Users

[MrKowz]

Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool. (I should know )

As soon as someone invents something foolproof, society invents a better fool.

 

[arkusM]

As soon as someone invents something foolproof, society invents a better fool.

So true.
I was reading a post on Don Normans site, he is an advocate of simple intuitive design, where he was talking about a work around for the auto faucets shot on time (wet paper towel over sensors). Mr. Norman was comments more on the workarounds people come up with when a design is flawed and barely functional. However, in the comments people were FREAKING OUT about the waste of water this would cause... It is like we are morphing into the people of the spacecraft in Wall-e, lazy blobs incapable of turning the water tap on and off? Really. When I was a child my parents drilled into me to shut the water off, and not to let it run needlessly and we were not on a water meter at the time, this is(was) a basic sense of responsibility.

To me the dumbing down is also manifest in people standing on escalators. They are stairs people, they happen to move, but still are stairs... I could appreciate that some folks have a hard time with stairs (I work with someone like this) but when I see 90+% standing on the escalators.
We are moving to Wall-e-blobdom. sigh.

Oh, when are we getting the auto-butt wipers... (non-bidet version).

 

[arkusM]

Sorry about the rant folks, tooth pain is making me irritable today.

 

[Ruddles]

Let it out, man, if it helps you feel better.

Hey, we appear to have moved to the lounge... it's nice here, isn't it?

 

[Michael M]

Hi R
Just had the same thing here...A button on a Userform that returns to a Master Sheet, clearly states "This will return you to the Main Menu....and in RED & BOLD on the button "No data will be saved"

When the button is pressed, a MsgBox pops up with....."No data will be saved. Are you sure you want to lose ALL data"

One of the engineers using the sheet, logged a call with IT ......wait for it ....because every time he fills in the data and goes back to the Main Menu, his data disappears.....it must be a bug in Excel !!
There must be a level of stupidity that can't be crossed !!!
I finally cracked....I have now put a series of MsgBoxes in the script, so that when this one user logs in, it asks about 6 times "are you REALLY sure you want to do this"
He's starting to get a little peeved.....but give him another few days, and I reckon it will be lesson learned !!

 

[Sandeep Warrier]

I have now put a series of MsgBoxes in the script, so that when this one user logs in, it asks about 6 times "are you REALLY sure you want to do this"

After sometime it'll be blindly click click click yes for everything, and then the same complaint logged in IT

 

[mikerickson]

If I could make a suggestion:

In Excel dialogs, pressing YES usually does something. Your user might be confused by a "YES save nothing" dialog.

Perhaps the user would make fewer mistakes if they had a more familiar dialog like "Save the data (over writting the existing scheme)?" YES NO Cancel, with YES the default

 

[Sandeep Warrier]

As soon as someone invents something foolproof, society invents a better fool.

I've shamelessly plagiarised this and posted it all over my office

 

[Peter_SSs]

Did our great Anthony Wiener's twitter scandal make it in the papers over there?

Certainly did down-under.

 

[Joe4]

I have seen some doozies here too. Here are a few of my favorites (that have happened here in my office).

First, the minor, more common ones I think many of us have seen:

1. Formulas that needlessly use the SUM formula, i.e.:
=SUM(A1+A2)

2. People who complain that saving an Excel file to a CSV drops the leading zeroes off of zip codes and ID numbers (they are actually there, its just viewing the file in Excel drops them upon opening). I really hate that Microsoft selects Excel as the Default Viewer for CSV files instead of NotePad... I change the default on all our users computers to a robust text editor that we use.

Now, for some more interesting ones I have encountered:

1. People who think they can convert an Excel file to a Fixed-Width text file by going into Windows Explorer and changing the file extension form ".xls" to ".txt" (or vice versa).

2. An Excel file that was set-up as read-only but also set to auto-backup every ten minutes. I got a call people panicking that all their updates weren't being saved. I browsed to the folder and found about 15 different variations of the file, as the auto-backup kept saving copies with a counter on the end (since it was read-only). What fun it was trying to coordinate all the updates in 15 different files into one!