Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday frolic through your tales of delightful tech support encounters. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Val" who shared a story from his time as a contractor for a housing association in the North West of England. "The IT manager was, to be blunt, an …
Why should there be a difference ?
<whiny nasal IT voice>Well you might be CEO/CFO/CTO because you're an expert in the field and make money for the business. But you see you clicked to embed this table as an active-x direct-wibble object rather than an in-line OLE direct-fooble object, so you can no longer do Excel stuff in it when you're not in Office365 inside our cloud infrastructural nodal-thingy
Which again is a perfectly reasonable attitude to IT
You don't expect the office workers to change how they work to accommodate how the power grid operates, you expect the grid to deliver power. Nobody complains that the CFO doesn't understand load factor balancing in HVDC grid interconnects
On the other hand I did cross swords with a real IT guru. Turned out he didn't know the difference between a SQL database and a php device driver. Put 2+2 together and came up with rather more than 4.
Knowing a lot about something doesn't imply you know anything about everything else. Pointing it out delicately did result in them going full maga-trump.
> I did cross swords with a real IT guru. Turned out he didn't know the difference between a SQL database and a php device driver.
I think this happens a lot. I work in big-tech, and I meet a lot of bright people who joined a company as a grad and are now worshipped as senior principals - but couldn't connect the language of their choice to a database and run a simple query. Heaven forbid they have a threading issue.
Lots of tenured people are amazing at what their company use day-to-day, but have no knowledge of anything else. If you want to get good, a bit of early career mobility is a good thing.
"The real clue is probably "Manager"."
People often get promoted into a managerial role based solely on seniority when they have no talent for management. I've had some very excellent managers and it can make all the difference in the world. I've also had incredibly poor ones that were likely costing the company loads of money by being such twits.
Anybody usurping the work of others to make themselves look good is not a good manager. There's no shame in having somebody below them that is much better at something. The manager's job is to insulate those people from the ijits further up the org chart and to keep them focused on the goal posts and not noticing the hottie two rows up the stands.
Someone that can not distinguish Word and Excel is unlikely to have arrived at the IT manager position after rising through the ranks of IT. He probably wasn't hired because he can manage everything without having to know about the subject as according to the article he didn't have any people skills.
Without additional knowledge my assumption is he was one of those managers appointed for who they know not what they know or can do.
Or maybe the issue is MS Office is not fit for purpose and is only used through corporate lock-in and momentum.
Maybe they could integrate copilot into Word so that if someone enters something like looks like a spreadsheet formula, it offers to convert the table into an embedded spreadsheet (j/k that this needs copilot btw).
Embeddable documents are hardly new technology, it was done in the 80s and 90s, even in mobile office suites on Symbian.
These types of managers are the same sorts who demand you "fix" a printed photograph because it does not respond to their attempts to "pinch zoom" it.
After all, it "looks like" their smartphone screen. /sarcasm
I’ve heard that about a three year old who got all frustrated and upset because a printed magazine didn’t work like his iPad when he tapped with his fingers on the pretty pictures. For a three year old it’s funny. Not for a grown-up man.
"For a three year old it’s funny. Not for a grown-up man."
I think it's sad for a 3yo. A lot of digital things are an abstraction of the real world so having skills and knowledge of the real world first can be very important.
You can find online - very probably not legally - the late Isaac Asimov's short story "The Fun They Had", in which two children in the future examine an old-type book, and wonder why the words don't move or change when you page forward and back like on screen, and do you just have to throw the book away when you finish reading.
"But, we would expect someone who manages the power grid to understand the little details."
I disagree. If they are a manager, they need to have people under them that understand the little details and they keep focused on the bigger ones. The higher up the org chart, the further back from the picture they need to be. A SVP having a discussion with a jr engineer about how a PID loop has been set up isn't what one wants to see in a larger company.
>> You don't expect the office workers to change how they work to accommodate how the power grid operates, you expect the grid to deliver power.
Doesn't On Call now and then have items about the careless frying a power supply by forgetting to switch from US to UK settings?
I expect the office workers to change how they work to accommodate reality. In the case where it is easy for me to change that reality, I will do it to save them the effort, but when that is not possible, they can often change more easily than reality can. Using your example although it's not the strongest for my point, I do expect that they will work around the way the power grid works. If they need a bunch of power-hungry things, I will still tell them not to put them on a single circuit and have a single switch that starts them all up simultaneously because the grid doesn't respond well to it. Why not? Technically, someone could put the electrical infrastructure in place to handle that kind of spike, but that's harder and more expensive than expecting them to remember that they have multiple switches they have to use for subsets of the equipment. I think they should be and generally have been capable of remembering that and doing it.
I expect to be able to tell people when their work needs to change to deal with some situation. An IT manager should already understand much of this, but if, for some reason, the CFO absolutely needs to change their behavior because of something related to load balancers, I will explain what change they should make, because it's likely to be smaller than changing how load balancers work. If I can easily change the load balancers so this is not a problem, I'll do that instead, but this is not likely.
Managing the frequency of the grid in an AC distribution system with DC interconnects is hard. I know that.
I am a manager, of sorts, in IT. More on the side where I need to know how every piece of IT infrastructure works, need to be able to hold devs, ops, dbas, security etc to account and I have exactly one sticker on my laptop.
It reads... "I am only responsible for what I say, not what you understand".
I have always considered it to be talking about when I get into the fine details and everyone else zones out a bit aside the single other person on the call who understands what I'm saying.. but actually it could mean the reverse too.
"It reads... "I am only responsible for what I say, not what you understand"."
I need a few of those. I do have one that reads "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you". I can't count how many times I've carefully explained something and the first words from the other person is "Ok, I understand that, but........" and they're off again into the realm of perpetual motion.
"If they don't understand, I'm not doing a good enough job of explaining it."
Unless they have no respect for your expertise and then you will have no chance of replacing the data in the corrupted register with something that will produce good results. Reprogramming them with a large mallet (retro-phrenology) is frowned upon.
This is much more like, "If the power goes down, and the office worker blames the plug socket and cord beneath their desk for the problem." than "not expecting office workers to change how they work, etc. etc."
Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but this would be more like the CFO not understanding Finance.
> "If the power goes down, and the office worker blames the plug socket and cord beneath their desk for the problem."
Yesterday my insurance emailed me to update my cellphone # via the web "For enhanced security". So I go to their site, name, password, ERROR! I check it again, type very carefully, a few times. Nope. The error says to call them "for immediate service". Well it wasn't very immediate, but I speak to a person. I was told to "Call back, our computers are down". (Assume she meant workstations.) I hang up and after a bit I realize that if _THEIR_ computers are down, that probably explains why _I_ can't log into the website. Sho nuff, call 2 days later, my name/password went right in.
And I agree with you. Seriously.
I've seen horrendous abuse of Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. Arrogant PFY-me did laugh at the abusers. Not that I'm much less arrogant nowadays but at least, I recognise the total lack of training on these matters. The company just expects that all staff expertly know their ways around the MS Office 365 suit. Spoiler: they mostly don't.
I don't think I have seen training courses for Office products for years, companies expect you to know it - and for the school leavers they should have been taught at school. This does leave a massive skills gap.
One of the people you used to work for my brother - made a spreadsheet, had a column of numbers - added them up in a calculator and then input the result manually. It used to annoy my brother as he would change a number and then wonder why the totals didn't update.
I mean I will admit to writing multi chapter technical documents (a wifi requirements document came in a 130 pages - which included various easter eggs to prove people had read it) but I use Word for the text, and include a lot of tables however those tables are probably 4 rows and 3 columns. Diagrams are done using a proper application and inserted as images etc.
if you are wondering about easter eggs then in an explanation of wifi mobility the reason for moving from one building to another was quoted as "better snacks" which somebody found - there are still some others that haven't yet been located.
>Diagrams are done using a proper application and inserted as images etc.
Especially Excel charts.
You get the chart vaguely readable and embed it in word and then the axis label text is unreadable because somehow Word has a different set of fonts to Excel.
Then you have to fight with word to embed a figure as an image, no don't link it, don't insert it as whatever-Microsoft-is-calling-OLE-today
Neither Word nor Excel are layout applications. Sure, people use them for layout all the time. That doesn't change the fact that Word and Excel are the completely wrong tools for the job. But millions of users can't be wrong, wasting hours and hours of their lifetime layouting documents using Office and inevitably producing abolutely terrible documents? Someone certainly would tell them - not Microsoft, maybe, but somebody would. And they'd certainly believe that person and... Uh, oh...
Agreed
Word is 'designed' to word process - i.e. allow a writer to churn out large multiple page documents, the main thing it (I) need to do is format the text on the page with standard styles - so it can key the section headings and produce a document with an index and tables for reading on screen or printing.
If I want to design a newsletter, catalogue etc then I will shift applications in my case to Affinity Publisher but others will use Abode InDesign, Quark etc.
Trying to do graphics layouts in Word is a short cut to going insane...
"That doesn't change the fact that Word and Excel are the completely wrong tools for the job. "
It's the only bent screwdriver they have and they'll keep prying with it until it snaps off and they go get another.
True, the layout application in the Office stable is Microsoft Publisher.
Which is now being retired on the basis that "eh, people can do most of that stuff in Word or PowerPoint". To the predictable but ineffective howls of protest from anyone who actually uses Publisher because it is so much superior at those things.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/microsoft-publisher-will-no-longer-be-supported-after-october-2026-ee6302a2-4bc7-4841-babf-8e9be3acbfd7
See especially the "recommended alternatives to Microsoft Publisher" section if you feel the need for a disbelieving laugh or ten.
Recommended action for any Publisher file that you need to continue editing is "convert to PDF, then open in Word and convert to a Word document". This even has a cautionary note attached to let you know this will screw up your graphics layout, oh well. (Actually it screws up much more than just your graphics layout.)
My wife - like many other people - edits a church newsletter in Publisher. Trying to replicate this in Word seems like a nightmare. I'm not sure whether to shell out for standalone Publisher 2021 (I've heard reports that this can be problematic to install alongside M365) or whether to try Affinity Publisher or possibly LibreOffice Draw, which can reportedly open Publisher files with varying degrees of fidelity.
Either way this is a horrible decision for consumers, apparently driven by MS wanting to cut support costs and not having figured out a way to sufficiently stuff Publisher full of Copilot nonsense that they can charge people to use. Marketed of course as a desire to "simplify and enhance the user experience". Which it is, if you realise that they are talking about Microsoft's user experience, not the consumers'.
Add Softmaker to the radar. They don't have a direct publisher alternative, but it may work better than MS-Word. "Freeoffice" ist a limited version of it with enough capabilities for most, so she could test that too.
I got a word document sent to me with an embedded Excel table. Except I didn't. All I got as the word document with a blank space for the excel table because the file path to the embedded table was c:\My Documents\.... :-( Some sort of linking fuckup on the part of Office or the user.
Adding up columns with a calculator… My grandfather, who attended school up to grade three (all the farm school had to offer), added up columns of numbers in his head much faster than any young whippersnapper could possibly do with a calculator.
My dad could do that and more.
In the days when many small shops totted up bills by hand, I was with him when he told the shop assistant she'd added the bill up wrongly. He was reading it upside down and in her handwriting. Not only that, he was able to tell her exactly what mistake she had made.
"Not only that, he was able to tell her exactly what mistake she had made."
He was doing the whole thing at the same time so it was easy to spot the mix up. Another factor can be how somebody learns and thinks. I know that if I write something down, it burns the information into my brain. I don't have to review my notes later, it's just the act of seeing the writing as I jot things down that helps me. Another good high school teacher had the class do some exercises so we could asses how we best learn, Visual, auditory, kinetic, etc. I wish I had that earlier in school as it made a big difference. I could read dates and places in the text book but if I copied them out I did much better remembering them. It also helped me to hear things so in college lecture courses where I could get a recording, it let me play those lectures back in the car until I could hear the professors voice in my head while taking tests. I stopped taking voluminous notes since I could write fast enough to keep up. Instead I just wrote down key headers and tried to star anything the prof seemed to fixate on as that was the sort of thing most likely to show up on a test.
"added up columns of numbers in his head much faster than any young whippersnapper could possibly do with a calculator."
That's a very good skill to have. Back in the early neolithic, I had a job where the cash register was rather manual. I had to do the arithmetic in my head for making change. I also had a good maths teacher than spent some time hammering into us techniques for estimating answers. On multiple guess tests, one could usually eliminate two of the answers with a quick estimate. I also know when I'm given change on a purchase what I should be getting back so I'm not being diddled. There's lots of tools now for doing calculations and I have several specialized calculator on my phone for when I need an exact answer. It's doesn't eliminate the need to do quick calculations in my head on a daily basis. I do a ton of backwards calcs in my head for time when I need to be somewhere at a certain time, but need to run some errands along the way or it can be the need to finish a big job and I can chart out what bits need to be done by what time to be finished on time.
When I worked in an R&D lab, we were granted the autonomy to place small orders with selected suppliers without going through Purchasing, in order to be able to get prototypes together before the customer changed their mind. Whenever I had to fill in an order form, once I had already written out the prices in nice, neat columns and still had the pen in my hand, I never saw any need to get a calculator just to add them up. And my order forms added up in my head never had any mistakes; a calculator user might inadvertently mistype a number and believe what the machine said, but a missed carry is easily spotted when you add it all up again bottom-to-top as a check.
I suppose modern kids wouldn't know what all those extra, small digits under the columns were doing .....
Agree 100%
Key point is "Spoiler: they mostly don't."
Still too many companies expect that all office workers can use the whole MS Office suite BUT never give training in using it properly.
The workers get flak for taking too long to do things or for errors (if they are seen !!!) ... the IT support staff get flak for NOT fixing the problems because the MS Office suite is 'used & abused' trying to do impossible things.
As a support person you usually don't use MS Office to the same degree as the workers BUT you need to be an experts to support everyone.
The attitude is that MS Office is everywhere and everyone knows how to use it ... therefore why do we need to train anyone.
This leads to 'Subject experts' being created as the person who uses Excel ALL day becomes the local departmental guru, BUT if they are not as good as they think they just perpetuate the 'bad ideas' that they learned from the last 'Guru' at their last job !!!
Who picks up the mess at the end of the day ... IT support !!!???
Creates your job and the need to be fulfilled ... your raison d'être so to speak, as far as 'users' are concerned. !!!
:)
I agree. By now having MS office should provide the user with the ability to work on a 'thing' that is a munged-up mix of Excel, Word and PowerPoint stuff all working together, without them having to realise which app.is doing what behind the scenes.
"without them having to realise which app.is doing what behind the scenes."
Apple tried to do that with Containers ages ago so one could create a document and use a third party application that did something encompassed within that document. Everything was dynamically linked so changes anywhere would flow through. It didn't catch on. The concept was probably too different for people that were used to Lotus 123, Word Perfect and other software all being stand-alone. I used to have a program called Ragtime that was advertised as a business document application and it had modules for text, spreadsheets, graphs and images. I don't know if it exists anymore. It was rather expensive.
As a support person you usually don't use MS Office to the same degree as the workers BUT you need to be an experts to support everyone.
That happens with all software. "How do I link this Rampiril record to the Amplodipine doses?" HTF do I know, *YOU'RE* the clinical secretary, not me. I just *deliver* the piano, I don't know how to *play* the fucker.
Excel in particular is black magic, the gulf between people who are good with Excel and all the rest of us is vast and intimidating
If you're possessed of basic computer literacy, you can muddle your way through Word, or PowerPoint, or Outlook. The UI will do plenty to help you help yourself, and it's possible to discover the features you need and become fairly proficient in just a few hours using nothing more than an inspection-trial-error loop.
With Excel, though? No amount of flailing around in its interface will turn someone into a self-taught expert... not quickly, anyway. Maybe if you kept at it for weeks or months. Maybe.
I really don't understand the "that's abuse of a spreadsheet" attitude. If it works, it works. Yes, if you're managing thousands of records that are mission-critical and need to be accessed by multiple people, a proper database is the only way to go. But for many smaller, everyday tasks, Excel is a good multitool - gets the job done without having to own (much less know how to use) a dozen different tools.
For example, today I was pulling data from an SQL database and putting it into Excel. Each query returned a column of batch IDs and one column of data; I needed half a dozen different queries. Why? Because each data column needed a different 'where' clause to get it. I could dig deep into SQL (likely for a couple hours) and try to figure out how to generate a single query that pulled all of that... or I could do them one column at a time, quickly, and dump them in Excel and connect them with an easy vlookup. (Graphs and simple statistics to be added next week.)
But here you were PULLING data from an SQL DB, NOT using Excel as the DB.
I'd say that's OK, as it lets you "do them one column at a time, quickly, and dump them in Excel and connect them with an easy vlookup".
It also gives you options like "Graphs and simple statistics to be added next week". I don't see anything wrong there.
If it works, it works.
If it works, but nobody know how it works, so changes cannot be made when required, it is a problem.
If it appears to be working, but is wrong, and nobody notices, it's a problem.
If it works, but in doing so, creates a lot of work for people to maintain it, when simpler, easy-to-use solutions exist, it's a problem.
If it works, but creates a bottleneck where only one person can make changes at a time, in a multi-user environment, it's a problem.
These are all real-world problems I have seen and had to deal with. Excel can get in the bin.
I mean, you can write a website using nothing but Notepad, but anyone who claims it's the tool for the job "because it works" is either a sadist or a masochist, depending on whether they are making someone else do that, or doing it themselves.
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And if that's the level of difference we were talking about, I'd agree with you. But it's not. The difference between "spreadsheet" and "table" is much simpler, even if they both have cells. Tables are for displaying things in a grid without making you format the grid. Spreadsheets are for taking automatic action on interrelated data, some of which may be displayed to you in a grid. I could see an argument for having embeddable spreadsheets within documents, but they would still be a different thing than tables.
Lotus Symphony would be the (failed) example in the DOS age as a follow-on for Lotus 123 (not to be confused with the reuse of "Lotus Symphony" when IBM used the name for a re-skinned OpenOffice in the 'noughties).
You mean this Fireworkz ? https://croftnuisk.co.uk/coltsoft/fireworkz ?
Ou, just tried to use it: You cannot make a cell with "=b3+1", and then copy that to the cells below to have counting up... Strg+Z missing, lots of other things are not existent. That one has a LONG way to go, nonono...
"There's an alternative view that it's with the existence of OLE that the problems start"
Nowt wrong with OLE per se, just that if you're going to embed an object linked to a different file, you simply have to be aware that a change in the origin may or may not get reflected in the target doc. Simples, really. M$ does at least warn you (sometimes) in certain instances that it can't link back to the source as it has moved / been deleted / etc. And there's the link analyser (or whatever it's called) so you can find out what's happening
You di link OR embed. If you linked, the file was outside the corrrent document. and any change in it would reflect in the current doc. Still, you need a current link to show (and change data).
If you embedded, the docuemnt is stored inside the current one, and it's a new copy no longer linked to the original. Any changes are in place.
It's funny how Windows more than thirty years ago was far more advanced than anyyhting you can get on Linux today...
You'd be surprised what you can do with troff, tbl, pic, and external programs like awk. All available before Windows even existed. They just require a different mindset.
And on top of that, you have had tools like S or GNU R, and even integrated packages like Uniplex.
Unix has/had loads of tools that most people don't even know about.
I still get some quizzical looks from people when things that they would do by converting data into a CSV, import into Excel, process, and then export can be done by piping between different tools on a single command line in a fraction of the time, and often on the fly. Of course there are things that Excel can do, but these are not the types of things that I do very often.
I often find formatting data from a system, and then just importing the final results into a CSV for display purposes (and further use by people who expect to use Excel) is easier for me.
A former (non-technical) manager of another department insisted on using Word for everything, even as a file explorer, and would use Word's file dialog box to move files around and try to open them, and I'd frequently get calls complaining that files were missing, simply because Word kept defaulting to only listing Word documents, not random file extensions. I'd regularly get whole-screen grabs of a small unreadable error dialog box pasted into a word document and emailed to me, where I had to go and see what the error actually said as the tiny blurred thumbnail was illegible.
Worse, she was the type who insisted that her underlings did everything the way she did and would get irate if one of her staff did something different, so this behaviour spread (this was back in the early 2000s so there was a little less existing knowledge).
She banned one of my team from talking to her underlings because he showed them it was quicker to cut/paste with Ctrl-C/V rather than the way she insisted they do it of going to the application's edit menu and choosing the option, famously saying of her staff 'they only have little brains, and it confuses them'. She was very effective at what she did, but utterly useless at managing other people and these days would have been constantly in breach of workplace policies - I'm always amazed she was not once called before any unfair dismissal tribunal or anything.
Had the opposite one place I worked long ago: the Accounts team insisted that they would only use 2 x systems - the Finance system and Excel. So they were constantly ringing us up to complain that Excel was really poor as a word processor which I would counter by saying that I'd tried to use the Finance system for presentations and it just wasn't up to the job.
After a few deeply tedious months when their manager was constantly complaining about how the new system (there wasn't one, they were using the same Excel version - just in a bonkers way) was taking up a vast amount of time they quietly gave up and started using Word for documents - just like everybody else did.
Had the opposite one place I worked long ago: the Accounts team insisted that they would only use 2 x systems - the Finance system and Excel. So they were constantly ringing us up to complain that Excel was really poor as a word processor
Ah, our HR team to this day use Excel to draw staff organisational hierarchy charts, and another department use it to create room plans/site maps (800+ rooms across 5 floors and about 12 buildings on 2 sites). To be fair the end result is not bad, having resized the sheet down to a grid of very small squares, but I can't believe the time it must have taken, or why they didn't think to ask about better tools before they started, or even whether we already had existing plans...
I'll raise my finger for abusing Excel, when I started way back when (pre-2000!), I made pretty colored schedules for signing up and blocking out lab time. I'd print them and slap them up on the bulletin board.
Many moons ago, I encountered someone who abused Excel like an Evernote or Onenote app. Some cells full of text, others had links to everything, other documents and presentations, photos, both locally stored and in networks shares, and websites both intranet and www. Funny how some of the links didn't work while away from the office!? No amount of explaining could enlighten them.
Many moons ago, I wrote a couple of non-fiction books and self-published them on Amazon.
During the writing phase, I joined a forum for self-published authors.
I tried to make a contribution by writing a post about the usefulness of text outliners—apps that allow you to write your ideas as bullet points, which can then be re-arranged or grouped together to create a very helpful overview of a written document's structure.
I don't remember all of the replies, but there were a couple of people who used Excel to plan their novels... and one guy who outlined his books using software that was used to plan the drilling of exploratory oil wells.
"I made pretty colored schedules for signing up and blocking out lab time."
Just a couple months ago, I created a pretty colored schedule for our big project, showing who was going to be on shift when. (I'm not the manager, it was just for my reference.) Quick, easy, and effective. Don't knock it.
"Some cells full of text, others had links to everything, other documents and presentations..."
Yep, another department has one of those. I think they call it the Holy Grail. An index to every major document, every fileshare, every troubleshooting guide, etc. that their department would need. It's shockingly useful.
A friend of mine who ran a software tools company got a call from a very irate customer who complained:
"I'm trying to cross-compile some code using the XYZ compiler you sold me, but it keeps reporting syntax errors - even for a simple test program that only contains main()".
This was a bit of a shock as the compiler was widely used. He asked the customer to send the file in.
It was named test.c.doc
Turns out the customer didn't understand the difference between text files and Word documents, with the problem being compounded by Windows hiding the .doc extension.
Yes and no, Literate Programming fanatics talk about embedding code In documentation, and formatting that documentation richly, but they still took a coder's view of how that was done. The documentation was written in source form (typically using TeX), which is kind of the exact opposite of writing code in Word.
Any documentation system can allow rich markup in doc comments (Python supports ReStructuredText markup in docstrings, and Doxygen can interpret MarkDown), but you're still writing the source for that rich text, which may eventually be rendered more elegantly.
I don't think anyone has yet come up with the WYSIWYG code editor that would allow you to edit that markup without delving into its source. And, of course, unless you're using something like LaTeX your markup is a lot less flexible than Word. (No margins, no font control or sizing, no text alignment, etc.)
I remember hearing that a new team had been created to make software packages for distribution across our various systems, and for some reason it seemed to be under the control of a team that wasn't really anything to do with IT. They were due to be based in the building I looked after, so I set up a space for them and went to meet them. One member was particularly snooty and started to pick at me from day one over everything, most commonly things that were nothing to do with me. 'Why can't I access this?' 'Ask your boss, he set it all up without telling us anything about it.'
Some of the calls were so bizarre I started to wonder if they even knew what they were doing or had any IT background whatsoever, I had an annoyed call one day informing me that their schedule was being held up because my computers couldn't create EXEs properly. Odd, but I interpreted the most likely case to be 'we're generating self extracting installers but they're not MSIs for some reason, and the packaging software isn't configured right'. Again, wasn't my call. wasn't my remit.
Still, I showed some goodwill and went along along to see if I could speed things up. I asked to be shown through the process. It went as follows:
- Writes basic script in notepad
- Renames script.txt to script.exe
- Points triumphantly when it fails to run.
I still don't think they'd got a single package out of the door by the time I left.
I am afraid I am with her on that but generally it's applicable to the entire organisation with the confusion increasing and brains decreasing the closer you get to the C Suite.
Applicable to government too. I can imagine Sir Humpty opining to Bernard that it was not worthwhile bothering the cabinet with any significant decision as they only have little brains, and it confuses them.
Really the vast majority are only up for something no more complicated than Wordpad or Windows Write and should not be let anywhere near a spreadsheet or a dbms.
Alternatives and options just overtax the neuronally challenged — there ought to be zero or at most one way to do anything and in the interest of harm minimisation, zero would be favourite.
If there's nuance, and there may not be, "labor hire" may mean providing a company's core needs using "temporary" employees. So that except for managers maybe, no one who works there really works there. It doesn't strike me as a good idea, or necessarily a legal one.
I did work with a guy - a manager who had been on all the IT courses, who didn't trust excel, so he typed in all the numbers, then got out his calculator to do any calculations.
It was painful to watch.
He really didn't believe the outputs when I extracted data from the ERP system directly into Excel, built out the calculations that I wanted, and got the results in a fraction of the time (I would send him the spreadsheet, and he would look through the ERP system to verify that I had the correct data, then use his calculator to verify the calculations!)
"I did work with a guy - a manager who had been on all the IT courses, who didn't trust excel, so he typed in all the numbers, then got out his calculator to do any calculations."
I once had a VAT inspector like that. He would not believe my computerised accounting (QuickBooks), and insisted on cross checking invoices against register entries etc.
Many many pieces of software which sold to companies as 'Accounting Software' did not work correctly !!!
Basic accounting is 'simple', in general, BUT getting all the rules right for tax etc was where most systems used to fail.
I worked with some very very good accountants and they would regularly try systems that they could break in minutes when it came to getting the rules right and creating the final set of accounts in a form that would be acceptable to HMRC (UK Tax Authority).
They found that too many people who created these systems did NOT get them checked by real accountants and that they thought that an American system could be easily 'tweaked' to comply with the UK rules.
Lots of generic accounting software is useful & usable BUT you need to understand what you are doing and be able to verify that the accounts are valid.
Basic accounting skills could/can do this BUT blinding trusting accounting software was likely to lead to weeks of pain and HMRC dropping upon you from 30,000 feet suddenly with no warning !!!
Had lots of fun helping customers to unravel the 'accounting messes' at month/quarter/year-end ... lessons learnt the hard way for some !!!
(I had real accounting knowledge skills behind me ... would NOT dare to do it with no 'Back covering' from real accountants, then or now !!!)
:)
To be fair, I am supportive of the people who check everything.
Lots of software had/has quirks and hidden errors ... I would check everything if my reputation or the companies reputation depended on it !!!
Like all things ... TRUST has to be earned !!!
I would remind people of how long MS OSes have been around yet we are still fighting bugs/errors even now ... ditto MS Office in all forms.
Writing good, dependable and reliable software is 'hard' ... mistaeks [:)] are still being made now !!!
Do I trust software 100% now ..... NO !!!
Will I ever trust software 100% ..... NO !!!
Why ???
Because proving software is 'right' is ALSO 'hard' and far too little software is tested in this way !!!
WE have been beta-testing software for the Software companies for SO LONG that we hardly notice any more !!!
:)
How far? Because they were checking a spreadsheet against a calculator. Calculators can have bugs too. Do it on paper and the chance that someone misreads a handwritten character or makes a mistake somewhere along the line significantly increase. Where does it end, because it's eventually got to?
We had a Parcelforce driver like that...
Her would count the number of parcels, compare them to the number on the bottom of the printed manifest... different! Count again, get yet another result... count again...
I think the big clue was the fact that he looked sndg acted like everyone's idea of an aging hippie
I'm getting that when I work on "codeword" puzzles (substitution cipher crosswords) where one of the techniques is to count how many number 1s are in the puzzle. While it's possible that there are three and they represent the letter E, it's unlikely. The point is, it's quite easy to miscount, up or down - even when, my tip, dividing the crossword grid first into multiple sets of 3 columns, and scanning one of these big columns at a time.
I had great fun explaining to one of my colleagues not long ago that not all calculators do basic arithmetic the same because of whether or not they implement algebraic hierarchy.
It's something I learned back in the 1970's when comparing calculators from TI (which did), and others like Commodore, Sinclair or Casio (which didn't).
I didn't extend this explanation to RPN calculators from the like of HP! That would have been too much (although knowing how that worked was very useful at Uni. when learning about stack based calculations and the way compilers broke down calculations to execute, and the Forth programming language).
"You would think (hope) that after having to do manual calculations a few times that he would have realized that Excel was capable of doing the math automatically."
I will often use a spreadsheet as a calculator when I'll be running a bunch of different permutations. It's much faster letting it do the math and it's not going to fat-finger the calculator keys like I will. I can also put in a range of values for something and have it give me all of the results at once. I do that with photos too where I'll shoot an exposure bracket even when I have a pretty good idea what the settings will be to get the result I want. Now that I don't pay for film and developing, it doesn't cost anything and takes 1 second longer to capture the sequence.
Even though everyone being like this would be probably a disaster, we NEED such people.
Because of course the spreadsheet formula does not include the last two cells, one reference is off by a column, it says *2 instead of +2 and no one has noticed MS Excel silently converted rows seven and eight to dates…
"no one has noticed MS Excel silently converted rows seven and eight to dates…"
I've had that happen often where I let the spreadsheet guess what the format of the contents are. If I'm not just using the spreadsheet as a calculator, I will spend the time to manually define the formats. I often wind up duplicating a spreadsheet to use for something else as a template so the little bit of extra effort does pay off over time.
I was a new hire 40 years ago, and had been asked to copy some documents and do it duplex, so there was writing on both sides.
I printed the first page (10 times), then took the paper and put the paper back into the photocopier, and printed the next 10 pages. It was easy once you worked out which way the paper had to inserted.
My manager came to do some copying, and having watched me struggle - asked "Why don't you use the duplex button" ... which does this automatically. I remember this 40+ years later.
A long time later, when I had a not very good manager, he wanted some stuff copied urgently. I passed him at the copier, and he was saying "damn machine has a blockage... I'll go and find another copier".
I suggested it might be easier to unblock it, but he didn't know how. I opened the doors and written inside was "if this light is on - then pull lever 1, clear the blockage and then push level 1 back".
We followed the easy instructions and cleared the blockage. My manager was not keen on seeing the sheet which caused the blockage - but I could tell it was not work related.
As a so called "technical manager" he was not very technical - he thought we was very technical, and hated me showing him up.
I read an archicle a while back that intimated the only skill you need to get ahead at work in some big money in the city company is to be a whizz at excel. Never mind whatever bollox you spent years studying and being examined on.
Then again AI will sort this all out. Only man left standing will be the mighty grovel under the desk sorting the cables out bloke. So stupid big suspender braces bullies better start being nice lol.
In a past life I was briefly the IT Manager for the government quango that advised the schools that the government under our first female PM had allowed to opt out of Local Education Authority control (the Grant Maintained Schools). I also doubled as the IT advisor to these schools.
We had arranged a meeting for the IT support staff from the GM schools to form our own IT support group now the schools had no LEA IT support.
One prominent headmaster of one of the first GM schools to opt out (the school where a later Labour PM sent his children, which is why that PM took 6 years to get rid of the GM schools), decided to attend himself rather than send any of his IT staff. Unfortunately this head didn't have the first clue about IT, and me being fairly fresh out of university and not having the tact I have since learned with old age, basically told him this in front of the rest of the delegates.
Apparently you don't tell a headteacher who has the ear of the then PM as well as the directors of the quango you work for that he doesn't have a clue because a few days later I was given my marching orders. Supposedly I was fired for not getting my hair cut, which I had actually done when requested, but it was hinted that I had really upset this "VIP" and that was the reason for my diismissal.
How did this mangler get the job in the first place?
Anyway, since Microsoft is so marvellous and wonderful, why can't they have a full instance of excel running within word, which runs within powerpoint, running in another excel instance. And so on and so forth, gobbling up all your memory.
"And so on and so forth, gobbling up all your memory."
IDK about that. The cheese grater has 96gb of RAM.
One of the things I do with a spreadsheet is to take the output of a report from my accounting program to do more advanced stuff than the accounting program will do internally. If I could take something like a graph of that data and have it flow into a word processor document template, it would be a slam dunk to create dynamic reports that can be run at any time without there being much time input.
There hasn't been much new in the world of double-entry bookkeeping, but there are fiscal management practices for how to allocate money that are interesting. x% gets put aside for taxes, x% goes for salary, etc and at the end, x% can be used to buy new shiny. That sort of thing. For an accountant to be able to take somebody's Quick Books data file and hand them back that sort of analysis almost automatically might be a nice little earner. It has to be given a once over to make sure it's right, but it's simpler than AI and an accountant is often under the same sort of confidentiality rules as an attorney. AI is not.
Many, many years ago, a new "manager" was appointed from outside the company I worked for. His role was to "manage" the I.T. Department. I did not expect this manager to know the "ins-and-outs" of I.T. but...... He came to me one day and complained that we did not have a database on the network. At the time we only needed a flat-file database. I told him we had one in the shape of Excel. He was adamant that Excel was "only" a spreadsheet. I showed him how to use Excel as a flat-file database which was all we needed at that time. (The need for a relational came much later.) I did this in private so he should not have been embarrassed or humiliated. However, from that point on he hated me and did his best to make me resign. I did not resign but eventually retired. A couple of years later, I found he had been fired because his incompetence in I.T. had led to large financial losses for the company.
In this case I am with the manager.
Excel is not a database.
Excel can pretend to be a database but can screw up badly in ways that a decent database usually cannot
e.g. Excel for a long time had a lamentably low limit on number of max number of "rows"
e.g. Low precision on numeric data (IIRC 15 digits max in Excel?)
e.g. data integrity with multiple concurrent users editing data.
Plenty more.
Excel can be a convenient tool for viewing a small subset (an amount Excel can cope with without performance being awful) of content extracted from a database (e.g. can graph things OK quite easily which helps some people interpret data more easily) but that is not the same as it being a database substitute
If all you need is a flat-file with a few hundred rows and you aren't storing super-high-precision numbers, it's fine.
Note that 15 digits precision is enough to store the total amount of money in the world, to the nearest US dollar. Most engineering calculations are quite fine with about 4 significant digits.
Intermediate calculations absolutely aren't fine with anything like that. Let's use a simple example. Let's say someone borrowed half a million pounds at a 7% annual interest rate, paid monthly. If we calculate the monthly interest rate correctly, you end up paying exactly the amount specified. If we calculate it with four significant figures, you pay £41,433.35 too much. Let's take it up to 6 sig figs. Now, you pay £486.41 too little, which you might be fine with but the bank won't be. To get that below a pound inaccuracy, you need 9 sig figs. To get it below a penny inaccuracy, you need 11. If this is a larger loan or a different random interest rate, those could end up being even larger.
But if you're borrowing half a million pounds, a pound inaccuracy is negligible, much less a penny. If you're borrowing 5 million pounds, then 10 pounds inaccuracy is negligible. As the scale increases, so does the "that's so piddly it's not worth thinking about" amount. And Excel's 15 digits is far better than any of these.
Note my original comment was about:
1. The total amount of money in the WORLD, in US dollars - where exchange rate fluctuations would be many orders of magnitude more than any imprecision in Excel's calculations
2. Engineering calculations. If you're building a 1 km bridge, you don't need to measure your materials (or indeed the distance!) to 0.01 mm; 0.1 m is probably fine, especially given thermal expansion will throw it off anyway. (But shoot for 0.01 m, just in case. That's 6 significant digits, one of the cases where 4 might not be quite enough.)
I've worked temp jobs a number of times. People need temps to handle extra load caused by either their great success or their great failure. The clients are either really really nice, or just the worst people that ever lived.
I once overheard one of the client employees talking with another about running out of money to pay for the temps. That evening I was called to say I was fired for being "habitually late". I'd never been late. I faxed them both a few hundred pages of big black squares, but scheduled it to happen when I was personally in the office to pick up my last check (before caller ID).
At another job I was tasked with opening mail and delivering it, and accidentally saw my tempco's bill for my services. I was getting less than half what was being paid for me, of course. But I'm sure tempcos work SO HARD they deserved it more than me, right?
About 3 days into my IT career I was parachuted into a client site where one of the two company bods had just left to go freelance. They knew what rate we were being body-shopped at. Very shortly the other one left as well & I quickly became team leader on the site. It took a long time to rebuild* the finances after a long time as SSO in the Civil Service to be able to make a move like that.
" Build might be more accurate.
Yep, me too:
1. First professional job, I was a "temp", making 2/3 of what my permanent co-workers did, and with no benefits. But I bet the customer paid almost as much for me as for them.
2. Several years later, I was a permanent contractor. Found out the customer was paying almost triple what I made. (And our benefits were lousy.)
Now I'm directly employed - with a 30% salary increase just for being a direct employee, plus better benefits, plus better yearly raises, plus a bonus, plus a promotion... Unless you're a highly-paid specialist, employment as a temp or contractor is to your distinct disadvantage.
"At another job I was tasked with opening mail and delivering it, and accidentally saw my tempco's bill for my services. I was getting less than half what was being paid for me, of course. But I'm sure tempcos work SO HARD they deserved it more than me, right?"
Was tempco paying the employer's side of taxes that come out of paychecks? The company where you are doing the job might just be paying tempco a flat hourly/daily to have you and the agency does all of the PR tax and filing stuff and pays for the workman's comp insurance. Of course they are marking up your pay to cover their expenses as well as make a profit.
If you've ever had a business with employees, you quickly learn that what the employees take home vs. what it costs you as the employer are quite different. A typical rule of thumb is a factor of 1.4-1.5 depending on country, state and pay amount.
Of netbooks appearing on the network which I warned the stake holder about who was in-charge of that area. Was ignored because I was a "lowly temp". 3 months later "What are these netbooks doing on the network".
I warned you about those 3 months ago. I helped the engineer do it safely and securely otherwise, because he used to work for you, would of done it anyway as no one had bothered to changed passwords.
I was summoned to a meeting, they attempted to do this with no representation but my nice manager stopped that and joined me. I was told "We were going to get rid of you but another manager saved you blah blah". I refused to say thanks when I'd done nothing wrong, they hadn't reacted when I warned them. They all got off scot free and tried to pin it on me.
I should of walked out and left but, sadly, needed the money and continued with the beatings (they moved me do a different role and dropped my pay).
I would have expected anyone using both to know the difference.
I saw a colleague's spreadsheet once where the negative values were coloured red. I was really impressed that he understood conditional formatting. Until I took a closer look. He'd gone though it and manually changed the colours.
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Use of spreadsheets and word processors is a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect). People who know a little bit think they are experts.
While working in a university, I came across an academic who was about to submit a 500+ page research paper. Page breaks had been created by pressing <Return> multiple times, meaning any edit led to a major manual reformat of the following sections of the document. Each heading had been formatted individually - no styles used at all. The table of contents was being updated manually… I could go on.
A word processor is the most basic tool used by an academic, much as a hammer is the basic tool of trade for a carpenter. If I had asked if they knew their way around Microsoft Word, I have no doubt that she would have told me that she was an expert user… yet the staff member was not using any of the features that make a word processor powerful. Training in Microsoft Office was freely available and offered regularly, yet this individual must have declined to take it multiple times.
I was once asked why a project was taking so long. I replied , "The network is slow." They said, "No it's not." I ran the tests and sent them the report. - Services no longer required
Another place it was inventory and upgrade the OS. Got down to the last 100 PCS and could not find them. I asked the perm team if they had any ideas. They said you should look for them. I told them I had. Literally walked miles searching for them. Manglement was also asking where the PCs were. I reported I had asked the perm team, received no answer, and started marking the inventory as "unable to find." - Services no longer required
Another place I was asked to help the Exchange admin... with an Exchange problem. I was a lowly Level 2 at the time and informed them I was not an Exchange admin nor being paid to be one. Nor a server admin. Again, the perm team was hostile on a daily basis (I could write a book on that time, alone), so I knew being a hero was not going to be rewarded. I then asked why the Exchange admin could not solve the Exchange problem. - Services no longer required
And that is just a sample. If I stop and try to remember all the other times in detail, I am going to ruin my day.
I wonder if I contracted in the same place around 1999-2000? I was hustled out of the door within a couple of days of making the IT Manager look bad, in a very similar way. The difference being that I did it ostentatiously in front of his boss, because I had already clocked him as a poisonous piece of work who had got where he had by finding faults in others rather than demonstrating positive qualities in himself. I was young and naive then... 25+ years later I've seen enough of that to know when to keep my head down (basically when the money being paid is enough to make turning a blind eye to a bit of sh*t worthwhile!)
I saw a young lady client (a Geography Degree under her shapely belt, presumably with statistics involved), type in a list of prices into Excel, then open the drawer of her desk, pull out a calculator and proceed to add up the numbers and type in the answer at the bottom of the 50+ prices.
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