Excel in the work place

PCRIDE

Well-known Member
Joined
Jan 20, 2008
Messages
907
I don't know about everyone else but I find staff in technical environments that hardly know how to use excel. I build reports, spreadsheets, summaries, make tools to do things faster but I find that a lot of people may be scared of excel or just intimated by it.

For example
There are some grueling tasks that folks are doing manually that takes HOURS... simply making a report that a user simply needs to press CTRL A, CTRL C, click on the other sheet. CTRL V and press update is hard for them??? An hours task turned into 30 seconds but they rather do this manually??? WTH!

In the office place (unless your an accountant) A lot of people just don't know how to use Office suite very well. That seems like it would be a basic skill these days...

Does anyone also experience this?
 

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All the time. Even people who you'd expect to have a fair degree of skill look stunned when I do something that is second nature.
I'd go as far as saying that, for a good sized chunk of the workforce, Excel (and in fact ANY application) is a major productivity killer.

Denis
 
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All the time. Even people who you'd expect to have a fair degree of skill look stunned when I do something that is second nature.
I'd go as far as saying that, for a good sized chunk of the workforce, Excel (and in fact ANY application) is a major productivity killer.

Denis

They don't use it for how its suppose to be used, :) is that what you mean by productivity killer?

They use it for all the wrong reasons many times IMO.
 
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They don't use it for how its suppose to be used, :) is that what you mean by productivity killer?

They use it for all the wrong reasons many times IMO.

Yep. Anyone who uses Excel purely to store numbers, while doing the real work on a calculator; or writes letters in Excel; or does table calculations in Word; and many other dumb examples of misusing or abusing applications.
All of the above will take longer than they should, and produce a sub-standard result.

Denis
 
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No one in my workplace can do anything with excel, half of the time it is an effort for them just to open a file.

They had a 3 page mud map on how to do a price file and no one could follow it so I made a macro that opens the file does all the necessary editing etc... and then emails the file and deletes the text file.

Now it only takes them 5 clicks of the mouse and still they complain and the only reason they have 5 clicks is to make sure that the email address etc... is right and give them the option to edit important information if they need to.

I use excel and a macro recorder to key 10's of thousands of barcodes, new parts etc... which my company refuses to load into the system, all they need to do is convert the excel file to CSV and load it, but they would rather someone key it "AS it gives them something to do".
 
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The funniest person is my boss, I put a button on his toolbar to delete columns as he doesn't know how to right click a mouse button and click on delete, he still can not delete a column and it's about 10 years since I put the button on his toolbar.

He keeps saying that he doesn't use excel for anything, yet we get hundreds and hundreds of files to work on as our company sends all their reports in excel which he has to edit and send back.

I guess he just types values in a cell and then clicks save.
 
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If I were to give an instruction manual to someone to build a chair, all they have to do is follow step 1-10 and the chair is built. But I guess people would rather pick up parts and bang them into square holes and eventually figure it out - lol
 
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I don't see the issue with users/other technical bods not knowing Excel/insert thing here.

Imagine this: You work on a pig farm and you are the technical supervisor for the tractor. You're colleague is the technical consultant for, er, pigs. Do you expect him to know how to change the oil in a tractor, change a wheel etc? These things may be second nature to you, but to him he has no idea.

You can use any analogy for this.

Just because an IF statement is as easy as breathing to us, doesn't mean everyone should know it. No matter how technical they are.

I work in SAP support. I deal with users on a daily basis who have no idea on the simplest things. Some people don't like to solve things for themselves, or to learn - they have others to do it for them! Not to mention language barriers/mental capacity/job load.

Think about other people's backgrounds before saying they are all useless.
 
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Agreed. My comments were based around people who work with these apps all day long, and could save themselves hours of tedium.
I guess it's my frustration showing because I worked as a trainer for about 12 years and it's hard to grit your teeth sometimes ;-)

Denis
 
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The point I mean to drive is that any office job these days, basic skill is required, at least knowing what the tool is used for and how to do the basic functions.

Some people don't even know that you can type an equals sign into excel and point to 2 cells. Good god.... let alone even know what a pivot table is nor how to use it.


Have you ever seen someone scroll down to row 5000, 500 or whatever? It happens, all they need to know is CTRL Down arrow. It would take someone 20 min to scroll with the mouse through a long spreadsheet.

I see people all day long trying to find an email, all they need to do is sort by who it was from then look at the last few emails...


"Did you see that email I sent the other day?"
...waiting for them to find it (standing behind them)
No I don't see it.

"Just sort by From and type the first few letters of my name!"

Hopefully schools now days are teaching these basic functions, its no different than a construction worker that doesn't know how to hammer a nail.
 
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