# Users



## Ruddles (Jul 5, 2011)

As this is Excel Questions, I guess my post ought to contain a question...

"Users: couldn't you just _strangle_ them?!"


In the past couple of weeks I've had users:-

Rename a worksheet, crashing my VBA code. (Okay, I should have anticipated this but in my defence I didn't know they had such an advanced level of expertise!)
Insert a new worksheet and copy all the data from the main sheet into it because they wanted a different font. (The main sheet was protected so they couldn't change it there.) This stopped the VBA code from working because of course it only existed behind the main sheet.
Make a copy of a workbook with a different filename - I have no idea why - which prevented the workbook consolidation routine from collecting the up-to-date information since it was still looking at the now-abandoned copy rather than the newly-created one. This was in spite of a very clear warning in the user guide that filenames and folder locations were not to be modified.
Remove conditional formatting "because I didn't think it was doing anything".
Report that they were unable to insert a new column into a sheet. When I asked them what additional information did they want to capture in this extra column, they said they wanted to store the folder where the workbook was located so that they could find it again easily in the future.
Save a macro-enabled workbook as an XLSX file because someone told them that this would save them from having to click the 'enable macros' prompt each time they opened it. (The opening screen displays a numpty's guide on how to add a folder to _Trusted Locations_.)
A few years ago - and I'd forgotten this until it came to mind when I posted a reply to a new board member earlier this afternoon - a user asked me for a fresh copy of a worksheet I'd designed for him some time earlier and into which I knew he'd being entering a fair amount of data. He claimed to have deleted it accidentally and when I suggested getting it restored from a backup he said that the IT Help Desk had been unable to restore a version from any of the daily/week-end/month-end backups which had been taken since he had started using it. He said not to worry about it in any case, he had a hard copy of it and was quite happy to key it all in again.

So I gave him a fresh copy of the workbook but I then wandered over to the IT Help Desk and expressed my concern that they'd been unable to restore the file, resulting in a lot of wasted effort for my user. They couldn't find any calls on the system asking for the file to be restored. Strange... So I logged a call myself and was surprised when they managed to restore the file almost immediately from the previous night's backup.

I opened the workbook to make sure all the data was there, hoping to save my user having to type it all in again, only to discover that he had used parts of the worksheet to demonstrate how wide his vocabulary of profanities was, including body parts I wasn't sure existed and physical activities which I'd never even dreamt about. Unfortunately he'd entered these into cells which he hadn't realised became locked when the workbook was saved (for audit purposes), and when he tried to remove them he was unable to do so, so he panicked and decided the best course of action would be to delete the entire workbook.

I do hope he reads this amd remembers me...


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## RoryA (Jul 5, 2011)

Could, and have. They'll never find the bodies though.


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## SuperFerret (Jul 5, 2011)

Yes! 

Are you sure we don't work for the same company? I promise I'm not a culprit to any of the aforementioned offenses but the rest of the people working here...well it wouldn't surprise me!


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## MrKowz (Jul 5, 2011)

rorya said:


> Could, and have. They'll never find the bodies though.


 
Probably under the ever-growing pile of Guinness cans/bottles.


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## yytsunamiyy (Jul 5, 2011)

MrKowz said:


> Probably under the ever-growing pile of Guinness cans/bottles.



I would have thought a true exceler would bury them in a formula...





























...eg: =H<sub>2</sub>SO<sub>4</sub>


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## texasalynn (Jul 5, 2011)

ahhhh yes, the truth is revealed.  No accidents at all


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## Greg Truby (Jul 5, 2011)

Ruddles said:


> ...only to discover that he had used parts of the worksheet to demonstrate how wide his vocabulary of profanities was, including body parts I wasn't sure existed and physical activities which I'd never even dreamt about. Unfortunately he'd entered these into cells which he hadn't realised became locked when the workbook was saved (for audit purposes), and when he tried to remove them he was unable to do so, so he panicked and decided the best course of action would be to delete the entire workbook.
> 
> I do hope he reads this amd remembers me...


 
I don' care who ya are -- that's funny right there. Were you not a Brit, I'd suspect you used to work on the staff of one of our fine congressmen we have over here. Did our great Anthony Wiener's twitter scandal make it in the papers over there?


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## xenou (Jul 5, 2011)

> Report that they were unable to insert a new column into a sheet. When I asked them what additional information did they want to capture in this extra column, they said they wanted to store the folder where the workbook was located so that they could find it again easily in the future.


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## diddi (Jul 6, 2011)

you didn't mention the utterly idiotic things users do when using a seemingly indestructable userform...


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## arkusM (Jul 6, 2011)

Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool. (I should know )


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## MrKowz (Jul 6, 2011)

arkusM said:


> Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool. (I should know )



As soon as someone invents something foolproof, society invents a better fool.


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## arkusM (Jul 6, 2011)

MrKowz said:


> As soon as someone invents something foolproof, society invents a better fool.


 So true.
I was reading a post on Don Normans site, he is an advocate of simple intuitive design, where he was talking about a work around for the auto faucets shot on time (wet paper towel over sensors). Mr. Norman was comments more on the workarounds people come up with when a design is flawed and barely functional. However, in the comments people were FREAKING OUT about the waste of water this would cause... It is like we are morphing into the people of the spacecraft in Wall-e, lazy blobs incapable of turning the water tap on and off? Really. When I was a child my parents drilled into me to shut the water off, and not to let it run needlessly and we were not on a water meter at the time, this is(was) a basic sense of responsibility.

To me the dumbing down is also manifest in people standing on escalators. They are stairs people, they happen to move, but still are stairs... I could appreciate that some folks have a hard time with stairs (I work with someone like this) but when I see 90+% standing on the escalators. 
We are moving to Wall-e-blobdom. sigh. 

Oh, when are we getting the auto-butt wipers... (non-bidet version).


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## arkusM (Jul 6, 2011)

Sorry about the rant folks, tooth pain is making me irritable today.


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## Ruddles (Jul 6, 2011)

Let it out, man, if it helps you feel better. 

Hey, we appear to have moved to the lounge... it's nice here, isn't it?


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## Michael M (Jul 6, 2011)

Hi R
Just had the same thing here...A button on a Userform that returns to a Master Sheet, clearly states "This will return you to the Main Menu....and in RED & BOLD on the button "No data will be saved"

When the button is pressed, a MsgBox pops up with....."No data will be saved. Are you sure you want to lose ALL data"

One of the engineers using the sheet, logged a call with IT ......wait for it ....because every time he fills in the data and goes back to the Main Menu, his data disappears.....it must be a bug in Excel !!
There must be a level of stupidity that can't be crossed !!!
I finally cracked....I have now put a series of MsgBoxes in the script, so that when this one user logs in, it asks about 6 times "are you REALLY sure you want to do this"
He's starting to get a little peeved.....but give him another few days, and I reckon it will be lesson learned !!


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## Sandeep Warrier (Jul 7, 2011)

Michael M said:


> I have now put a series of MsgBoxes in the script, so that when this one user logs in, it asks about 6 times "are you REALLY sure you want to do this"



After sometime it'll be blindly click click click yes for everything, and then the same complaint logged in IT


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## mikerickson (Jul 7, 2011)

If I could make a suggestion: 

In Excel dialogs, pressing YES usually does something. Your user might be confused by a "YES save nothing" dialog.

Perhaps the user would make fewer mistakes if they had a more familiar dialog like "Save the data (over writting the existing scheme)?" YES NO Cancel, with YES the default


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## Sandeep Warrier (Jul 7, 2011)

MrKowz said:


> As soon as someone invents something foolproof, society invents a better fool.



I've shamelessly plagiarised this and posted it all over my office


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## Peter_SSs (Jul 7, 2011)

Greg Truby said:


> Did our great Anthony Wiener's twitter scandal make it in the papers over there?


Certainly did down-under.


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## Joe4 (Jul 7, 2011)

I have seen some doozies here too.  Here are a few of my favorites (that have happened here in my office).

First, the minor, more common ones I think many of us have seen:

1.  Formulas that needlessly use the SUM formula, i.e.:
*=SUM(A1+A2)*

2.  People who complain that saving an Excel file to a CSV drops the leading zeroes off of zip codes and ID numbers (they are actually there, its just viewing the file in Excel drops them upon opening).  I really hate that Microsoft selects Excel as the Default Viewer for CSV files instead of NotePad...  I change the default on all our users computers to a robust text editor that we use.

Now, for some more interesting ones I have encountered:

1.  People who think they can convert an Excel file to a Fixed-Width text file by going into Windows Explorer and changing the file extension form ".xls" to ".txt" (or vice versa).

2.  An Excel file that was set-up as read-only but also set to auto-backup every ten minutes.  I got a call people panicking that all their updates weren't being saved.  I browsed to the folder and found about 15 different variations of the file, as the auto-backup kept saving copies with a counter on the end (since it was read-only).  What fun it was trying to coordinate all the updates in 15 different files into one!


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## diddi (Jul 7, 2011)

i have a project where several users enter info onto a form which ensures that each section is completed correctly, but the boss who has no IT idea demands a tool without validation for himself to be able to 'edit' the data.  so when it falls over i check and find a date field with "not needed" in it or something equally dumb. needless to say the other users dont have any problems. lol


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## Michael M (Jul 8, 2011)

Hmm, didn't know we had the same boss !!!
Nice and cool here P.....minus 5 this morning !!


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## JamesW (Jul 8, 2011)

My personal favourites are:

I open a spreadsheet someone who is an "excel consultant" has created only to be greeted with a wall of bright red cells which cause my eyes to bleed.

Also, in said spreadsheet, there are 255 columns and 60k rows all with duplicate information and about 6 billion vlookups.  This "Expert" is paid more per day than I get in a month...  I managed to get the spreadsheet down to about 20 columns in the end.

Someone typing in numbers then getting out a calculator to sum them up.

People insisting on using +=A1+B1 on EVERYTHING (my Father is the major culprit).

Users asking why =A1+B1 won't work when one of the cell values is "TAX @ 20%"

Users creating a mammoth nested if/and/or formula when a simple SUMIF will suffice.

There's hundreds more..


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## Ruddles (Jul 8, 2011)

My pet hate is probably that mahoosive long formula which the user ends up not being able to understand or even modify without causing a syntax error, because he insists on shoehorning it into a single cell when the sheet still has 16,370 empty columns to the left which he could use to break the formula down into three or four much simpler chunks.


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## arkusM (Jul 8, 2011)

JamesW said:


> I open a spreadsheet someone who is an "excel consultant" has created only to be greeted with a wall of bright red cells which cause my eyes to bleed.


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## RoryA (Jul 8, 2011)

The only thing worse than users is consultants. 
I'm sure there are exceptions (e.g. all of _you_ who do that consulting thing) , but every one that I have come across at work has been useless, or worse.

Actually, I take that back - trainers can be worse than both. (not Bill, obviously)


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## arkusM (Jul 8, 2011)

Users; can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em


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## RoryA (Jul 8, 2011)

I'm generally my only user, and I still get annoyed by the things I do.


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## Ruddles (Jul 8, 2011)

arkusM said:


> Users; can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em


Can't live with 'em; can't bludgeon 'em to death, cut their bodies into small pieces and bury 'em under wasteland.


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## texasalynn (Jul 8, 2011)

We had a consultant that named his files "Book1, Book2, Book3, etc"
Really??


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## Smitty (Jul 8, 2011)

Ruddles said:


> Can't live with 'em; can't bludgeon 'em to death, cut their bodies into small pieces and bury 'em under wasteland.


 
When I quit being a cowboy, and went into the coat and tie world I was on an interview and had a VP of Operations ask me how I thought I could transition from managing cows to people. I told him: "Management's easy, it's just the product that's different. With cows you make them go where you want by making them think that's where they want to go, and you can do the same with people". He asked what you do if you have problems with that in ranching and I said "you shoot them, and eat them." 

I got the job.

Edit - FUBAR: should have been "that's where they want to go", not "that's where you want to go"


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## MrKowz (Jul 8, 2011)

Smitty said:


> When I quit being a cowboy, and went into the coat and tie world I was on an interview and had a VP of Operations ask me how I thought I could transition from managing cows to people.  I told him: "Management's easy, it's just the product that's different.  With cows you make them go where you want by making them think that's where you want to go, and you can do the same with people".  He asked what you do if you have problems with that in ranching and I said "you shoot them, and eat them."
> 
> I got the job.


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## repairman615 (Jul 9, 2011)

Ruddles said:


> ...mahoosive...


 


I am sooo guilty.


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## Ruddles (Jul 9, 2011)

Yeah, me too sometimes.  I even wrote a bit of code which takes a series of formulae in multiple columns and combines them into a single huge formula!

I reckon that's okay though, as long as you don't destroy all traces of the individual formulae just in case you need to tinker with them in the future.

Although I usually do...


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## Joe4 (Jul 9, 2011)

I usually try to avoid massive formulas. If a formula gets too big, I like to convert it to a UDF where I can document it and follow its flow a bit easier.


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## diddi (Jul 10, 2011)

Joe4 said:


> I usually try to avoid massive formulas. If a formula gets too big, I like to convert it to a UDF where I can document it and follow its flow a bit easier.



Agree with this.  I think it is a terrible failing of excel to actually allow users to construct these horrible convoluted behemouths of formulae in the first place. wouldn't it be great if you could apply a subroutine to a cell directly? much easier to debug.


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