first?
> 
> I have seen people go to google, type an address into the search and then click on the link when the results come up. Why not just type it into the address bar?


 
We had a vendor doing a sales pitch and displaying his website functionality to the entire engineering team a couple of years ago.  To get to *HIS OWN COMPANY'S* website, he typed the company name into google search. And then dithered about which result to click.

I don't think that he works for that company any more.


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## Michael M (Feb 19, 2012)

Yep, you guys are correct in your comments......now go down to the local TAFE and have a look at the "how to use the Internet" classes....Want to find your own company ?...do a google search.
That's what the govt makes us / them teach the users.
I tried to change the study notes and lesson structure some years ago at my TAFE and was very quickly put in my place. It was pointed out that these notes and lessons are compiled by professionals and they are the best they can be !!!


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## SydneyGeek (Feb 19, 2012)

Well... if the notes can't be updated they definitely ARE the best they can be ('cause they will never be otherwise)! Set in stone.

Denis


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## Michael M (Feb 19, 2012)

Hey Denis.....Were you my TAFE professional.....


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## SydneyGeek (Feb 19, 2012)

I've seen heaps of that -- spent much of the last 12-13 years as a trainer, and people can get precious about their manuals. 

I love the fact that if someone works for a big company they are automatically assigned "expert" status -- like, "Yep, that's our model and it's correct because it was put together by a guy from [Insert name of big investment bank here]. Quick scan of the workbook shows that the user is limited to half a dozen functions and could have put together a much more efficient workbook if they knew a bit more about Excel.

Denis


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## Michael M (Feb 20, 2012)

Yep, and that's why we have an Excel Forum with about 3 million posts !


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## Darren Bartrup (Feb 22, 2012)

I had to read a whole two pages of text explaining that I must use text to columns, copy this here, paste that there, turn it inside out, email it to Mars....

Once I understood what it was trying to do, I got it down to these formula:
=TRIM(PROPER(LEFT(A2,FIND(" ",A2))))
=TRIM(PROPER(SUBSTITUTE(A2," ","."))) & "@myemail.com"

And another one which was telling me to sort on a certain column, open another sheet sort that into order on a column, paste them next to each other, copy the results to here, etc... ended up with a simple VLOOKUP.


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