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)

[ClashCityRocker]

Ah PowerPoint.

Trying to get into someone's head that using every fade, slide in, sound effect, star wipe and special effect going makes your presentation look less like a professional presentation and more like a year seven school project takes some doing.

Having the text sliding in, doing a 360 degree spin complete with a 'whoosh' sound does not add excitement. It's a presentation about the annual and lifetime pension allowance, Ffs, no one attending is expecting it to be a white-knuckle adventure into the Land Of Different Fonts.

Bonus points if you've missed off an important point because it's half hidden behind a piece of retro clip art. Which is always, always that stick man looking puzzled with a question mark above his head.

Not great at ms word though - I don't use it that much, although I did have to help a colleague with setting tabs. She'd just been using the space bar and wondering why it wouldn't line up when she made amendments.

I'm quite surprised at how poor the youngsters seem to be on ms office - do they not do it at school or is it all coding now? We did ECDL alongside a levels at college which I thought was really useful, although I went into a job where I was using quite a lot of what I learned straight away after. I guess if you don't use it regularly you soon forget.

[wasonthelist]

But the problem is what we consider standard format now (probably pdf) in a hundred years time will probably be completely obsolete - you won't be able to access the files...
Also it is a bit like if you found a floppy disc now you would struggle to be able to get the data off it -you still could at the moment - but in 50yrs time? in 100yrs?

No different from paper docs written in obsolete languages that no-one speaks or reads any longer really.

This kind of stuff was maybe true 10-20 years ago, but we've hit a critical mass now.

We're creating more data in a year as a planet than everything that ever existed before.

Ok much of it is cat videos, but paper will soon be all but gone.

Get used to it.

As for formats changing - we already have the power and tools to deal with that really easily.

[wasonthelist]

I'm quite surprised at how poor the youngsters seem to be on ms office - do they not do it at school or is it all coding now?

It's a dying skill because fewer and fewer people need to know how to get things to look decent on paper.

Think of all the Utilities, Doctors, Schools etc who used to write me paper letters 10 years ago - now it's all done by email or SMS.

[DadDadDad]

Trying to get into someone's head that using every fade, slide in, sound effect, star wipe and special effect going makes your presentation look less like a professional presentation and more like a year seven school project takes some doing.

Yep, and it's not great in year 7 either - I've tried to fight the battle with my children that just because you can do it in Excel doesn't mean you should do it.

It's a presentation about the annual and lifetime pension allowance, Ffs, no one attending is expecting it to be a white-knuckle adventure into the Land Of Different Fonts.

That's hilarious!

Unfortunately, those who just fill slides with verbose bullet points and then just read them out are probably worse. Although not as bad as those who fill the slides with verbose bullet points and then don't read them out and talk over them with the expectation that "you can read this yourself". No! I can't read dense text and listen to you at the same time if you expect to properly digest your message!

[DadDadDad]

Whoops, I meant Powerpoint in my first comment just now.

[DadDadDad]

Whoops, I meant Powerpoint in my first comment just now.

[StatisticallyChallenged]

So true with the excessive powerpoint formatting - although on the flip side I recently sat through graduate recruitment interviews/presentations and several of them had done no formatting at all. Think white slides with the default black text.

I'm generally opposed to most powerpoint animations. Very occasionally I think it can be appropriate if you need to explain the steps in a complicated diagram - where it might be useful to layer up the different parts - but in most cases step AWAY from it for professional work.

[CMOTDibbler]

But better PP animations than a fairly recent internal meeting where different groups had to present their 7 year roadmaps. With an edict that there was to be no PP at all and you were to be 'creative' with it. Largely incredibly cringe worthy and detracted from the messaging!

[unlucky83]

was the pdf thing - think of the falls of great ancient civilisations. Think about if there was some natural disaster or pandemic. Think about someone looking at a floppy disc/hard drive and not even knowing what it is ...would you know what a keyboard was if you had different letters and numbers - typing had been done on a flat touch screen for a few hundred years and we had moved onto a different alphabet. Thinking about ancient languages we got lucky with the Rosetta stone...maybe we would in the future - an ancient Windows '50' computer found and they manage to work out it needs electricity and a plug...and what voltage/wattage etc....

Powerpoint ...I always think WHY?
Does anyone know a professional field where they would use or need the funky animated text (not boring slowly appearing - but the zip in from the side stuff etc) and the funky backgrounds and .... I really can't think of any - even in eg arts or media or gaming.
Surely they aren't needed so why are they in the program in the first place - why not have a less space/memory lighterweight more basic program?
Like the really funky unreadable fonts in Word -or Word Art etc etc - WHY? (Except to give children something to play with when they are learning ...and so we need every increasing hard drives and memory)
I guess it goes with turning increasing number of features on idea - you could also have eg basic Excel then you could download add ons for science or business - statistical tests, etc.
Basic word , basic powerpoint -all where you can choose what you want or need and can add to in the future if your circumstances change...

[wasonthelist]

was the pdf thing - think of the falls of great ancient civilisations. Think about if there was some natural disaster or pandemic. Think about someone looking at a floppy disc/hard drive and not even knowing what it is

Er - exactly my point about why paper's no better - we have bits of stone and paper lying around now with stuff on we can't understand.

[Freshprincess]

An Excel AIBU. I'm Almoat as giddy as when Marian Keyes answered my question on a web chat .
I love Excel. I dont mind a set print area because I always preview
I use it for non-number things though, mostly sorting contacts prior to uploading to our actual database. Someone, once had an epic sorting fail (just sorting the last name column and not the rest of the data) and totally ballsed up the prospect database. Let's not apportion blame though, it could have been anyone of us,

Sorting mishaps aside, I'm an intermediate user. I can do a pivot table, but no VBA stuff. I'm considering learning it just for the sake of it.

I could be here for the rest of the day with my powerpoint AIBUs though, so don't get me started.

[wasonthelist]

Freshprincess

I rest my case about why Excel shouldn't be used for business critical (or even slightly important) data. :)

[woodly2013]

Loving this thread! I am a self taught exceller and still learning and love to learn! Yes I've discovered pivot tables too but really want to know more. Still a novice in this field and also using google docs(anyone else??) doesn't permit all excel functions and is a right strange beast at times especially as I have assistive technology. Living and learning and at times growling! Enjoying the excel furore

[Freshprincess]

wasonthelist I always create a master untouched read only version now just in case.

[unlucky83]

was but we know we should be trying to understand them, we have an idea of what they are ...
eg a CD/DVD we would have to understand what it was first (seeing as old ones are used in gardens as bird scarers...if they were excavated there maybe some way of helping plants to grow???? or a child's toy?)
then even if we then realised and it wasn't too damaged - how to get the information from it? and then files to open and then still have letters we couldn't understand...
(topic came up talking about some house docs from the late 1700s - librarian was talking about the best of keeping the paper to preserve it -I said why not photocopy/scan - which brought the whole topic up. And also apparently scanning can damage ink...I guess like erasable gel pens not being suitable for photocopying)

[wasonthelist]

Unlucky Point taken but I think we're reckoning without the advance of technology. I think it's unlikely we'll lose the knowledge of what these things are for and how they work - or at least not without an even so catastrophic that it would be irrelevant. Some people are thinking based on the past, not what we'll be able to do in future.

As for scanning damaging docs, digital photography would work fine in that case, high res camera set a fixed distance.

As for digital media being damaged/unreadable etc - increasingly stuff is online in system with multiple redundancy now - we no longer need to keep making backups to USB sticks, floppies etc (except for the kind of folk who insist on printing out spreadsheets every 5 minutes) - this will improve massively over time, too.

[caroldecker]

Wason That was probably the view of the Roman empire in 200AD.

[wasonthelist]

Wason That was probably the view of the Roman empire in 200AD.

Ok Ok, suit yerselves, keep on printing then :)

[wasonthelist]

BTW quite a lot from Roman times has survived and continues to be used and/or contribute to our current technologies.

[unlucky83]

wason I actually don't print everything - I try and keep it to a minimum.
Switched to emailing invoices etc to save resources.
But I went through a lot of the the files/records of the charity I work for - 2 huge plastic tubs of A4 folders from the early 70s - and scanned to pdf useful/interesting things , saved in the cloud and binned the paper...
But I have kept the old account ledgers ...and the original building lease.
There actually is still a lot more 'archive' stuff - a lot we could get rid of -when I get time to go through it .
But I do feel a bit guilty about potentially destroying all this 'evidence' but I am sure a lot of it would be binned if kept as paper in time anyway...so I guess it is preserved in one way when it wouldn't be otherwise...

[RandomMess]

Do any of the rest of you remember that annoying MS Office Paperclip "help" that just would not go away? One of the more techy people I worked with eventually managed to figure out how to disable it completely and "kill" it? It was SO annoying!

I recently went on an "advanced" course and didn't learn anything tbh. Definitely have learnt the most from colleagues different ways of doing the same thing. Was scary how much it moved on in my 6 year career break in the 00's.

[wasonthelist]

My favourite (if rather tasteless) pisstake of the paperclip was -

"It looks like you're writing a suicide note..."

The thing was, it was, like much of Microsoft's offerings, totally US-centric and didn't take account of locale at all.

[Freshprincess]

I remember the cartoon paper clip but can't remember what it was for.

[DadDadDad]

The paper clip was meant to be a help function. So he would watch what you were doing then as in was's parody, would say "it's look like you are trying to write a letter" or "insert multiple columns" and then offer to help show how to do this.

There were several alternative characters I seem to remember: a dog? a cat, Einstein (!), what else?

[DadDadDad]

Maybe in light of this thread, we need to bring back a slightly more aggressive paper clip: "It looks like you are trying to sort but only including half the columns. Do that again and I will delete all your emails....!"