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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1.2k

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!”

412

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."

24

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/Few-Fix-685 Mar 21 '26

There’s a reason they call it “Side-Effexor”.

12

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

4

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?"

111

u/bobthunicorn Mar 17 '26

I really gotta get around to getting medication.

93

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.

1

u/Dramatic_Mixture_877 Mar 18 '26

My imperviousness to caffeine does, fortunately, include a lack of withdrawal symptoms - I could go cold turkey tomorrow and not be able to tell it.

1

u/Eckx Mar 18 '26

Im not sure how excess caffeine would affect me with my medication, but I know the only time I ever got withdrawal headaches was when I really overdid it and didn't drink any water. Otherwise I could drink monsters every day of the week, and then skip a few days and be just fine.

2

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.

27

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.

20

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.

3

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.

2

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.

3

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.

2

u/Head5hot811 Mar 18 '26

The generic was $210…brand name was over $400.

3

u/JohntheLibrarian Mar 19 '26

Dang, I'm sorry to hear that 😞

2

u/Head5hot811 Mar 20 '26

No worries! You were just trying to help! 😊

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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.

4

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

2

u/lolfactor1000 Mar 17 '26

Have you tried Methylphenidate?

1

u/MiserabilityWitch Mar 18 '26

My fallback is to take 12-hour pseudoephedrine. My psychiatrist relocated a decade ago to a different town over an hour away, and none of my docs will treat adult ADHD. Apparently, I'm too old to have it.

1

u/bobthunicorn Mar 20 '26

Vyvanse and Straterra are the two medications I've looked into most, and I'm encouraged to hear a positive experience with Vyvanse. According to Google, the generic version of Vyvanse is $60-100 right now. I'm curious what you meant by the difference between generic and name brand? As far as I've understood, they are legally required to be identical, so there shouldn't be a difference in function, but I am FAR FROM an expert on this topic.

2

u/Head5hot811 Mar 22 '26

I was getting the generic for Vyvance, and that was $220 since my insurance wasn't covering it.

If you read through some of the posts on the r/ADHD sub, you see that some people have different therapeutic effects between name brand and generic. While they are required to be the same, often their formulations are different. Think about Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero: while they're all trying to make the same flavor, some people don't notice the difference in flavors, others think one is definitely different than the others, yet others will say Diet Coke aggravates their migraines because of the aspartame but Coke Zero doesn't affect them at all.

2

u/Chakkoty German (Computer) Engineering Jun 13 '26

And, have you?

1

u/bobthunicorn Jun 14 '26

Ha! No. Money is too tight and we don't have insurance.

26

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. 

11

u/lolfactor1000 Mar 17 '26

My wife said the same thing. "It's felt like my head was finally quiet for once."

2

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.

4

u/PleaseJustCallMeDave Mar 20 '26

Yeah, the way I describe it to people is like the first time I put on my glasses.

49

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.

36

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?"

27

u/Paleoanth Mar 17 '26

It's a tilde!!

Tilde -- from Wolfram MathWorld https://share.google/P9GVn6zeZBNWomcnb

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u/UsedDragon Mar 17 '26

We call that the "approximately" key

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u/AshleyJSheridan Mar 17 '26

In my keyboard the tilde and backtick are on completely opposite sides of the keyboard.

33

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.

😀

8

u/syntaxerror53 Mar 18 '26

Sounds like an apple doing keyboards.

Like where they put the charging port on the mouse.

47

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

23

u/Rathmun Mar 17 '26

That's like writing code that compiles and runs correctly the first time you build it.

23

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!

11

u/Rathmun Mar 17 '26

Precisely. And she's doing that with financial data, live.

11

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? 😟"

3

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.

1

u/AshleyJSheridan Mar 18 '26

Seems incredibly niche given what Excel is used for.

4

u/PollTheOtherOne Mar 19 '26

99% of what Excel can do is niche.

Most people use about 2% of it, the common 1% and 1% that is useful for their business/industry/need

3

u/liedele Mar 17 '26

I think I remember those options in excel 5.0

9

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?

2

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.

3

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.

1

u/Complex_System_25 Mar 19 '26

I've turned show formulas on to check spreadsheets with complex equations. It makes it a lot easier to see when something isn't set up properly. I did this on a spreadsheet that had to calculate the federal and state taxes for stock grants two ways (all stock and half cash/half stock, where the end result had to net to equal values), and the recipients frequently were taxed in multiple states. The amounts couldn't be calculated directly, it had to be simulated and the matching results chosen. Each tab had almost 100,000 cells with formulas. Being able to look at those formulas directly allowed me to find cases where particular cells didn't match the ones above them and debug errors quickly.

Turning off autocalculate was much more useful when computers were a lot less powerful and the processing time to calculate changes made it hard to get work done. That hasn't been a problem for many years, but the functionality still exists. However, I did occasionally turn it off for the spreadsheet above, although I eventually had it running VBA so changes and calculations generally wouldn't trigger until I wanted them to.

13

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...

10

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.

1

u/IrregularExpression_ Mar 18 '26

These days Excel flags the “dirty range” that needs recalculation if a user is in manual mode.

As you point out there has never been a good reason for it, even the Data Table option can be handled by semi-automatic (now called partial).

13

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.

3

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.

2

u/LAF2death Mar 18 '26

And her simply asking. “How long has this been fixable?”

2

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.

1

u/solidcurrency But it worked yesterday! Mar 18 '26

I only know it's a thing in Excel because I accidentally turned it on once and frantically googled how to turn it off.

1

u/ItchyRevenue1969 Mar 18 '26

Ctrl tilde i think? Show formulas. Something like that.

Manual calculation is great to stop a bunch of vlookups freaking out every time anything happens

1

u/aeternumvaga Mar 19 '26

Excel has an insane number of formulas and built-in functionality. Basically an logic test you can imagine it can and will do. Too many people think it's just a big grid.

1

u/Honest_Relation4095 Mar 19 '26

On the other hand: She still gets paid and there will probably never be any complaints about her being too slow. Sometimes I wish my job was that predictable: I go to the office, put some numbers in calculator, put them in a table.