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 agree to a point. Schools are never going to be able to teach all computer programmes. At least to a point your brain recalls it once you get back into the swing.

I think there’s also so many more things. It’s not just excel. It’s the whole Microsoft suite and additional things like power BI.

I think it should be taught in school. But given how much schools do and the time constraints I don’t think it would give a level that would stick with someone. As I said, my experience they are at least touching on it. Or some schools are starting to.

I think we also need to define what computer literacy would be. Is it Microsoft office? Is computers and how they work? Programming? Maybe the most commonly used systems such as Sage? SQL and Python are more commonly used than I have known before. Would it be APIs etc. Schools can only cover so much. But it should be higher prioritised.

@Itsonlymashadow

I think the old ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence) would be a good one to teach in schools

https://www.distance-learning-centre.co.uk/european-computer-driving-licence-ecdl-online-course/#:~:text=The%20European%20Computer%20Driving%20Licence,and%20efficient%20use%20of%20computers.

My son's school used to do it for all students in years 7 and 8, and said in their prospectus that they did it, but they suddenly abandoned it for the year my son started and didn't replace it with anything else. He was quite looking forward to it! Presumably the teacher left and they couldn't find a replacement!

Excel and word are basics. Access is not. Most JDs for office roles will have a statement about basic IT skills and often mentioned Word and Excel by name. I know that, for a fact, the JDs of the people who I have come across with no excel capability in my place specifically mention basic IT skills including word and excel - it is standard wording, yet they are doing those jobs without those skills somehow...

As for financial professionals not being able to do basics in excel because their current workplace uses specialist packages - well what about the next job? Seriously? Sounds like an excuse to me.

It is okay not to know everything when you start a job, but it is not okay to not learn things you need to do that job. If your directors are having to constantly get support from others to do basic manipulation of spreadsheets of information they need for their role then there is a big problem but it seems to be tolerated. This seems to be common in many workplaces - IT illiterate senior staff making junior staff pick up their slack.

My view is that word, excel and PowerPoint are the basics of standard office productivity tools that we should all seek to have an understanding of in office-based roles.

The wider Microsoft suite of tools, such as powerBI, publisher, etc are more specialised and should attract training for roles where they are required. I don't use powerBI in my role so don't need to be proficient in it, but our business reporting team do, so they are. I do need to use some specialised data management software so I am proficient in that, the business reporting team aren't so they don't need to know about it.

However as a manager I need to be able to manipulate data in spreadsheets, write word documents and do presentations with slides (PowerPoint) as does every other manager in my organisation regardless of their specialism because these tools are used to do the basics of communicating and managing the business as they are in many other organisations. Yet there are people who seem to have zero skill in one or more of these tools - excel being the most common one, somehow doing these jobs by relying on others to help them out and this is widely tolerated for some reason that I can't fathom.

@Eleganz

My view is that word, excel and PowerPoint are the basics of standard office productivity tools that we should all seek to have an understanding of in office-based roles.

Personally I think it needs to be broader than that. Those skills are essential for people doing university degrees and lots of other professions too and probably some college courses. The basics need to be taught at schools as they're pretty much a "life skill".

@Eleganz However as a manager I need to be able to manipulate data in spreadsheets, write word documents and do presentations with slides (PowerPoint) as does every other manager in my organisation regardless of their specialism because these tools are used to do the basics of communicating and managing the business as they are in many other organisations. Yet there are people who seem to have zero skill in one or more of these tools - excel being the most common one, somehow doing these jobs by relying on others to help them out and this is widely tolerated for some reason that I can't fathom.

So it must affect productivity - why doesn't the organisation provide some training?

I agree it’s not ok to not learn them.

i didn’t say the directors are ‘constantly’ looking for support. But yes, as tasks get increasingly complicated they struggle. All of them try, use my tip sheet etc. some will google it. But then reach out for help. The issue we face is that our finance department forget that a lot of the directors aren’t accounts and aren’t advanced in office tools, like they are. Their emails often cause a lot of the confusion in the first place. Or at least make it seem like a far more complicated task. And like to completely change the style and type of presentation on a monthly basis.

Half of finance have actually been sent on a communication course as they can communicate in an effective way to the rest of the business. I have a foot in both finance and operations. The other half of finance are going soon.

Even people do know how to use Microsoft office, it doesn’t mean aren’t always effective in other areas that are imperative. Like written communication.

I am not their junior staff.

I think it's one of those things that's difficult as most people will have the basic knowledge, so where do you set the training?

It's a bit like people who don't know there aren't 31 days in June or that the second month isn't spelt "Febuary" or how to do simple percentages. You can't waste everyone's time and the firm's money on "noddy" training courses for things that 90+% of the staff already know.

I think most organisations provide on the job training for the specifics of the job/role/organisation, i.e. accountancy firms provide basic book-keeping, accounting and tax training as they wouldn't expect new staff to know (unless it was for a senior position), but they're not going to provide training on basic numeracy or literacy as those would be "assumed" based on the qualification requirements of the job i.e. particular GCSE or A level grades in specific subjects.

The trouble with IT is that there are no "standards" and not all schools provide it as an exam subject (in fact some don't provide it at all), so employers can't "set a standard" for the jobs that are anything other that IT specialist roles and have to assume an average/typical level of IT ability, which obviously works pretty well if most of the staff in an organisation can manage their IT systems, especially generic desk top ones like Word, Excel and emails.

If you aren’t shown or trained how would you know 🤔

Also in my 50s and although I know that Excel has calculation formulas, I always forget how to do them because I've never properly learned how. I don't find it particularly user friendly tbh

I’m a hospital consultant and I have a PhD in a science subject as well as passing exams for two different Royal Colleges. I use a calculator to add columns in Excel or do whatever calculations are required (or I wander down my corridor, find a colleague who can do it & ask them, OR I email a spreadsheet to my Accountant brother and tell him what I need it to do). I don’t use Excel often enough to ever become proficient in it, and honestly I think it’s one of the worst and least instinctive programs out there. I have considerable expertise in my own specialist area and I simply don’t care about being terrible at Excel.

I agree, I'm also a long time user of spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 followed by Excel) so about 30+ years experience.
It's true that you don't know what you don't know with Excel as it's an incredibly complex programme that can be used for multiple purposes by people with differing knowledge levels.
I think what confuses some newbie users is that can add up numbers in one cell which isn't as obvious as totalling numbers in a 'sum'.

I know this can be done, I wouldn’t know how to do it myself.

Depends how comfortable you are with computers and what they can do. If I need to do something simple like adding figures (or even something not so simple), it's a fair bet that 20 billion other people have wanted to do this too. So if I already have them in Excel or some other program, I'd have a look at the help menu and search "adding" or "sum". Or I'd google "adding numbers in excel" and hey presto, there's the answer.

On the other hand, some people don't know how to use help menus, won't google for information, and are terrified of experimenting. My mother used to do a newsletter for her church, and by the church's standards she was fairly proficient with computers. But, she wouldn't try anything new. I tried to get her to use styles and failed - she'd rather type laborious spaces than set styles with indents, and she wouldn't use header styles but would change font sizes and styles individually. Sometimes she'd ask me how to do something but then not like the answer, e.g. "What are those marks at the end of lines?" "They're paragraph marks, mum. Here, you can turn them off like this if you don't want to see them." "PUT THEM BACK, PUT THEM BACK, YOU'VE BROKEN IT!"

They were told they could draft essays in Word, or do Power Point presentations, but they were never taught how to - it was all a matter of teach yourself.

My DC have both been taught in primary school how to create documents in Word, how to prepare a PowerPoint presentation and how to use a basic spreadsheet on Excell. My son, aged 11, can create a PowerPoint as easily as I can. It’s a life skill they use in high school and into university and part of their core curriculum in primary school.

I think this must be a recent development. DD left school 6 years ago and had never used Excel until she was writing her dissertation. It just wasn't taught at school.

I agree with PP that schools should teach the basics of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. DD is a whizz with Powerpint and Word, just not Excel.

I haven't used Powerpoint since the last century as it just isn't required in my job.

@RampantIvy I’m in Scotland so may also be a curriculum difference here, they’ve been doing computer work in some form or other since P1, so 2018.

Don’t even need a formula. Just highlights the figures and the total shows up bottom right

I use excel daily but still can’t use it to its full function.
basic things I’m absolutely fine with but no one’s ever shown me so I have no clue! I now and again go in and try play around but none the wiser yet
I’m early 40’s!

I don’t use excel much at all so I often have to google the formula I need when I use it. I literally use it for a household spreadsheet. I e a masters degree and I teach but I only ever have to add to excel sheets where formulas have been pre populated.

you say he’s 50. He’s in the age where he hasn’t grown up doing these things. I’m not far off 50. When I went to uni initially for my bachelor’s I hand wrote my essays and dissertation and used a library where books were on a 3 hour loan to be able to take my notes. When I started teaching the classroom had a bbc comp it er and when we got a windows with Microsoft encarta we thought we were at the height of technology!! Fast forward to 2017 when I did my masters and I had to learn how to electronically search for hit al articles and had to be taught how to reference using APA referencing and how Microsoft word can do this automatically for you if you know how. I did statistics as part of my masters but we used spss and not excel. But my point is I had to learn all this stuff recently as it wasn’t around when I started studying/work and those coming through afterwards were being taught but those in the systems of work were kind of just expected to get on and do. For what it’s worth as well I had a job between teaching jobs for a few years doing some admin and used excel but purely to store cataloguing information of where files were kept in an archive. No formulas needed. Mostly I was searching the spreadsheet to be able to go and find a file and the spreadsheet told me which room and which box it was stored in.

The problem with schools now is that they’ve moved on from teaching how to use a Microsoft package. That was what we taught to an extent back in the early 2000s, but mainly word and publisher. Ans how to safely search the web and use email. My children are now in secondary (y7/10) and I’m not sure either have been specifically taught excel but they laugh at my basic PowerPoints and like to improve them for me if I’m doing a presentation. lol. But the curriculum now is pre on coding - being able to programme little robots, basic games etc. They’re learning about binary code etc. They use Google classroom software for their everyday lessons so it’s assumed they can now use basic word processing. I’ve still never seen them use excel though.

Haha I love this description, I've met a fair few people like this!

In fact, when it comes to projector settings at work, I'm considered to be the most like that out of my immediate team... but in my defence all the buttons are labelled obscure things like "hdmi2" which I need to remember means "the visualiser", and "SS" which means "source search", which is already jargonese.

Excel, if you just want to do simple things with it, is relatively straightforward as computery things go. You click the button labelled "autosum" and it's easy to guess what that means.

But I will admit we're all on a spectrum of tech-fearing. I thought, before this thread, that I was quite extremely tech fearing but even I have played around with the buttons in Word and Excel!

My favourite thing to click is "Restore Default Settings".

Edit - I know hdmi2 doesn't literally mean a visualiser - in fact some classrooms have it on hdmi1 so it just goes to show!

Did he not come across excel at work???

Google what you want to do and it will tell you how to do it.