I may be alone in this but...

[Patience]

... do you ever feel slightly wistful when you have tidied up someone else's data, into something meaningful and useful, having pulled some amazing formulas out of the bag in order to swiftly make some thing horrible into a dataset of beauty in a matter of minutes - and then have to copy and paste the values over it all? All those poor beautiful formulas that no one will ever see or marvel at?

It pulls at my heart strings, anyway.

 

[gingerafro]

I'm with you on that.
Literally just finished doing a little reporting and thought 'should I leave them in or not'. I'm going to tell the user that they just have to live with the calculating cells for ever more.
Plus, I'm sure it will get 'tweaked' and then I'll have to write them all over again...

 

[riaz]

Bryony, as long as you are part of this forum, as the Liverpool FC fans say, "You'll never walk alone."

When I (rarely) manage a masterpiece unashamedly plagiarised from the brains of the marvellous minds at work on this forum, I tend to keep a copy on my own hard drive, so when someone does "funny" things, at least I have a source to retrieve the work and put all right with the world once again.

Sometimes I will go back and just look at the work nostalgically and think "I wish I could have done that..."

 

[Patience]

Yes - I suppose that is a good idea. Sometimes it is nice to look back at something, just to make you feel good about yourself - even if others totally don't understand what it means to you! Some people just don't understand the beauty that lies within some formulas. But yes, here, people get it. And that is a good feeling in itself

 

[Long Nose]

Bryony, as long as you are part of this forum, as the Liverpool FC fans say, "You'll never walk alone."

When I (rarely) manage a masterpiece unashamedly plagiarised from the brains of the marvellous minds at work on this forum, I tend to keep a copy on my own hard drive, so when someone does "funny" things, at least I have a source to retrieve the work and put all right with the world once again.

Sometimes I will go back and just look at the work nostalgically and think "I wish I could have done that..."

+1 The "Save As" is your memorial of the creation and moments of greatness. Fortunately most of my company's reporting is mine and I guard against those who would hard-code my work.

 

[cornflakegirl]

I've been building a model recently that has to be flexible for 4 assumptions that affect the actual structure of the model - complete nightmare. I got my boss to review it yesterday - took him through some top level sense checks on the results. Then I offered to show him the formulas behind them. He took one look at one that had an OFFSET and a couple of MATCH and said, no thanks. Part of me wishes he could appreciate the effort I put into it, but the other part is a little bit smug

 

[TinaP]

I have become completely anal about the workbooks I create for others. For instance, on some workbooks with macros, I have a Workbook_Open event that pops a message box on the screen to warn the users against changing cells, adding and deleting columns and the like. Other workbooks with heavy-duty formulas get to have their protection set. The password for the worksheet is very, very basic so I don't forget, but it's enough to stop anyone from overwriting my formulas.

Just yesterday I had a co-worker call me to his office, "The numbers aren't changing in my workbook." It was a workbook that was created without my involvement, so I really had nothing vested in it. When I got there, I found that he overwrote all of his formulas. The formulas themselves weren't complicated, but there were hundreds. I only managed to get about ten steps out of his office before laughter overtook me.

 

[Patience]

Yes - of course that is a slightly different issue, I meant stuff that was only ever meant to be temporary, but when people mess up you hard work that then needs repairing it can be even more frustrating. I always make back ups of files that this may happen to, but still it drives me up the pole.

I really like the idea of the message box on opening the file that warns people against such transgressions. Think I will pinch that in future!

 

[RoryA]

I meant stuff that was only ever meant to be temporary

This is one of those phrases that rings alarm bells for me. If anyone else ever asks me to do anything, I now assume that it will need to be repeatable, easily customised and stand up to external audit, especially if I'm told it won't.
It's up there with phrases such as "could you just", "quick question" and "have you got a minute"...
Oh, and there's nothing quite like a formula of absolute beauty to remind you that you're a complete nerd.

 

[cornflakegirl]

Actually, thinking about the OP some more, I don't think I ever would paste values over the top. Partly because of what gingerafro said about the little tweaks that are always required, and partly because I always like to know the source of my data - I never know which of my fag-packet models is going to morph into a huge business case 6 months later...