DH has been using a calculator to add things recorded in Excel

[RokaandRoll]

AIBU to think this is absolutely astonishing?

I found out because we were doing a new budget spreadsheet and he read out what we spend on different things each month while I recorded each item in Excel. He then asked me to read the amounts back to him so he could add them up. I was like WHAT??? I'll just add a formula in Excel. He said "really, you can do that?" I asked him what he thought Excel was for, and he said he didn't know as no one had taught him.

Have you ever found out someone was doing something in a completely bizarre and illogical way on a similar level as this? DH is in his 50s and is a quite intelligent person (or so I thought). He has used Excel in his job although obviously not extensively. AIBU to be completely shocked?

I still live learning new things. He's going to love what excel can't do now he's found out

Saw someone in work photocopying a stapled document, one sheet at a time, turning the page. I said would you not just remove the staple and use the document feeder?

Public sector. This person has been promoted to a €60k job after trying and failing multiple times in internal interviews. Great system.

I never got shown how to make formulas and just did add it up in a calculator. Haha. My sheets were qualitative research projects so not huge quantities of data but still. I was mortified when someone randomly finally showed me how. It was about a month before I left. I'd been there 15 years. Everyone thought my work was great and never fucking noticed. Haha.

DH did this until about 5 years ago. Like you I was completely astounded. I use Excel all day every day and it didn’t occur to me that he wouldn’t know that the sum function existed. Backfired on me as I get a “how do I” Excel question every time he’s working at home now.

At least he wasn’t typing in commas…

Im going to say YABU as you can just highlight the cells and it tells you the total without a formula.

Point is - many ways to skin a cat.

I worked in education for 20 years and never did work out how to do booklets on the sodding photocopier.

That reminds me of this XKCD cartoon. It's nice that you get to enlighten him!

https://m.xkcd.com/1053/

and he said he didn't know as no one had taught him

He has used Excel in his job although obviously not extensively

Well I assume you know because someone taught you or you've used it extensively? How else do people learn

I had a boss who was convinced his maths was better than excel and he would overwrite the formula with his own idea of what the total should be, breaking the spreadsheet and inevitably being entirely incorrect. Drove me mad the first few times, drove him mad when I started locking the cells 🤣

I suppose tbf to him if he hasn't used it much then he wouldn't know about the 'hacks'. He must have been delighted when you enlighten him though, so much time saved!

I worked for a large international company who used to direct mail people. This was a few years ago but the receptionists would spend weeks individually typing out names & addresses for labels. I showed them a mail merge !

😂😂😂😂😂😂

I used to spend ages doing spreadsheets with formulae for clients and the amount of them that would delete them and then get everything wrong. It was painful 😭

I'm mid 40s so exactly the right age to have missed anything computer related being taught in school, but everything computer based in work. Unless you've been trained or shown, it's easy for things to have passed you by.

I remember 20+ years ago now moving between documents I was working on. I had loads of things open. I was in PowerPoint, then going to excel using my mouse, trying to remember which of the documents I had open was correct, selecting that, finding what I needed, going back to PowerPoint the same way. Someone happened to come over to my desk and saw what I was doing and said 'You know you can alt tab between 2 documents?' Clearly not! But that has saved me soooo much time over the years. There have been other things here and there over the years. But I often wonder how many time savers I don't know!

I love these threads, and the 'what have you found out today?' type that is also running at the moment, full of things that are blindingly obvious to a large percentage of the population.

It's amazing what we don't know we don't know - sure we all have 'gotchas'. Fortunately none of mine springing to mind at the moment, but no doubt they've been there and people have scratched their head at me too. 😆

As a teacher this rings soooo true!!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I used to study civil engineering. One of the main topics, which was my speciality, was soil engineering. The tutor who was teaching it made her own formulas up to calculate the strength of soils, from results of soil tests, when actual experts in the field who had studied the topic for decades had already formulated actual formulas that were used across the world in determining soil strength.

When I asked 'why not use the actual formulas that we use in every day life to design things' she said she had never really understood it and this worked in the examples she had so we were using it and that was that.

It was then I knew that the system was fucked.

I had a colleague tell me she had run out of white paper for the printer and could only find yellow paper in the stationery cupboard. This was distressing her greatly.

A minute later she lit up with a brainwave "oh I know what I can do - I'll photocopy a yellow page and then use the pages that come out of the photocopier".

Was I wrong not to tell her? 🤷‍♀️ Maybe, but it was fun watching her waiting while it printed her 20 pages. And it made her so happy to feel smart for once 😊

The thing with anything like excel is that you don't know what you dont know. I've used it since spreadsheets were invented but I still learn new things by seeing someone else do something differently to me or coming across a tip online

However if he didn't know that they added stuff up what did he think a spreadsheet was for?

I use excel a lot, but my knowledge is still basic. My best mate is an absolute whizz at excel and does all kinds of complicated things!

I'm still learning how to do things on the computer, I'm mid 40s. Yet, amusingly everyone at work comes to me for tech advise and amazingly most of the time I know the answer 😄

I remember the day when someone showed me the 'hidden' flight simulator in excel!

P.S. I would happily use Lotus 1-2-3 if it was still available.

I think the thing is, you use it for whatever you need it for and don't tend to go beyond that. Or even know what stuff you can do on it. I would have been using it nearly 20 years before I discovered a lookup 😬

I remember a work colleague a few years ago jokingly suggesting men think like Excel, and women like Word. Every rule has an exception it seems!

Why are you shocked that someone doesn't know something they haven't been taught or used?