Venting!

[Smitty]

When I was transferred to Northern California we had a lot of restructuring to do, including configuring potential new offices, so I'd use Visio to lay out office configurations based on realtor floor plans, plug in pricing for workstations, et. al., and come up with efficiency diagrams, etc.

Corporate, in their infinite wisdom, decided to go with the facility manager's hand drawn (pencil & graph paper) renderings instead. And this was (not anymore) a Fortune 500, $1BB/year company, who is a Microsoft partner!

Granted, Visio isn't my forte, but it's incredibly powerful, much more so than graph paper.

That's one of the reasons I left....

 

[SuperFerret]

Our last office reorganisation was based on a drawing done in Paint...none of the 'desks' were even the same size (I still doubt they even used the Rectangle drawing tool to draw them) and they wondered why they had to make some last minute changes when moving day came because nothing would fit where they thought it would...

 

[mole999]

. I also by accident left the screenupdating on (I think actually they are fascinated watching the flicker).

I leave screenupdating on for anything that runs more than about 20 seconds (well its on and off in places)

otherwise they play with buttons and try crashing out because they think its not doing anything.

Ironically they sat and waited for someone elses six minute code, which I squashed to 30 seconds

 

[MARK858]

(well its on and off in places)

If I am writing a program properly that I know is going to run for a while then I normally do something similar (strictly speaking off and on as I only turn it on to change the screen) or sometimes I change the status bar which most of the people I work with do seem to take notice of.

Ironically they sat and waited for someone elses six minute code, which I squashed to 30 seconds

Haven't had the patience to see how long this one runs for. The guy who asked for it did say it seemed to take a long time to run. I told him it had to do a lot of calculations (which was true) and he went away.
One day I might alter it a bit as because with the number of formulas the screenupdating is annoying (but not soon) or you never know he might even ask for it to be done properly rather than via a macro.

 

[mole999]

when i'm testing i tend to somewhere unobtrusive

range("a1") = now() at the very beginning of the code
range("a2") = now() at the end of the code
then just do a2-a1 on the sheet

or create a page for the stages, and atleast I can see where the delays are and work to optimize them.

I do use the status line to show what's its doing, though means more to me than most of the users

 

[jeffreybrown]

Many moons ago I put together a spreadsheet we use for collecting work measurement data (with a lot of help from you guys…thank you ). As time moved, on I left and other people preformed any upkeep to this spreadsheet which was minimal.

When I left the sheet was unprotected (or at least this is what I remembered), but just the other day somebody meet with the big boss and immediately after called me and said, "the boss said YOU will unlock that spreadsheet and give us the password". It had been so long I honestly could not remember if I had actually protected the workbook. I said give me a few minutes to remember and I call you back.

I opened the spreadsheet, selected the Review tab and then selected Unprotect Sheet…presto. No password…go figure.

Now that wasn’t so hard was it and I live another day to collect another paycheck. Life is good

 

[MARK858]

Being honest I have never thought about timing it that way. When I test I use a timer. Something like...

Dim t As Double
t = Timer

at the start of the sub and

MsgBox "Code took " & Format(Timer - t, "0.00 secs")

at the end or wherever.

The only reason the people I work with pay attention to the status line is that I have convinced them to do so. At one time the only way they were happy was to have a progress bar on every macro and I hate putting in progress bars.

My next big task is convince them not to use merge cells. But that will be a bit harder.ray:

 

[mole999]

merge cells, i would reserve that for when someone says this dosen't work when they have been playing.

then sit down with them and get them to make the changes, as we debugger (sic) it together

 

[shift-del]

My next big task is convince them not to use merge cells. But that will be a bit harder.ray:

Some of my colleagues center each and every cell in the spreadsheet. And I can't talk them out of it.
It drives me nuts.

 

[Atroxell]

Shift-del,

I see that almost every day. Why on earth would every single column have to be centered? And no one seems to listen when you tell them it's really not necessary. I was once told that centering "gives the eye enough white space to see the data more clearly." Really? Because the default alignment won't?

Another one I see from time to time is people using calculators to enter data into a spreadsheet. I have seen this peeve multiple times on this forum, so I won't elaborate beyond saying that I have seen it done mostly in the Accounting Departments.

Since we're venting...

I recently built a workbook for my daughter. She teaches and the school she's at had a workbook to track special needs students, grade 1-8. At first it was pretty straight forward and required a little macro writing to make it more user friendly. Once all of the universe of variations were taken into account, it ran well. Except for the times when someone (after the completion) comes up to her and says, "Oh, I forgot to tell you I also do this with it and it needs some changes." It is for my daughter though, so I am happy to do it.

And to my daughter's credit, the last email I got on it from her was to tell me about how the macro had "failed" for one of the teachers. She was determined not to "bother" me again about this workbook, so after much head scratching she discovered that the teacher had actually deleted 4 columns of data (but not everywhere applicable and not correctly) and then discovered the macro would not work for some reason. Hmmm...imagine that! We had designed the whole thing to be flexible enough to adjust for such corrections, but it required a specific set of editing to maintain integrity.

My daughter, who has no prior experience with macro writing, dug through my code and figured out where and how to modify it to run in the new design. She gave credit to my excessive commenting (I'm one of those people ) in the code for helping her to figure it out, but I think she's pretty smart to be able to do that.

And yes, I did leave the project unlocked. It was for a school and I am a ****** for kids and teachers. (Probably should not post that tidbit--now every teacher on the board will be emailing me. ) But I often wonder if I should have locked the worksheets to make my/my daughter's life easier. There are no bigger kids or tougher students than teachers...