I may be alone in this but...

[cornflakegirl]

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.

Amen, brother!

 

[riaz]

As an aside, do you find that after your forays into this forum, your knowledge of Excel has increased to such an extent that you are now the acknowledged office expert on anything IT related? As in, "You're an Excel expert, can you help me recover my Word doc that I worked on for four hours and exited without saving"?

 

[TinaP]

I'm so used to creating workbooks/formulas that are only temporary that they don't even register anymore.

 

[riaz]

I never know which of my fag-packet models is going to morph into a huge business case 6 months later...

That's going to be difficult now, Emma, with fag packets covered in "pretty" pictures.

 

[Patience]

Hmm Rory,- well yes, I guess so. I should explain what prompted my current musings I suppose. I inherited a file that had months across the top, and loads of projects and cost areas down the left with the little boxes filled in with numbers. Not exactly pivotable or useful in many ways. Although it didn't take long I added a column for 'months' and copied the categories 12 times. Rather than cut and paste the numbers into one column I thought 'I can do this more quickly with a bit of OFFSET, MATCH, throw in a bit LEN, RIGHT etc to taste and a pinch of LOOKUP.'

I am the only person who will ever use this data, although I will now be running reports from it that I will distribute. I have no need to do anything else with it - so my formulas were now just taking up space, so needed to go. It just hurt.

I have been burned by the odd 'please make it so my numbers change again' questions a few times. Agh.

I recognise that I am real geek/nerd for this stuff, which makes it even harder to call someone over and say 'Hey, look at THIS!' Maybe we should have a thread here to post things that we are proud of that may be worthy of admiration. You guys would understand!

 

[cornflakegirl]

Riaz - I'm going to start tearing beer mats open instead

 

[Patience]

I never know which of my fag-packet models is going to morph into a huge business case 6 months later...

Yeah - that is a whole other issue here where I work - and in fact that is exactly what the file is I am currently TRYING to rescue. Several months ago I had the best **** budget file ever, which was ignored - this new one was created (real fag packet stuff) using just values, no links to anything - nada. I said at the time this was only going to cause more problems down the line.

Well, I was right. The excrement hit the cooling device yesterday, I spent a chunk of time sobbing in the loos after getting the blame for it, and am now spending today trying to make the best of a pretty awful situation. Why do we do this to ourselves, eh? *sigh*

 

[cornflakegirl]

Don't get me started on budget models! The number of times I've had a manager make a hard-keyed adjustment to a budget model because it was for a deadline and there wasn't time to do it properly. You always get left with non-sensical numbers by the time you try to filter the change back down to the bottom.

(Oh, and hugs for yesterday. If that's okay. I'm not sure this is a very huggy board...)

 

[riaz]

Riaz - I'm going to start tearing beer mats open instead

I don't drink, so that is not an option for me Whaddamigonnado?

 

[Patience]

(Oh, and hugs for yesterday. If that's okay. I'm not sure this is a very huggy board...)

Oh, I'll except hugs from anyone nice! Thank you.