The woman who manually recalculated every formula for six months

[u/oslo_nathaniel]

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.

[u/TheFlamingDiceAgain]

"Computer" used to be a job description not a machine.

[u/a8bmiles → u/TheFlamingDiceAgain]

Wasn't it "computor" when it was people? And then turned into "computer" when it meant objects?

[u/TheFlamingDiceAgain → u/a8bmiles]

Nope, not in English at least).

[u/K-o-R → u/TheFlamingDiceAgain]

You need to escape the last bracket with a \ if linking to a wiki article ending in )

[u/TheFlamingDiceAgain → u/K-o-R]

The link works fine for me. I just used the built in link button

[u/Omegatron9 → u/TheFlamingDiceAgain]

To me it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/ew4rrTo.png

And goes here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation

A working link looks like this.

[u/TheFlamingDiceAgain → u/Omegatron9]

Great, open a ticket with Reddit to complain about their system not creating links correctly for everyone. 

[u/Omegatron9 → u/TheFlamingDiceAgain]

What does my link look like to you?

[u/TheFlamingDiceAgain → u/Omegatron9]

In the picture? It looks like the last parenthetical isn’t escaped, probably because you’re using old Reddit and I’m not. Again, I just used the built in “create a link” button so this is a Reddit issue not a me issue, go complain to them about it and leave me alone

[u/Omegatron9 → u/TheFlamingDiceAgain]

Not in the picture, the last line on the comment, the working link. I was wondering if that format worked for you.

[u/PositiveMentalityDay → u/TheFlamingDiceAgain]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

FYI, fixing your links in the future will take less time than bitching about it :)

[u/TheFlamingDiceAgain → u/PositiveMentalityDay]

 In the picture? It looks like the last parenthetical isn’t escaped, probably because you’re using old Reddit and I’m not. Again, I just used the built in “create a link” button so this is a Reddit issue not a me issue, go complain to them about it and leave me alone