IT Manager & Excel

[Bruno_x]

Our IT Manager, you know the one with the company-car and nice salary, asked me today : "Is there a formula in XL to concatenate cells A1, B1 and C1 and place the result in D1 ?"

I told him about & . . .
(I gonna look for that "Excel for dummies" book on the loft)

 

[RichardS]

"...concatenate cells A1, B1 and C1 and place the result in D1 ?"

In D1, =CONCATENATE(A1,B1,C1)

which is basically his own words. Do IT managers assume everything is more complicated than it has to be?

Richard

 

[Bruno_x]

In D1, =CONCATENATE(A1,B1,C1)

which is basically his own words. Do IT managers assume everything is more complicated than it has to be?

Hi Richard,
The equivalent of CONCATENATE() in our dutch version of XL = TEKST.SAMENVOEGEN() wich means : merge text . . .

And yes, there is a contradiction between IT managers and simple solutions

 

[adaytay]

Of course, you could just use '&' instead of typing out "Concatenate" every time. But then I'm lazy.

D1 = A1 & B1 & C1

Not wishing to defend IT Managers, but rather more try and understand where he was coming from, although IT Managers have worked through the ranks, the number of people (in comparison) that have used VBA or Excel cell formulas - especially "Concatenate") is actually quite small.

Some IT Managers learn their skills through a variety of roles. Some are system support (helpdesk). But unless you use Excel at a more advanced level than just punching numbers in, why would you know of the Concatenate formula?

Just my tuppence, please don't flame me...

Ad

 

[starl]

well, they aren't all so dense - we've (that's MrExcel) received several clients that had their IT depts point to us. So, there's hope yet.

 

[WillR]

Someone from IT just came to install a "corporate screensaver" on my PC.

I am now missing all of my Internet Favourites. ALL of them.... can you imaging just how big a list that was!!!!

(I do have the majority at home, but I probably add ten to twenty new "resources" each day.... and probably the last time I backed this up was a month ago... )

Bugger!!

 

[mark007]

Hmm, I'd do a search for them on your C:, you never know. Also check the recycle bin.

Has your profile name changed or something? Would seem an odd thing to delete. Doesn't surprise me though. My experience with IT departments are they are full of cretins, but there you go!

 

[WillR]

Mark.... they all gone (just like that Mondeo )

F##K knows what they did.....

(Still I have most at home... just bloody annoying!)

 

[Smitty]

Our IT department converted us all to a new corporate network on Thursday. We were told to back everything up (300 something users) to the network prior to the conversion as all C: drive documents would be FUBAR'd and replaced with the network copy. (Why do users have to do this?) Unfortunately, I have 40Gb of data and the server is 80Gb. (I've been asked previously to get all of my stuff off the server because I took up too much space - I have a personal tape drive for backups, so I didn't think it would be too bad).

Thursday I try to log on and my PC takes 4 1/2 hours to START!

Of course the IT guys in our Corporate office didn't get the memo about my PC, so ALL of my information was gone! Finally one of the PC techs who knows me, says, "Oh we made an extra backup for him, just restore it.) What about that tape backup you ask? The upgrade fried the driver for the tape and IT couldn't find the disk.

So Thursday is pretty much down the tubes, then I spend Friday re-installing Office and my other programs, which conveniently got entirely wiped out with the "upgrade". Then I find out that the Corporate backup wasn't an entire FUBAR; I somehow now have two sets of almost identical files, except that in one directory a file might be OK, in the other it may be FUBAR'd, so I had to go through ALL of my recent files swapping and replacing to get things squared up. Then my PC starts crashing, can't figure out why...Hmmm...My 80Gb HD now has 8 Mb of free space. That could be it...(Unfortunately, dependinjg on how you look at it, my boss has had IT make me an Admin on my own PC, so I got to do all the work...)

Delete 40 Mb, major defrag and by 4:00 P.M. Friday I'm ready to go, with 2 days of work to catch up on, and I get the message from our IT dept that "by the way, your new laptop is in, but we've been too busy to get it to you. Can we bring it up Monday or Tuesday?"

%&*%$# (Insert the seven words you can't say on TV here... )

I vote mine as the most incompetent IT department around. (Mind you, they've gotten better since an Intern fried my hard drive with two years worth of work on it the same weekend he fried the server - The Dept thought it was a great deal, he was an Intern therefore "Free"). OK Sparky.

Smitty

 

[Zack Barresse]

... The Dept thought it was a great deal, he was an Intern therefore "Free"). OK Sparky.

Smitty

Now that takes the cake!

Um, does it count if I am my own IT department? LOL!