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)

People who would claim they can use Excel well.

Why are there hidden rows, that is where my missing expenditure is???

Try removing the filter that is giving you just your data...

Any information that is business critical should really be version controlled. I've only come across this in software though. It would be worth looking at though, because if someone does ruin a dataset it can easily be rolled back.

BlameIt - find someone who knows how to use Excel and ask them to teach you. It isn't hard but being shown how to makes it much easier!

I used to work with people earning hundreds of thousands who were inexplicably unable to set their own print areas, so if I sent anything out I had to set it for them

I work in financial reporting for an insurance company, so outputs are pretty business critical, and we are highly dependent on Excel - tens of workbooks being produced every quarter. But, we are disciplined about things like version control, write access, stating sources, doer and reviewer. So, yes, dangers of errors and loss of audit trail, but can't give up such a versatile, flexible tool!

Some years back I was taking over a job, and the woman training me was showing me a dataset that came in from a customer as a filtered list. She explained to me that you have to count the cells because it's filtered. Poor woman had been given no training in Excel and must have wasted hours of her life manually counting visible cells.

Blameit, the golden rule of Excel is that if you find yourself doing lots of manual fiddly stuff and think "omg this is taking forever there should totally be an easier way" then there always totally is. And if you type "Excel I want to select only cells formatted in green" or whatever your problem is into Google then Google will tell you how to do it.

Or find the nearest actuary and buy them some jelly beans (actuaries are key here because any actual IT professional will tell you that you shouldn't be using Excel anyway, which may be true, but is rarely helpful whereas actuaries understand that Excel is almost always the answer in practice, and are grateful for the human interaction).

I can't believe so many people are still printing things off. I rarely print at work these days, paper light and all that

I don't know how to use Excel. Excel plays virtually no part in my job. I once thought I should maybe learn, and I paid myself to go on a half-day course, and I did learn some stuff. But because I never use it, I can't remember it. I certainly wouldn't know how to set your print areas - or even that you were meant to...

One interesting thing is that as I've become more proficient over the years and the sheets have become more complex, I've ended up using more links to pivot tables, indirect references and other stuff which won't work unless every related spreadsheet is open. This is a blessing in disguise because it's got me into the habit of pdf-ing sheets before I send them out to other people which is a very useful thing to do as noted above.

I would class myself as entirely fucking useless at spreadsheets - it has nothing to do with my job. But even I know enough to understand this conversation. I'm able to use different tabs, look-up tables & hide/show columns and all kinds of other shit.

I stopped doing maths when I was 14 - I took my O Level, got a pass, and just refused to do anymore. It has come as a great surprise to me that I'm actually better at it than I realized, and as an adult I see the appeal of being able to order and organize things so beatifically. If I had my time over, I'd be an actuary.

And yy to being able to power up once certain things have been mastered. In fact, that should be a rule of life.

To the person up thread who would like to send images of sheets as pdfs...you can -really easily.
I don't use Excel any more, I use the Free Libre Office calc they are very similar or used to be at least so not sure about the latest MS Office features but I can export to a pdf - it will do the whole sheet.
Even better (for just part of a sheet) you can get things like Nitro Pdf (free). It acts like a printer - so when you go to print, choose printer you choose nitro - then it will ask you to save as and you get a pdf of the print preview (as many pages as you would print).
Obviously people can't change it then -but they can annotate using a pdf reader...or print it and annotate it and then scan and email back...
I would also have a backup copy of anything like that.
Just thinking can you track changes on a spreadsheet like word these days? Then you could see the silly errors made...

My current biggest bug bear is I have to do something using a provided spreadsheet - basically it contains linked fields to create a report/summary - it is supposedly idiot proof - all protected cells etc. (I needed to adapt it and it was a real faff...).
There are two 'information sheets' -you fill in certain highlighted cells with eg dates and names and they are linked to the different sheets - instead of entering the same thing 4 or 5 times you do it once...in some case it only appears elsewhere once but I guess that is then in the report it isn't highlighted but it does get filled in. ALL the data in the information sheets appears in the relevant place in the summaries/reports.
I have to print 5 copies of this report which is 5-6 A4 sheets long - not including the 'information pages' (I would argue that 4 copies could be replaced with soft copies to be emailed but anyway ...)

Every time I give these to one person they tell me I have forgotten to give them the information sheets - I tried to explain to them twice that they aren't needed, why they exist -but they can't get their head around it - now I don't say anything and just print the extra 10 sheets... I guess I should go over their head and get their 'boss' to explain to them too but life is too short...

I know how to use pdfs. It's more that for the particular problem I have the info is currently stored on a shared drive. I could switch to having it locked down and pdfing images but I would have to do it daily in different variants for different recipients. Often multiple times a day. So it would massively increase my workload. Ideally I need the other users to be able to make minor changes too but applying filters seems to be challenging

actuaries understand that Excel is almost always the answer in practice, and are grateful for the human interaction

Hey! I'm an actuary.

And what you say is totally true.

Oh, Davidwainwright...see post about databases and practicality and guess my job. Accurate post

You want to work in primary schools where the children spend most of the time getting exactly the right colour for their charts rather than analysing it.

I can't believe I just read about people manually adding up columns with calculators to put it into Excel.

Surely that is what Excel is actually FOR!! It can do that sort of thing in seconds and greatly reduced the potential for error. Are these people in a time warp back to the1950s.

I like Excel. I work in Financial Services. A lot of my calculations and uses of it remain fairly basic and I am largely self taught, but if I have a tricky problem to tackle then I always try to work out first whether Excel can do it, or most of it. Frequently it can.

If I know that I am going to need to mess around with a critical spreadsheet in order to work out how to get what I want then I don't mess with the original one. I make my own copy to work with. No issue then when/if my experimentation goes tits up at first. No data is damaged and all is still there.

Surely that is common sense.

I was doing a presentation at work yesterday and kept getting a pop up suggesting I change the colour of my screen

This is possibly the most precise AIBU ive ever read!

Topsey - 15 years ago I joined an organisation where the HR director refused her staff to have excel!!!

She had them doing pension calculations etc on paper... We could not get through to her that it was just maths on sheet like Word was typewriting on a sheet type of thing.

I've also intervened to stop someone copy and pasting hundreds and hundreds of names and accompanying details from an online directory into a spreadsheet. This directory is well maintained, regularly updated and easy to navigate. And there's a fuck off big button on the page labelled "Export to Excel" (sounds pointless, but there's a use for this).

They had been doing it for days (tasked by one of the calculator/Excel geniuses).

I am looking for another job

And there's a fuck off big button on the page labelled "Export to Excel" (sounds pointless, but there's a use for this)

I wish some of the directories I used had that. Or download as CSV. Or something.

I have spent ages copying and pasting from so called directories. But it's done.

Random I had an HR director have a massive go at me in front of dozens of colleagues (bang out of order in any situation, but I was very junior) for not sorting the report I'd given to her, in Excel, alphabetically

Why, thank you redexpat