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My current job requires me to do a lot of Excel spreadsheets. Coming from a programming background, there are many things that Excel does which completely baffle me. I need to vent. Gather around. A thread:
Starting with an oddly specific one, but it tells you a lot about the whole program.
Excel often tries to infer the format of cells based on what you type in, especially for dates and time.
Excel often tries to infer the format of cells based on what you type in, especially for dates and time.
1.2.3
Yeah sure, that's 01.02.2003.
jan1
Obviously, you mean 01.01.2001.
1jan
Now, that is 01.01.2020.
Okay, fine (but not really).
Yeah sure, that's 01.02.2003.
jan1
Obviously, you mean 01.01.2001.
1jan
Now, that is 01.01.2020.
Okay, fine (but not really).
But then you try a date in ISO8601 format, THE ONE INTERNATIONAL STANDARD for representing time, and it just doesn't know what to do with it.
The official documentation sucks. Way too much reading to get to the point. It's easy to come back knowing less about a function than before reading it.
Oh and then there is that thing where it for no apparent reason decides to become unusable until you let it use all your computer's processing power for twenty minutes. Oh, okay. You go ahead. It's not like I was going to need any of that.
Co-worker: "Oh yeah it does that sometimes. Just grab a tea and wait."
Well okay then.
Well okay then.
You might find yourself looking for a very basic feature, just to find out that it does not exist. But worry not. You can always count on the big online community to have a solution involving a complicated 10-step workaround and/or 200 lines of VBA.
Here's one of the better workarounds. There is no simple way to reverse the order of rows. So, the agreed upon procedure is as follows. Create a "helper" column with ascending numbers. Select everything including this column. Sort the helper column with descending order.
And the Excel experience is full of such "tricks". It gets tedious after some time to say the least.
Those are some of the reasons why a seemingly simple task might take up the better part of a day. Is it bad for everything? No, of course there are some very legitimate reasons to have it around. Easiest way to break the Eighth Amendment by forcing someone to use it, for example.
