people using 'set print area' on an excel spreadsheet

[thecolonelbumminganugget]

It annoys me so much I have to leave my desk and make a cup of tea to calm down everytime someone emails me a spreadsheet where they've done this!

There is no justification for this. Either:

A - you have set the important information to print and everything else is backing information. In which case you need two tabs, one with the summary, the other with the backing so anyone who wants to can trace it through but the important information is summarised on the front sheet. Or;

B - it's all equally important but YOU only needed to print part of it. In which case either select cells and use print selected or use clear print area before you save it in a shared location or forward it on. If it is the case that the bit you needed to print is the same bit everyone else will need then I refer you to point A above.

All that happens is that you send it on, the recipient prints it to read, or worse still when they've added their own work to it and printed it, the bit they wanted didn't print because it's not in the print area you dictated, they throw it in the bin, swear at you behind your back and have to go back to their desk, clear print area, and print it again.

I know I'm not being unreasonable when I say the only reason to do this is because you hate everyone you work with!

(Oh god that feels better)

So glad I no longer work in a role that involves having to work with data people have stored in Excel spreadsheets which really belongs in a database. My working life has improved immensely

Not always that easily achieved in a small (or even large) business environment though. Excel is fairly universal compared to database creation knowledge IME.

I work with people who use calculators to add up columns. Every day is painful

OMG

That make me glad I work in a corporate finance team with excel geniuses!

This thread clearly demonstrates it's not nearly universal enough. And excel just fools people into thinking they can do something when really they shouldn't!

statisticallychallenged you must have been absolutely livid, because I think that's the first time I've seen you swear on MN. I could be wrong, but it's certainly the first time I've noticed. Given your prolific postings during the Scottish Referendum I was ASTOUNDED that you didn't at that time, while the rest of us were swearing like troopers!

Sorry OP I never think about what I've printed from a SS before posting it & I just set my own print area when receiving one. Any cockups I just swear at my own inattention, add the paper to the scrap pile & sort it out. Never occured to me to get pissed off with someone else because I didn't check. But I like your thinking 😁

StatisticallyChallenged You have my sympathy for that kind of crappy work. Has the idiot apologised for their stupidity?

I get called around the office to sort out people's spreadsheets, but my colleagues generally have the good sense to check with me first before performing actions they are unsure about.

Someone who supposedly was in charge of one of our IT systems once sent me a screenshot, by printing, scanning and then emailing!

Nah YABU

1. You are printing off too much stuff (have you got a 2nd screen - they are wonderful)

1. You should also do your own "set print area" and then print preview before you waste paper and print anything off anyway.

I do concede though I bit it's really annoying if this is something that you get mailed regularly and have to faff about with

I work with people who use calculators to add up columns. Every day is painful

Oh dear god, I'd have burried them by now!

paper because they needed to complete two copies of a form which was stored in excel...they had a printer and a computer, but were printing out the blank form and filling in by hand. Twice. Hence request for carbon paper 😳😳😳. Fuck me...how the hell do they hold down a job anywhere near you?

I was explaining to a 10 yo how we used to use carbon paper for typing with copies the other day, the look on her face was priceless! 😁

Can I please put in here I hate people who make a table (it as part if a wider document, just a table) in word? And then can't handle it when t is switched to excel, which is so much easier to manipulate and format??
My boss uses word for EVERYTHING and it drives me fecking bonkers!

wason I'm a tax accountant, my presence is, at best, a burden.

I think this may be my problem...'it's only tax, nobody cares apart from the tax saddo in the corner, look! She's got a chair again, who have her that? In fact who let her out of the cupboard?!'

People who distribute pages and pages of printed excel reports at meetings without setting the headers to print on every page so you're constantly flipping back and forth and counting columns....

I LOVE the idea of unlocking features as you master tasks. That's genius!

*not as
Ms word rage induced!

Not always that easily achieved in a small (or even large) business environment though. Excel is fairly universal compared to database creation knowledge IME.

Agreed but it is (as demonstrated on this thread) a fallacy to imagine using Excel is more efficient or effective because everyone spends hours faffing about with it (to varying degrees).

I sometimes recruit for a job that requires high levels of computer literacy. I have a small questionnaire which I use to check what the "Expert MS Excel skills" on their cv actually means and one of the questions is "What is the number one peril to beware of when sorting data?" They normally look at me blankly but anyone who says "Sorting some of the columns but not all of them because that results in the entire data set being unusable and the person who sweated blood over creating it beating you over the head with the heavy duty stapler" gets a gold star and an automatic free pass into the next round of interviews.

When I send out spreadsheets that need to be printed I choose settings like fit to 1 page horizontally. Why would you reset those settings & then print it on 2 pages? And then ask me to change the spreadsheet?

YES! Yes you can backwardelephant

Unfortunately I can't be 100% sure who it was, although I have an incredibly strong idea!

The carbon paper, and the spreadsheet silliness, is linked to our business rather than my day job (where I work with lots of excel loving people, but who have a tendency to over-use VBA!)

heatwave livid doesn't even begin to cover it, honestly. It took me two evenings of staring at spreadsheets (having set if/index/match formulae up to compare between different versions to identify the problematic people) to get it to a semi fixed state, and I still can't be sure there are no errors. SOB.

It's a catch 22 of trying to make things as easy as possible for DH and I by minimizing the number of workbooks and having everything populating automatically, and giving excel illiterates too much access.

I'll go one better. I one had to teach a colleague - in FINANCIAL SERVICES - how to copy and paste. Honest.

I'll rephrase - if it was database-based then I would have to do absolutely all of the work, and I'm not exactly a database whizz but the difference is that I pick computer stuff up quickly so I would learn it. The others wouldn't - 1 year in and absolute basics still haven't been mastered.

If km feeling particularly pissed off, I will not only not set print area but type a full stop in cell XY 41009.

That'll learn em not to print preview.

And people who rather than deleting the contents of a cell, do the shift up or shift left thing which totally fucks EVERYTHING!

Or just c&p cells rather than inputting data, where the c&p cell is actually a formula linking into something else.

I feel like I have found my people

My pet hate is when I send out a spreadsheet with formula embedded for users to complete and then have IDIOTS phone me saying "when I enter a number into cell B2 cell E5 is changing and I didn't touch it..."

I have to agree MS Word is evil, document submitted for a financial decision and all the working are in word - why, just why. In fact MS Word formatting - it's just a complete inefficient PITA

Also people who do all their sums on the calculator and type into cells.

People who don't even grasp that you can get Excel to do lots of helpful stuff and carry on using paper rather than ask the financial team for some help.

TBH working is just bad for my health - the level of frustration it creates!

I hate people who set print area and also people who don't format the workbook for printing - if the latter was done properly then you wouldn't end up printing off empty cells and wouldn't need to set print area.

I opened this thread because I know that I don't have a clue about excel and printing and that it always ends up going wrong. I'm now closing it more confused than ever and convinced that there is some kind of witchcraft involved in getting it right….