I may be alone in this but...

[cornflakegirl]

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

I get my supplies from Rory. I'm sure he has enough for all of us

 

[riaz]

I'm not sure this is a very huggy board...)

What's a huggy board? Anything like a smorgasbord?

 

[cornflakegirl]

I don't know. Are smorgas like hugs?

 

[RoryA]

By all standards I have come across, this is quite a huggy board, and should never be ashamed so to be. If we can't be our own support group, I don't know who will be!
I have a distinguished ( to my mind anyway) history of calling a spade a #%$&ing shovel, so my bosses can never really pretend to claim I didn't warn them. Doesn't always make me popular, but they have learned that there's usually a good reason if I swear at them, and gradually they are starting to pay attention!

 

[RoryA]

What's a huggy board? Anything like a smorgasbord?

only if the Swedish version of Starsky and Hutch had smorgasbear in it.

 

[riaz]

For all of us who feel proprietary about our masterpieces, here is a bit I found on "A smorgasbord of classics", left as comments in his code by a fellow feeling programmer.

** This source code is a part of the legendary Total For-Ex (TFE)
** trading system, supporting foreign exchange trading activity
** at Initech Investments. The system must work on a virtually
** continuous basis and I, the undersigned programmer, am its
** benefactor and protector. As we are truly in the medieval
** ages of software development, I am a big fan of simple code.
** Another artifact unto the Ages....
** Custom code - 100% Recyclable, 100% Biodegradable

 

[Greg Truby]

"...huggy board...smorgasbear..." «¡brilliant!»

Bryony, riaz hit the nail on the head when he said "you'll never walk alone" as long as your a member of this board. All of our power members have gone through what you are.

For formulas of exceptional beauty that I have found on this board, I tend to copy them into a worksheet in Personal.xls Then when I need them or something like them, I can completely forget that they're there and spend an hour re-inventing them due to my pi__ poor memory. Here are the descriptions of some I have picked up over the years:

• Formula to put WS Name into Cell
• Most Commonly Occurring String in a Range
• Count Unique Values in a Range
• Calculate the number of characters in common
• Longest word in a cell
• Test to see if A1 is a prime number
• To make a calendar

What I wish I had done was to also create a log over the years of workbooks that contained particularly elegant formulae or bits of code because now I'm faced with the decision "I *know* I have solved this exact same problem before... so will it take me longer to remember where and find the damñed workbook than it will take me to just solve it *again*?" [Of course, I would probably forget that I had the ruddy log, so perhaps the point is moot.]

And regarding some of our "whoa, that's purdy, right dere" moments -- see this thread from three years ago; which was resurrected for a bit last spring. I would actually encourage anyone that still uses XL2003 or lower frequently to peruse the thread if for no other reason than because it features Stephen Dunn's V() UDF.

 

[Long Nose]

I get my supplies from Rory. I'm sure he has enough for all of us

Anyone else like Caol Ila?

 

[Fazza]

There are a couple of guys I've worked with for a few years; I end up creating any complex spreadsheets for them. When I have a neat new spreadsheet it is good to demonstrate it to them. They have an appreciation of what is being done.

One thing for me though is that most of my spreadsheets don't have formulas. I use a lot of ADO & SQL maybe on a few worksheet events. So data in some files or worksheets and opening another file or moving to a summary worksheet will pull the data and do the magic. Maybe generate a consolidation or report or new data file for our real database.

 

[Darren Bartrup]

I have a distinguished ( to my mind anyway) history of calling a spade a #%$&ing shovel

I try to do that, but there's too many people in the office who like to call it a mobile soil conveyance device and that always confuses the issue.

Any particularly nice formulas or snippets of code I put into a Wiki which sits on our teams network - www.tiddlywiki.com .
Makes searching for these things much easier and when asked for the nth time how to do something I can now tell them to look on the Wiki.

Also, what is the problem with supplying a spec? I'm sure the people who ask for a spreadsheet/database know what they want the finished article to do but instead they give you a vague "here's some numbers, can you make it do something" approach.
Then there's the scope creep that ALWAYS happens - I remembering reading somewhere that it's like someone asking you for a map, so you give them a nice 2D map. They then ask for it in 3D. They then ask to be able to fly through it. Only a small difference from the original request.

And why do people think they know how long it will take to do something? I was recently asked for four hours of my time to create some charts.... 3 months later I was finished. The main reason - no spec, and scope creep.

Sorry, rant over now