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?

For those of you with left handed DCs, the way to teach them to tie shoelaces or a tie is to sit opposite them and show them.

Not side by side as you do for right handed people.

This was many years ago. Nobody lost a job, they were a caring company & still needed receptionists, but just found them better things to do, like mail merges & getting more involved with campaigns.

I can’t use Excel but I can whack out something impressive on Adobe InDesign.
Wouldn’t mock someone who can’t.

Agree public sector training is dire. I went from City of London finance world to NHS setting out of London years back. Suck a shocker! Everyone was issued expensive new computers and no one knew how to use the software. A secretary in my office had a manual diary, message pad and calendar…….I taught her how to use email and calendars for meetings.

I attended a course for the NHS system and that was dire too. I know it’s more up to date now depending on dept, hospital etc but the difference between public sector training and corporate was so vast. Could never understand them supplying top spec new computers to staff but no training.

I was also public sector, and tbh we did get training occasionally, but when you didn't use it, you very quickly lost it.

I remember working out how to merge excel and email so that it personalised each message. With various data inserts, this was donkeys years ago. It was a huge time saver. I told one trusted colleague to save her time. I also swore her to secrecy as it would just mean more work.

In my time at work I was really good at working out short cuts for any procedure, it is driven by laziness. I approach all tasks like this, housework and just about everything.

Remember one colleague crying at her desk over an issue, it involved multiple steps. Worked out how to do it in a time saving fashion. My brain is very black and white. I would just ‘have a go’ at stuff. I did something very bad once to a system that was ‘impossible to break/do’ it took a month to sort. I sent chocolate bars through the internal post system as an apology to IT services.

I've dealt with an Oxbridge student on work experience who was mystified by the fact that letters he printed were not coming out on letter headed paper. It hadn't occurred to him to check and put letterhead in first.

I did learn a fair amount of excel in school but I have never had to use it in my job, and I've never had to photocopy a booklet either. I don't know how much I could do now

Why would I know these skills? It's not like it's an interesting skill to learn. I doubt anyway mocking those that can't use excel could do half the skills in my job, and it would be bizarre for them to sit at home practicing them

If I changed industries then sure I'd spend some time learning to use excel. But it's a real waste of time to sit there learning a fairly dull skill you never have to use.

I don't think Oxbridge degrees have many seminars on printing on letter headed paper tbh

I joined the NHS in 1988 as a management accountant. Personal computers were still a "new thing" in the health authority where I worked and we'd just started using a very primitive early spreadsheet package to keep track of budgets and expenditure in our unit. (I can't remember what it was but it wasn't VisiCalc and I can't remember if Excel was about in the late eighties).

After a few months of use our "old school" unit accountant began questioning the reports and started manually checking the spreadsheet calculations and we couldn't understand why - until he demonstrated to us that the calculations were wrong!

After laboriously checking each cell in the formula (and there were a lot of cells!) we realised that the spreadsheet package didn't have sufficient capacity to cope with formulas containing more than a surprisingly low number of cells.

Taught us all a lesson about not taking for granted everything a spreadsheet tells you!

(Didn't something similar happen during Covid when some civil servant didn't realise that there was a maximum number of rows in Excel and the underlying statistics they were reproting on exceeded that number?)

This 👆🏻

@meganorks I'm mid 40s so exactly the right age to have missed anything computer related being taught in school,

I’m mid fifties and studied computing at school. I have an O Level (prehistoric qualification before GSCEs) in computing and learned how to use Lotus 123, DBase and WordPerfect - precursors to the much improved software we use now. I’m amazed that someone 10 years younger than me didn’t get to study any computing in school.

BUT despite never having officially been trained in Excel I can still teach my colleagues the odd thing that they’d never known, and vice versa.

I work in finance. There are some graduates that join and they have never used excel before. They have a degree in accounting and finance or business but have never used excel. That is shocking to me. Apparently the degree they do gives them a choice to use excel or paper based with calculator.

@HideTheCroissants your school was very much a trailblazer to offer an O level in computing in the mid eighties. That was unusual.

After laboriously making a contents page for a dissertation, typing the list individually and putting the dots to reach the page number - like this;

1.1 Introduction…………….12
1.2 Blah…………………………13

there were at least 50 lines

after taking about 2 days to do it and moaning about it, a fellow student asked me “do you not use the automatic table of contents function in Word?”

When she showed me, I nearly cried!

I have an absolute phobia of Excel and avoid it wherever possible. Stems back to using it for an audit I was doing at work once - I somehow managed to get the wee box thing on a random page which was page 999 or something - sent the document to the printer and it had about 3 pages with content and the rest was just hundreds of empty spreadsheet pages - it only stopped because the printer ran out of paper!

I’m in my 50s and have been using computers to do architectural drawings and detailing since the 80s but I have never used Excel. Tbh when I can I do all design work on ye olde Wolde drawing board and these days get others to draw it up on the computer as I find it mindlessly boring

I haven’t had the need Excel although I generally know what it’s for.

Im a also treasurer of a charity and every expense is put down in pencil in a big red folder and I use a calculator……🤣🤣🤣hello to your dh.

About 10 years ago I did what your DH did with excel. I had no idea, I didn't really use it much at all.

Now I'm a software engineer 😆

A highly paid boss of mine from my public sector days could never understand how a fax got from our office to the education department half a mile away so quickly.

However, he was a brilliant lawyer specialising in administrative and constitutional law, which is why he earned a very high salary for the time, probably equivalent to about £80k now.

Easily done in Word.

my £75k boss struggles with creating a PDF

Word isn’t great for tables. Beyond about four columns it can’t cope and the formatting can be painful.

Excel is much easier. PowerPoint is better than word and less likely to completely lose the plot.

I don’t work in a computer-y job and wouldn’t have the first clue how to use excel, never been shown and never needed it!

But we are discussing what is obvious, not what is possible.

I used to work with a lady who every morning would hand write the stats from a report on her computer, and add them up manually with a calculator.

Every morning for 45 whole minutes.

She knew the report could be filtered to give her the totals she needed but refused, as she could not trust the report to be correct apparently.

She was a bit of a martyr when it came to work related stuff, always the busiest with the most to do, whilst working in some of the most inefficient ways possible, so producing about a quarter of what other people did.

Early 40s and worked in an office since leaving school, she just thought she knew best. Was infuriating.

I guess it depends on the age of a person but I'm 35 and it was litrally a basic requirement of our mandatory GCSE's. My DH is nearly 40 and learned in school too.

If someone is a decade+ older I might assume computers weren't part of their schooling so they might not know if they haven't been taught for work but someone my age or younger I would genuinely be shocked if they weren't a school drop/home schooled out but didn't know a basic core topic.