Venting!

[Brian from Maui]

I work for a State Government. While I love working with Excel, almost all of the departments use Excel for a fillable form, rather than using Word. I politely e-mail those in charge that while Excel is a useful and powerful program, fillable forms are better suited in Word.

I spent about an 15 minutes converting a form created in Excel to a sample, fillable Word doc. You couldn't tell the difference when printed. For the end user, it's much easier than navigating a Excel file with all those merged cells.

Whoever created that form in Excel must have spent hours getting the formatting right with all those merged cells and different row heights and column widths.

I receive a e-mail saying, after a staff meeting, we have decided to stick with the Excel file.

WTH!!!!!

 

[SydneyGeek]

So...
Do they have some snazzy routine for harvesting the results from the messy Excel template? Or is it just too hard to change to a more efficient option for fear of offending the person who built the original?

Denis

 

[Brian from Maui]

So...
Do they have some snazzy routine for harvesting the results from the messy Excel template? Or is it just too hard to change to a more efficient option for fear of offending the person who built the original?

Denis

Yeah, they print the form out.

Call me naive, but I just can't imagine the powers to be are that clueless and have no vision what so ever.

Plus I'm a end user.

The person that created that Excel template MUST have spent hours creating it.

Go figure!

Thanks for letting me VENT!

 

[Jaye7]

The powers that be in companies do some really dumb things.

At my work I use excel and a macro recorder program to key barcodes into our system which they could have all the barcodes loaded instantly if they paid $700 to the company that owns our software.

My boss says that it gives me something to do.

They think that I have been manually keying barcodes for over six months now, whereas my computer has been doing it for me, I key one barcode my recorder does the rest.

 

[Beezkneez]

It never ceases to amaze me some of the things companies come up with.
Last year, I was asked to build a workflow system in Excel as an exercise to justify not spending money on buying workflow software. The system would have had thousands of users over multiple geographic sites, and countries.
I laughed and told them that if they thought building workflow in Excel would work, then they didn't understand what workflow was.

Yes, Excel CAN do pretty much anything. But that doesn't mean it should.

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

I receive a e-mail saying, after a staff meeting, we have decided to stick with the Excel file.

WTH!!!!!

Sheesh!

 

[mikerickson]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

If what they have now works, they're going to stick with what works.

 

[alansidman]

Fear of Change is a great motivator for staying with the existing. I never really worry about it to much so long as the checks continue to have my name on them as the payee.

Alan

 

[mikerickson]

"The better is the enemy of the good."

 

[Atroxell]

Brian--

Your frustration is understandable. I worked for 10 years at a State vendor here in CA. While I was not working directly for the State, much of what I did had to pass through review with them.

The inefficiencies of government and attitudes towards anything new drove me crazy. In the end, the only thing I could do was to ensure that I did my job to the best of my abilities and ensure that anything new that I built was as good as the present technology allowed. You can't fight the whole system, but you can control your section of it.

I don't claim that I or anything I did was a game-changer--but I did change a small corner of the game. And when it came time for me to leave I left with a clear conscience. With government related jobs, doing your job well has to be the reward you want and need.

And the greatest reward of all for me? The Marketing database/web reporting system I helped build is still in use today---6 years later--and is still growing because of its ease of use, ease of programming and scalability.

Hang in there!