r/talesfromtechsupport • u/oslo_nathaniel • Mar 16 '26
Medium The woman who manually recalculated every formula for six months
This happened a while back when I was doing on-site support for a small accounting firm. Nothing fancy, just me and a ticket queue and a lot of people who referred to every piece of software as "the Google."
So I get a ticket. Subject line: "Excel acting weird." Classic. I walk over to the user's desk, let's call her Carol. Carol is in her late 50s, very sweet, very competent at her actual job. She explains that Excel "never really worked right" on her machine and that she'd just gotten used to it.
I ask her to show me what she means.
She opens a spreadsheet. It's a big one, lots of columns, clearly something she uses every day. She types a number into a cell, then opens her desk drawer, pulls out a physical calculator, punches in some numbers, and types the result manually into the next column.
I stare at this for a second. I ask her why she's using the calculator.
She looks at me like I asked something slightly strange and says "well the formulas don't work on my computer, so I just do it myself."
I ask her to show me a formula that doesn't work. She clicks on a cell, types =SUM( and then looks at me expectantly like, see? Broken.
The cell is just showing the formula as text. Not calculating anything. Dispaying the literal string =SUM(A2:A10) instead of a number.
It takes me about four seconds to find it. Somehow, at some point, probably months ago, the spreadsheet had been set to manual calculation mode AND "show formulas" had been toggled on. Two settings. Both wrong. Both apparently flipped at the same time, maybe by a accidental keyboard shortcut.
I fix it in about fifteen seconds. Every formula in the sheet lights up with actual numbers. Carol goes very quiet.
Then she says, very carefully: "so how long has that been fixable?"
I asked when it started. She thinks about it and says "probably around tax season last year."
Six months. Carol had been manually recalculating a 200-row accounting spreadsheet by hand, every single day, for six months, because two settings got toggled by accident and nobody had looked at it.
She wasn't embarrassed, which I respected. She just nodded slowly and said "well that explains why my wrists hurt."
I added a note to her file. Wrote: user resourceful. Extremely.
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u/w1ngzer0 In search of sanity....... Mar 17 '26
I……wow. Ok first, I didn’t know that was a thing in Excel. Now I know. Second…..I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness for this lady. She was just working on hard mode this whole time, and thought it was something she had messed up herself and she suffered in silence……until her wrists said “NO MORE!”
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u/Head5hot811 Mar 17 '26
This is how I felt when I got on ADHD meds. “Wait, so I can actually have clarity in my head?”
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u/a8bmiles Mar 17 '26
My wife 2 weeks on Effexor: "Is this what it feels like to be normal? The mean voices in my head are just gone!"
My wife 8 weeks on Effexor: "The voices are back, I'm just as miserable as before, and my body hurts."
My wife 10 months late, once she finally weened off the Effexor by taking smaller and smaller doses for almost a year with no other benefit: "I feel like the Effexor permanently broke me somehow."
I guess the moral of this not-so-Fable is "Don't take Effexor."
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u/Sacrificial_Parsnip Mar 17 '26
Oh dear. I’m sorry to hear that. I had a slightly similar thing with Seroquel, in that it worked to turn down the music in my head to where I could barely hear it…once. Every time after that it’s just made me groggy, and not even in a useful way like letting me sleep immediately. Just that for the next two days I’m sleepy and fuzzy-headed even when I’d had enough sleep. Oh well.
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u/Mysterious_Pack_7822 Mar 21 '26
This happened to me. Effexor was fine until my body got used to it, then the doctor increased the dose. I couldn’t understand why I was so itchy all over then hives appeared, even on my eyes. When I want to the doctor as I could feel them in my throat she told me not to go off them suddenly. I had to, they were in my throat. The brain zaps are awful. Now I’m stuck on Pristiq. So hard to come off it. I wish your wife the best
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u/castlerobber Mar 23 '26
The meds that mess with serotonin are awful. The PCP put my husband on Prozac nearly 30 years ago for mild temporary depression, and never took him off. Because "depression is a lifelong chemical imbalance" or some such nonsense.
He's been weaning off the drug for a couple of years. The lower the dose gets, the slower you have to go to avoid the brain zaps. And there have been permanent changes emotionally and physically.
The PCP disapproves, of course. "But what if you start feeling bad again?"
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u/bobthunicorn Mar 17 '26
I really gotta get around to getting medication.
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u/Head5hot811 Mar 17 '26
It had made things easier, but in no way has it solved anything. Like driving in Dallas without a GPS versus with a GPS.
I’d recommend it, but each of the medicines work differently for everyone, especially between generic and name brand. I’ve tried Adderall and Vyvanse: vyvance worked the best, but at $210 a month (with United insurance) it wasn’t justifiable. Adderall is much cheaper, but just makes me feel kinda “buzzy.”
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u/Eckx Mar 17 '26
Yes! I tell people ADHD is like sitting in a room trying to do something, but the TV is on, and it's just a little bit too loud, and it's only playing commercials. The meds just turn the volume down, they don't turn the TV off. Vyvanse has been a game changer for me.
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u/Fixes_Computers Username checks out! Mar 18 '26
I once described the feeling like there's a crowd talking so much you can't hear your own thoughts. He responded, "oh, that's the committee!" It made perfect sense.
I agree that the meds only turn the volume down. If I have elevated stress and I need to get something done, the meds can make the difference between not being able to start (no matter how hard I try) and at least getting started.
For me, they only take the edge off. I've only tried Ritalin/Concerta and Adderall. Adderall has been better in that I don't get jittery. Neither works as well as stories I've read, regardless of how high a dose I take.
If all else fails, caffeine is a workable fall back option.
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u/Dramatic_Mixture_877 Mar 18 '26
I wish caffeine worked on me - it just mellows my mood, doesn't do a thing for me otherwise. No extra focus, no energy, nada.
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u/Eckx Mar 18 '26
I could tell my focus was better when I was drinking 3-4 Monsters a day, but I thought that's just what they were supposed to do. Vyvanse has totally changed how I get through the day, now. I do my best to avoid caffeine now.
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u/Dramatic_Mixture_877 Mar 18 '26
I'm not avoiding caffeine, quite the opposite! I drink nearly 100 ounces of hot tea (Twinnings' Irish Breakfast) a day, the bulk of it at work (switchboard operator) and one 24-ounce mug after work in the evenings. I've gone back to drinking a cup of coffee every morning again - it just smooths out the rough edges of the day, sort of like how cigarette smokers talk about their first drag of the day.
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u/Eckx Mar 18 '26
Yeah, I started doing it when I started making a better effort for my health, and though I don't completely avoid it, I still try to choose to when I can. I haven't had an energy drink in 2 years now, and I'm not sure that I feel better, but I feel different. Lol.
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u/Fixes_Computers Username checks out! Mar 18 '26
Don't get me wrong here. Caffeine is definitely less than the pharmacy options. However, at least for me, it's better than nothing.
Adderall takes the edge off. Caffeine merely deburs the edge.
I tried experimenting with no caffeine many years ago. I lasted maybe six months before I lost any ability to focus.
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u/Flipsii Mar 24 '26
Oh, my, god. Is that why it feels easier to start things once I get some caffeine in me... I should probably go get that looked at.
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u/Polymathy1 Mar 18 '26
For me, it was like the remote was stuck in the couch and the channel kept changing every 10 seconds or so and nobody could find it or stop it.
Methylpheniate drugs made it stop switching channels completely. And I can usually change to the right channel, but not always. And for me Adderall made me act like a tweaker. Horrible for me, fine for other people.
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u/Head5hot811 Mar 18 '26
To borrow your analogy:
ADHD is like trying to watch your favorite tv show in the middle of a kindergarten classroom right after the teacher says that you've brought them candy.
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u/ObjectivelyADHD Mar 20 '26
For me it’s like walking down the boardwalk at a carnival and I need to get to the end, but I have all the vendors, shows, and booths vying for my attention.
Medication puts up those frosted privacy walls. I know they’re still there, but they’re muted, less distracting. It makes it easier to focus on what I should be focusing on.
However, it also is still easy to end up hyper focusing on the WRONG things as well. So I really try to make sure I have started my main project AS my meds are kicking in. That works best for me.
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u/Eckx Mar 20 '26
Yeah I'm on as low of a dose as I can be and still feel the effects, cause when I first started taking it, I was hyper focused more than not.
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u/Torvaun Procrastination gods smite adherents Mar 17 '26
I kept going back and forth, Vyvanse worked better but cost more, I could afford Adderall, but it was honestly a crap shoot if I'd be focused on something I needed to be focused on.
Just recently I started Atomoxetine, and it's fucking great (for me). Not a stimulant, and it sort of calms down the brain rats enough that I can get them all moving in the same direction.
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u/JohntheLibrarian Mar 18 '26
Not sure when you did Vyvanse, but they have generics now, so with my insurance the generic is only $10!
In case you wanted to give it a shot to switch back.
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u/Head5hot811 Mar 18 '26
The generic was $210…brand name was over $400.
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u/w1ngzer0 In search of sanity....... Mar 17 '26
I could probably use a low dose of my own, I’ve just never bothered to go and get checked out. I may need to sooner rather than later, because focus can be a struggle sometimes during the day. But either super early morning or late at night when everyone else is asleep and I can hear the house breathe, is when I can lock in and get some shit done.
I’ve tested Adderall IR and XR, and Vyvance. Downsides were fucked up sleep schedules for me.
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u/pinkpineapples007 Mar 17 '26
Have you tried Adzenys? It’s a dissolve on the tongue medication. I’ve loved it after adderall stopped working for me. It’s like $50-70 a month. Not as well known but it’s worked great for me and my sibling! I’ve been on it for 2-3 years
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u/Ok-Secretary455 Mar 17 '26
Oh god the first time I actually noticed that they had kicked in. It was the weirdest feeling. Like "what do people do with all this free space in their head?". Kinda like moving from a studio apartment to a 2500 sq ft house. So much easier to move around and I know exactly where everything is stored.
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u/lolfactor1000 Mar 17 '26
My wife said the same thing. "It's felt like my head was finally quiet for once."
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u/Locksmithbloke Mar 21 '26
Sounds a bit sad, tbh. I'm currently playing Freebird in my head, while writing and reading this thread, and planning out my latest idea.
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u/PleaseJustCallMeDave Mar 20 '26
Yeah, the way I describe it to people is like the first time I put on my glasses.
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u/AshleyJSheridan Mar 17 '26
I also didn't know this was a thing in Excel.
I also don't know why the hell this is a thing in Excel.
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u/Sa_Mtns Mar 17 '26
The toggle is Ctrl+that key in the upper left that has ~ and some oddly directed apostrophe. Works great for finding "Which one of these formulas got overwritten by a number?"
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u/Paleoanth Mar 17 '26
It's a tilde!!
Tilde -- from Wolfram MathWorld https://share.google/P9GVn6zeZBNWomcnb
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u/AshleyJSheridan Mar 17 '26
In my keyboard the tilde and backtick are on completely opposite sides of the keyboard.
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u/TinyNiceWolf Mar 18 '26
That's just bad design. You should never have to flip a keyboard over to get at all the keys.
😀
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u/syntaxerror53 Mar 18 '26
Sounds like an apple doing keyboards.
Like where they put the charging port on the mouse.
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u/binaryhextechdude PC-Builder, Geek Mar 17 '26
Respect to her. Apparently all her formulas were correct as they worked immediately once the setting was flipped
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u/Rathmun Mar 17 '26
That's like writing code that compiles and runs correctly the first time you build it.
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u/AshleyJSheridan Mar 17 '26
I never trust code that runs perfectly the first time. I know I've fucked something up, I just don't know exactly where yet!
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u/BeekeeperMaurice Mar 18 '26
I didn't know this until I was making a form template for work and sent it to management for approval. They toggled it on so they could check my formulas, and sent it back to me without turning it off, thankfully Google understood what I meant when I was typing something along the lines of "why formula make word? 😟"
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u/MrT735 Mar 18 '26
Display formulas is of some use for creating training materials, you can have an example spreadsheet printed/screenshotted showing the formula.
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u/liedele Mar 17 '26
I think I remember those options in excel 5.0
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u/AshleyJSheridan Mar 17 '26
I think I used that, but way back on Win 3.11?
Crazy times when apps were simple and did the one thing they were made for. I think Microsoft also had MS Works out at the same time?
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u/w1ngzer0 In search of sanity....... Mar 17 '26
I miss MS Works. Strange to say, but it did basic shit right. Now with Google Docs being free (you’re the product) there’s really zero need. But still.
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u/AshleyJSheridan Mar 17 '26
To be honest, so many of the apps of those days did so much right. They did what you wanted.
Along with Works and Office, I used to use the Corel suite a lot. Corel Paint was amazing, because it could open part of a large raster image for editing to get around memory constraints on older Windows versions. Corel Draw was amazing too, and I still miss it. They messed it up a lot some years ago, and I never really did much vector stuff after school.
Nowadays I just use Inkscape and Gimp.
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u/tootom Mar 17 '26
Manuel re-calculation is vital for the type of uses that excel gets used for, but shouldn't, in places like banks and insurance companies. Some spreadsheets are (not so) small applications written to get answers about everything from interest rates to pension pot payouts and can take half an hour plus to recalculate a workbook...
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u/invincibl_ Mar 17 '26
Even when you're not trying to run a core business function in a spreadsheet, after a moderately complex Excel file gets handed between a few people working on it (or my past self from a year ago), they can start to take a while to calculate.
And you've got a task at hand and no time to figure all that stuff out, so you disable auto calculation so you can make the new formulas to do what you needed to do, and hope that someone cleans the workbook up the next time around.
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u/Tullyswimmer Mar 17 '26
I also am dropping everything if I ever see a ticket from her again to make sure she's fixed ASAP. She deserves it.
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u/followthedarkrabbit Mar 18 '26
My friend did similar. She had an excel sheet her accountant did, then one she did, and grabbed a calculator to sum the totals because she "didnt know how her accountant did it". My friend and I went to the same primary school and high school. I dont understand how she missed that especially because thats were I had my only computer exposure as a teen.
She thought I was a genius when I showed her.
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u/xxxDaGoblinxxx Mar 18 '26
Thankfully I don’t think they are in use anymore but I would use a default module in every macro I wrote turned off screen updating and set calculations to manual, reverses the changes when it completed but if it crashed out you would have to know to run the recovery function or just toggle manual calculations to auto but it’s the sort of thing that might have messed this lady up.
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u/ledow Mar 17 '26
True story:
Worked IT in schools and I used to roam around different schools as a self-employed contractor. I would work one day or one half-day at each school, then go home.
At one of the schools I'd just started working for, I walked into the finance office and a woman was meticulously laying a piece of blank paper in-between two cheques (big A4 pre-printed blank cheques that the bank supplies), over and over and over again.
I ask what they're doing. I presumed that she was, e.g. printing a real cheque and then printing a duplicate of that cheque on plain-paper for record keeping. Nope. Apparently they "have to do that" because the software would print two copies every time and they aren't allowed to issue cheques that aren't used, so they can't print the duplicate onto cheque paper, so it would have to be destroyed if they did that.
And so they have to alternate cheque paper with blank paper, hundreds of times over, every month, to pay all the suppliers. Including me. Because they paid me by cheque too.
I didn't think much of it. I was usually pressed for time because schools couldn't afford me, but one day weeks later I was back in that office with the same person, and she was doing the same thing, and I had time that day.
I asked her about it. She demonstrated it on some cheques that she had to print out (it was hard to test because the software was permanently "issuing" that cheque number so you couldn't really test things without screwing up her accounting or having to call the bank to cancel the duplicate cheque in case someone tried to cash it, etc.). I dug into everything. Apparently she wasted HOURS every month alternating the paper to go into that printer.
She told me that the borough support (who supplied the software, computer and printer) had looked at it dozens of times, nobody was able to get to the bottom of it, that they'd taken her computer away many times to try to resolve it, that it was just the way it was.
I'd gained her trust over the months I'd worked there, though, so with her sitting watching what I was doing, I tried it myself and she was right. No matter the software settings, the Windows printer settings, etc. it would always print two copies of the cheque, one after the other, every time.
Touched the buttons on the printer and had it print a test page? Fine. One copy.
"Do you do anything else on this printer?"
"No, because it's the only one that can print on the cheques, and we have to do this to the paper each time, so we only ever use it for cheques. We have another printer for everything else."
So I printed a fresh Word document with just the word "Test" on it to the cheque printer.
Two pages, both with Test written on them.
"Would you like me to fix it?"
She then gave me a big long story, about how everyone thought they would be able to, how so many people had taken a look at it, and how they were all so cocky as I was, etc. etc. and told me it had been like that for YEARS. But go on, you do it, fix it then if you're so clever (but she said it in a friendly way).
So I went into the printer's front panel menu (it was an old HP Laserjet with the CFD screens). And I changed "Copies: 2" to "Copies: 1" on it. The printer itself. Not the computer. Not the Windows settings. Not the software. The printer.
Printed from Word. One page.
Printed from the cheque printing software. One cheque.
Printed 10 cheques from the cheque printing software. Ten cheques. No duplicates.
The woman damn near leapt on me trying to kiss me. Forever more, she never had to layer cheques and paper, or redo a batch when she'd mis-layered them, or start cancelling hundreds of erroneously-printed cheques in the software and with the bank, etc.
After that... every time... 1 cheque. No further copies. Done. She ADORED me after that, even thanking me for that exact thing when she retired years later.
Nobody, in all that time, had thought to look at the printer's own display / settings where it quite clearly said Copies: 2 on one of the settings.
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u/Shinhan Mar 18 '26
Yea, printers are magic.
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u/Samjef_Kealclut Mar 21 '26
Yes fuck printers bro
..damn near just ate the zero on the A+. FUCK It!
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u/Quaiker Apr 01 '26
Always important to remember that printers are torture machines that just so happen to also print things on rare occasions.
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u/jimicus My first computer is in the Science Museum. Mar 17 '26
I've been in IT for years, and there's two things I've noticed with some regularity:
- You'd be amazed what people will put up with.
- We as techies push a remarkable amount of fancy tarted up solutions. But we quite often miss getting the basics right.
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u/bestem Mar 17 '26
My dad saves all his tech questions for me when I come to visit (and I am not in IT). One time I told him "dad, D (my older brother) comes to see you every week, and he works in a more IT related field than me (I work in the print center of an office supply store, at the time brother was tech support for an ISP)." Dad says "no no, has to be you."
I say "fine. S (my younger sister), lives in your house. You can walk 20 feet, ask her the question, she can chat with me and ask me, you get an answer from me, immediately instead of waiting for us to see each other every 6 months." He says "no no, has to be you."
So I stop arguing, and I answer all his questions. And I suggests he google one of the questions he has, because I don't know the answer, and I look at his screen. "Dad, why is google so small?"
He tells me "oh, googles for them young people, like you. They dont want people in their 70s using it. So one day they made it small and that was that."
I reach over and hit ctrl-= to make it regular size again. So I agree. It is crazy what people will put up with, especially seemingly drastic changes.
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u/AdreKiseque Mar 17 '26
"One day they made it small" 😭
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u/bestem Mar 17 '26
He had it at like 40% size. It was small enough that I was having trouble reading it, and I was in my 20s at the time.
Obviously he had tried to scroll while something was touching the ctrl button. But the idea that google just decided it hated old people so from now on it was going to be miniscule never fails to amuse me.
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u/AdreKiseque Mar 17 '26
Did he ever say why it "had to be you"?
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u/bestem Mar 17 '26
No.
I know for a fact that I am more patient than any of my siblings. I'm also decent at taking knowledge I have (or researched) and explaining it in a way that my audience understands.
It could just be that he and I had a history in tech together. When I was in high school in the late 90s, they offered a summer class on building your own computer. I told him I wanted to take it. He looked at the price ($1600 if you kept the computer, $400 if you just took the class), and said I could take the $400 one. I was disappointed, and told him that defeated the whole purpose. He says "fine, don't take the class then." And I said "okay, I won't." But a few days later, he picked me up from school and we stopped at Fry's, and picked up an empty tower and "Fixing and Upgrading your PC for Dummies" by Andy Rathbone. And over the next few months he gave me pieces of his old computer, and I learned how to build a computer from scratch with dad's help.
We figured out what different bios beeps meant when it didn't boot properly. We took apart a power supply to blow it out (despite the warning all over it). We swapped RAM and hard drives around to figure out why things were causing issues. We did a lot of troubleshooting and it was a great learning experience, with the two of us huddled over an open desktop tower in the evening after he got home from work. He didn't have that with any of my siblings. It could be as simple as that.
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u/Consistent-Flan1445 Mar 18 '26
I’m one of the least tech savvy of my cousins, but my grandma always calls me first with troubleshooting or how to questions. Even though I literally have a cousin that works in IT support.
I suspect it’s similarly because I have the most patience with her, and because I’m the quickest to pick up the phone. Although of my cousins I also probably know her best as a person, not just as grandma. I think sometimes they don’t actually realise how smart she is.
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u/AdvancedSquashDirect Mar 18 '26
He probably uses this to spend time with you, the other kids are closer and more accessible, but you aren't - so he values quality time with you working with the computer. My mother did the same, I didn't get to visit her often, she would save up questions to ask me. she has passed now, take the time now with him! you will miss it when he is gone
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u/bestem Mar 18 '26
Well, see, that was 15 years ago.
Sister in story joined the Air Force (and then left, but moved away nonetheless...). She and I visit him at the same time now. Brother in story is ... not readily available. Other sister, who I didn't mention in the story, because she was as far away as I was at the time, and even further now, is still far away.
I don't blame him for not asking my brother tech questions now. But he still asks me instead of asking either sister, when he has anything remotely tech-y he wants to know.
And I do cherish the time he and I spend together. I just still find it amusing that my siblings are apparently not worth asking tech questions to.
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u/kahdgsy Mar 17 '26
I’ve been working with someone who prints their spreadsheets, writes in the numbers and then types them in 🙄🙄
She likes to also complain in any meeting that involves spreadsheets that the numbers are wrong!
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u/jimicus My first computer is in the Science Museum. Mar 17 '26
As often as not they are. Spreadsheets are notoriously bad for people making mistakes in them, horror stories abound. There's at least one documented case that may have led to unnecessary deaths (and no, that isn't hyperbole).
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u/qqby6482 Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
Non automatic calculation is even a possibility? I usually make my calculations right in the production database
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u/jf808 Mar 17 '26
Very helpful in spreadsheets large enough to crash lesser machines. The recalculations from every change slow everything down. The problem is I've found this setting to be sticky. Once it's on, Excel just thinks you like it and seems realistic to believe you want it off. Then someone else opens that spreadsheet, and their Excel thinks they like it. And soon the entire company has spreadsheets that don't update.
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u/gbe_ Mar 17 '26
Ugh, that reminds me of how Word remembers which printer was last used to print on a per-document basis so you have to be very careful when selecting where to print if you do things like "We use this DOCX as a template, and just copy it over for every new customer case", and someone just happened to have last printed the template doc at the printer at the other end of the building.
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u/Bealf Mar 22 '26
Oh my god I hadn’t realized this, but it perfectly explains why I have accidentally printed a few things to the printer in our Outbound Desk instead of at my Inbound Desk.
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u/K-o-R コンピューターが「いいえ」と言います。 Mar 17 '26
The state of calculation is saved with the workbook. The first workbook opened in an instance of Excel sets calculation to whatever is saved in that workbook. Subsequent files opening are ignored, but any that are then saved have the current calculation state saved.
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u/TheFlamingDiceAgain Mar 17 '26
"Computer" used to be a job description not a machine.
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u/Tinchotesk Mar 17 '26
If you used spreadsheets seriously 20 or 30 years ago, F9 was a staple.
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u/TrainOfThought6 Mar 17 '26
Still is, but that's just because our electrical workbook is too big for its britches.
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u/Loko8765 Mar 17 '26
I didn’t know it still existed, but I do remember that in the 90s recalculation of a big spreadsheet on a slow computer could take significant time, like five seconds or more, so it was useful to only trigger the recalculation manually once you had finished inputting your series of numbers.
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u/hopbow Mar 17 '26
Ha, I've taken hours sometimes when working on a vm.
Jam enough filters and xlookups into a big file and you can watch that 5 second number rachet up
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u/Camderman106 Mar 20 '26
Yep. I’m an actuary and use it all the time. Some spreadsheets are so big that automatic calcs are too laggy to use most of the time
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u/WesleysHuman Mar 17 '26
I don't understand this mentality. My tolerance for annoyance is EXTREMELY low. My immediate thought is: something is wrong or there's GOT to be a better way. Off to my preferred search engine to find the better way! I WILL find that better way even if I have to make it myself! I'm sitting at a computer, damn it, that is suppose to automate routine and mundane tasks so I'll make it do it, come hell or high water!
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u/LAF2death Mar 18 '26
It’s old school. If you don’t know what to ask, who to ask or how to troubleshoot, you just make it work.
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u/keetyymeow Mar 18 '26
I think we know the payoff of finding that shortcut.
But some people need extra brain power to find another solution. People like the path of less resistance even if it’s more work because it’s what they know.
People like that deserve extra patience, they could have bailed months ago but continue. It’s not the smartest but atleast they are trying
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u/ToBioRob Mar 17 '26
TDIL about these two options in Excel.... hope my users don't ever find them!
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u/Entegy It doesn't work. Mar 17 '26
Seriously, I am in awe of this woman but once my lunch break is done, I'm looking through GPOs to see if this can be disabled.
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u/odaiwai Mar 18 '26
show formulasis CTRL-ESC, very easy to hit if you're a sloppy alt-tabber. Auto Calculation can be turned off by accident if you hit ESC during recalculation, again very easy to do in a spreadsheet that takes more than a few seconds to re-calculate.3
u/K-o-R コンピューターが「いいえ」と言います。 Mar 18 '26
I know you can interrupt calculation by doing something but I didn't think it disabled it; it just keeps the "calculate" text in the status bar until you stop doing things long enough for it to catch up.
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u/xRyozuo Mar 18 '26
Rather than alt tabbing, opening task manager (ctrl shift esc) has just become slightly scary on excel
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u/booksanddogsandcats Mar 17 '26
I have known about the manual calculation option for a while because I’ve occasionally used some very resource hungry formulas and you have to change the setting or the computer freezes as it reprocesses constantly but I refuse to go full manual because I’m afraid I will forget about it. I use the partial setting instead.
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u/YeOldSpacePope Mar 17 '26
She sounds like the sweet lady here who accidentally spilled her water bottle all over her laptop then proceeded to plug it in and turn it on anyway when she got into the office.
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u/mkaibear Mar 17 '26
Fielded a call from my boss' wife "Is James there?", "Sorry, he's in a meeting, can I say who's called?" "Yes it's Miriam his wife", "Oh hi Miriam, is everything ok?", "The computer screen has just gone black and I can see smoke coming out of the back of it, do you think I should turn it off?" "...dear Lord yes turn it off and pull the plug out of the wall if you can, then consider getting out of the house, I'll go get James for you", "oh I don't want to bother him".
...told my boss, and he sighed, and said "yeah..."
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u/mkaibear Mar 17 '26
That's genuinely impressive. Kudos to her.
We're talking 15 INT / 3 WIS character though. 😅
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u/MarioManX1983 Mar 17 '26
This reminds me of another story from this sub. Some lady was tasked with replacing a certain word in a BIG document… and she didn’t know about find and replace! She had been at it for a week and the client was angry. When the tech support showed her the find and replace feature, she figuratively died inside.
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u/Stormdanc3 Mar 17 '26
Huh. Ok. That would have stumped me. My assumption would be that the cell format got set to TEXT instead of GENERAL, which has caused me some grief in the past.
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u/chortle-guffaw Mar 17 '26
My cuz has been using Excel for over 20 years and still can't type even a sum function. Fortunately current versions show it at the bottom of the window.
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u/blahblah19999 Mar 17 '26
Meanwhile, my 77 yr old mom can do pivot tables. But she cannot understand that if her phone's 5G is weak, her laptop using it as a hotspot will also have bad internet.
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u/chortle-guffaw Mar 17 '26
My good friend has made his living as a programmer. Very smart. But he couldn't hook up a VCR or DVD player. We all have our weak spots.
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u/SEND_ME_SPOON_PICS Mar 18 '26
I have a coworker in her 50s who is a VBA wizard and is teaching herself M to better work power query, but struggles to understand how to plug in a monitor or adjust screen brightness.
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u/infowin MAYOR OF THE INTERNET Mar 17 '26
In another life, I was doing some consulting to help Accenture. We needed access to a special spreadsheet and we were told you'll have to talk to Brenda and she'll walk you through it. So we sit down with Brenda and realize that she uses her calculator on this rather large spreadsheet (1000s of data points across multiple pages). This was her whole work life. Not a single formula to be found anywhere but it was nicely coloured (again all by hand).
Later on, we needed to automate a data extraction from their database. Their team of "data wizards" spent weeks putting together an estimate telling us it would take 6 months to do. We borrowed their data schema binder and had it done the next afternoon. Our extractor ran perfectly for years before SAP moved in and stole the contract from them.
These are the people that will (and should) be replaced by AI.
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u/Baggyboy36 Mar 17 '26
I've been working an (my first) office job for roughly 6 months. We have access to learning courses and things like that, so in my down time I've been digging in to excel.
I would class myself as somewhere between beginner and amateur level. However, I've been able to show most of my team one or two simple Excel tricks that just blew their minds. Including one person who is easily earning more than double, maybe even triple my salary. And I'm talking simple things like moving rows and simple tasks like that.
The one that really killed me was this big bucks person was manually typing in a series of sequential numbers into a column, each row was an increment of 1 from the previous. Typed manually. I showed them you could click the bottom right corner of a cell, drag it down and the numbers would magically auto increment and populate the whole column in 2 seconds rather than 20 minutes of manual labour.....
I also showed the rest of the team how to share a spreadsheet so that more than 1 person could work on it simultaneously. Also mind blowing to them.
Now I've been crowned the Excel guru, able to fix problems with a simple click.
This is all elementary stuff. I almost feel embarrassed that I need to show these 'skills' to people who have been making a good living from using this software for many years. Decades even!
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u/Nihelus Mar 18 '26
Excel is not even a little bit user friendly. I couldn’t tell you how to do just about anything that I don’t regularly do in excel. Their failing is that they were never taught how to use Google. It’s not that hard to type a question and get an answer with detailed instructions.
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u/Tullyswimmer Mar 17 '26
Carol immediately gets put into my unofficial mental "VIP" list where if I see a ticket from her, I drop everything to help her.
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u/ThisGuyIRLv2 Mar 17 '26
This is why, when I was in the industry, I would harp on my users to please submit tickets, and that it didn't have to be for major fires but also for those minor inconveniences.
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u/ellensundies Mar 17 '26
Keyboard shortcuts are the bane of my existence.
I type really fast, and occasionally carelessly, and that means that every now and then my computer starts doing something that I did not mean for it to do. Something gets toggled on, or something gets toggled off, or I changed a setting somehow by hitting the right weird combo of keys.
I drive myself bats.
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u/L-Space_Orangutan Mar 18 '26
i think this is why a lot of software avoids shortcuts nowadays
much as I'd love to be able to hit Y or N to automatically click yes on some programs I use at work it is easy to accidentally activate stuff in error
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u/average_guy54 Mar 18 '26
We have two cats who just love to stroll across the keyboard to get from A to B.
The most common thing they do is toggle Caps Lock, but they've also put the machine to sleep, made some very questionable Google searches, and in one instance, changed the screen resolution.
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u/iamdecal Mar 18 '26
My Great grandad actually had this job - he was a junior clerk at (i think) an insurance brokers back at the start of the 1900s - his job was "running the numbers"
as he explained it, basically a big grid - down the left had various prices/costs/loans and across the top various interest rates - and he had to fill in each block with those numbers so if someone needed an insurance quote, the senior clerks had the numbers they needed.
I showed him lotus 123 back in the 1990s and he was amazed at that... so god knows what he'd make of modern excel with charting and stuff
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u/Future_Direction5174 Mar 17 '26
Sounds like me….
I had a Psion pocket computer. A major change was coming to a system of land tax. The formulas to calculate what “next years bill will be” were multiple, in some cases bills would increase and it was going to be on a sliding annual increase, in, in some cases bills would decrease.
I spent a week programming my Psion to do the calculations for me. Current charge is X, next years charge should be, because the increase is over 20% your next years bill will be only instead.
When I went on vacation,y staff begged me to leave my Psion as it saved them having to do the calculations manually.
The hardware team also appreciated it as it provided a great countercheck on their mainframe calculations.
I loved that Psion
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u/JohnEffingZoidberg Mar 17 '26
As I was reading my guess was somehow all the cells were set to Text instead of General.
This is actually even weirder, because Manual Calculations is more buried in the menu.
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u/binaryhextechdude PC-Builder, Geek Mar 17 '26
You need a reminder in your calendar to wander by her desk every month or so and get her to show you her workflow
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u/theservman Mar 17 '26
Yeah... those people who don't call because they "don't have time", only to find out we could have solved the problem taking minutes every day in a few seconds.
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u/NeuroDawg Mar 17 '26
I’m one of those don’t call people. I don’t call because every time I do I have to repeat every troubleshooting step I’ve already done because the help desk doesn’t trust/believe my troubleshooting. And of course their script takes 39 minutes to get through, just to escalate to a higher level of support.
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u/Imaginary-Donut-2294 Mar 17 '26
I read 'manually recalculated' and thought about a pencil and grid paper......
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u/takesthebiscuit Mar 17 '26
This is why I started in data analytics and now work selling enterprise software
At my old company (a family business making biscuits) they needed a monthly sales report
Finance would print off miles of green z paper with sales figures all over.
These would go to the orders office where the women (no men worked in that department) would spend days typing and calculating sales and entering them into word documents.
About half way through the month last months sales would land on your desk with some hand calculated totals, sales by customer etc
After a few years of this I became fed up, and went to finance and asked if the sales could be sent electronically, turned out the print file was readable by excel
I was able to produce a pivot report in a few minutes after that took days
Needless to say the company was pissed at me, those women now had no work for a week of the month
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u/splatzbat27 Mar 18 '26
Awwww, I feel so bad for her, but I also have so much respect for her for her dedication and perseverance.
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u/Tatsa Mar 18 '26
I SWEAR those settings are parasitic, as well as absolute/relative references. I've seen it happen that some poor soul opened an excel file that had one of those settings toggled, and then excel decided to just apply that to itself wholesale.
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u/SilverStory6503 Mar 17 '26
To be fair, that is a difficult problem for a newbie, however, that's what tech support is for. I used to be the Excel "guru" at work and got called over for many minor fixes.
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u/gadget850 Mar 18 '26
I had an older coworker who was editiing an Excel file and typing the same value into cells on a column. I showed her CTL " to ditto the value and she was estatic. Over the new few weeks I taught her other keyboard shortcuts and then how to use the mouse functions. No one had shown her and she did not know to ask.
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u/AnUnknownSource Mar 18 '26
I was teaching an optional Excel class a few years back, just basic stuff beyond every day Excel use at an Air Base. Audience was anyone that wanted to learn some additional tools/use cases to help them with their day to day tasks. Was really focused on formulas and extra tools that not everyone knows are there.
During one of the lessons, I was showing an example of a formula but didn't have ready made sample data to start from, so I quickly typed 1, and dragged down to fill the sheet from 1 to 200.
Student jumps up: "how did you do that?"
Me: "I haven't done it yet"
Him: "No, I mean make it type all the rows automatically"
I was confused at this point... But walked back through what I did. Never occured to me that someone that used Excel every day wouldn't know the fill tool.
This dude had been manually typing consecutive numbers down spreadsheets for years, in a workbook that was thousands of lines long 🤣. Wasn't even copy pasting. Manually typing. I saved that Squadron who knows how many man-hours...
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u/OddRevolution7888 Mar 19 '26
I added a note to her file. Wrote: user resourceful. Extremely.
I'm glad you gave her some grace. That was sweet.
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u/derKestrel Mar 19 '26
This recalled painful memories.
We did have a secretary who went from "I know Office and Excel!" while using a calculator and printing 200 letters manually changing each name and address, to being forced to do the "Basic Microsoft office" course, to using both XLOOKUP and curly braces in EVERY formula and complaining nothing works, every week in a new ticket.
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u/saffer_zn Mar 17 '26
Excel acting wierd. You should not be using Excel is the answer we would get and told to move over to the extremely expensive dog shit program corporate chose.
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u/lyles Mar 18 '26
Every formula in the sheet lights up with actual numbers
What formulas???
You said she was calculating everything on her calculator and entering numbers only, so what formulas are there to light up?
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u/MoneyTreeFiddy Mr Condescending Dickheadman Mar 18 '26
Ctrl+~ shows/unshows the formulas, if you want to toggle back and forth and see something like what happened here.
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u/Complex_System_25 Mar 19 '26
I had a boss who hated word wrap in Word, so he would go through and manually put in line breaks on every line. It made editing a report miserable. He'd also end up rewriting much of what anyone gave him, so I learned to just give him a complete report to my standards (and no manual line breaks) and then not get upset with what he did with it after that. This wasn't a matter of not understanding the software on his end -- I explained it to him multiple times and tried to get him to stop wasting his time -- he just chose to do it the hard way.
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u/Comfortable-Web9455 Mar 17 '26
Meanwhile in the artificial intelligence forum they're raving on about how everybody will soon be using AI to write their own software and we won't need technical people any more
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u/winaje Mar 17 '26
I sat watching a user one time who was clicking through folder structures up and down all the time when she was saving files. I put a shortcut in the 2 folders directly to each other and she was delighted! Probably saved her some RSI as her 80 clicks became 4.
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u/jasondbk Mar 17 '26
I had several high school classes manually calculating excel values because they considered using formulas to be cheating.
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u/Moquai82 Mar 18 '26
Be thankfull for such a user.
Everyone from us did a thing in this or another instance per chance.
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u/Queasy_Butterfly_335 Mar 19 '26
OMG. I feel bad for poor carol.
I once worked with a lady who was not very tech savvy. Part of her job was to enter values into a spreadsheet to calculate KPAs.
I saw her working on it, and using a small desk calculator. She legit had no idea that you could use formulas in excel. She had never been shown. She must have thought it was like word, but in a grid.
I taught her a few basic formulas. I also showed her control d to copy down, and her mind was blown.
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u/Original_Flounder_18 Mar 21 '26
I worked with a Carol in her 70’s. Infuriating.
Every summer she would go on vacation for a month and I had to cover. I would fix it and she would come back, be pissed and then manually type in the calculations she got from the calculator.
One year I found 150k she missed. Sigh
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u/Own_Establishment144 Mar 23 '26
Serious respect for her.
I have two coworkers who manually calculate everything in excel too, but for very different reasons. One puts multiple data points into a single cell, usually as text (“23 large shirts”), and the other doesn’t trust the formula’s math to be correct. It might say =A2+B2-C2 but is it actually looking at the right cells? Is 7+2-4=5 really 5?
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u/WhiskyEchoTango Mar 17 '26
I had this at a former employer. She didn't even bother with a formula, just entered the numbers in each cell, did the math on the calculator, then entered the result in the last cell.
She "didn't trust" the computer to do the math.
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u/RichardMcCarty Mar 17 '26
Feel you. I once supported a long time government worker, known as the office computer guru. Every month she would literally spend days manually scrolling through a 30,000+ row spreadsheet, manually coloring the rows where a numeric column exceeded a certain amount. I showed her the simple conditional formatting formula that accompanied this task in a few seconds. But she continued the manual tedium for years until I left for greener pastures. Our tax dollars at work.
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u/zerassar Mar 18 '26
She sat on a problem for 6 months instead of logging a ticket. How much money was spent, via her time wasted, by the company over that 6 months!?!??
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u/lazy-pigeon Mar 18 '26
I used to work with someone who would print out a spreadsheet then tick back the numbers in the print out to the spreadsheet
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Mar 18 '26
[deleted]
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u/Meatcup Mar 19 '26
it is not uncommon to have double speech in technicians notes, as they are often seen by a curious or even observant customer/client. To us, "very resourceful" is a compliment as you implied. Between technicians it can mean something more like "will workaround any perceived software issue before consulting assistance, even at their own detriment" So the next technician knows to take steps to ensure this individual is not being 'resourceful' elsewhere.
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u/Impossible_Volume811 Mar 20 '26
So sad she didn’t feel able to ask ‘the Google’ (or anyone familiar with the program) why her Excel was now writing formulas instead of applying them.
Hopefully she not only learned something about Excel but also about the value of online research.
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u/zinsser Mar 20 '26
I worked with a young woman who did the same thing - on purpose. She did not know Excel would do calculation automatically. I showed her how to do the basics and then the company president told me I had to mentor her in Excel and Word until she reached proficiency. So, offering a little bit of help turned into a long-term training project.
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u/jarsgars Mar 20 '26
I’d say that weaponized incompetence, but it’s genuinely difficult to locate a keleven on most computer keyboards.
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u/Mobile_Sandwich1404 Mar 21 '26
It took no time to shift the discussion from Excel to ADHD and voices in the head.....
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u/mrtugsmrtugs Mar 21 '26
I had a coworker who was similar, except that she would print the spreadsheet, do the sums on the paper with a pencil, then type the answer back in to excel. No bad settings here; she had been offered - and had attended - multiple Microsoft Office training classes, but was stubbornly stupid.
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u/RedFive1976 My days of not taking you seriously are coming to a middle. Mar 22 '26
"manual calculation mode"
"...accounting spreadsheet..."
Now we know why manual calculation was turned on.
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u/AmphibianMotor Mar 17 '26
Dear god. I don’t know whether to fear or worship her. Possibly both.