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 have skipped to the end of this thread as it's very long but hoping that somewhere someone has posted a few simple cheats for Excel and computers generally. I have to ask the young uns in the office to help me with stuff sometimes and it's so embarrassing. I don't know how to make columns add up or use formulae so laugh all you like. At 61 I have a wealth of other skills but spreadsheets aren't one of them.

I use excel all the time. What specifically do you want to know?

@Hedjwitch I taught myself by watching YouTube videos, there are loads of really good step by step beginner’s guides to take you through the basics.

A couple of simple " hacks" that probably everyone knows apart from me. Things that are bleeding obvious to people who love spreadsheets. Assume I know nothing other than how to put data in a cell,how to make cells bigger,and how to wrap text because that's about it.

If you don't know you don't know.

My old manager didn't know how to send an email to more than one person, we all got cc'd on them

We have that with analytical samples, the sample position gets formatted as hours and minutes because it has a colon in it, so for the last 37 samples on a plate it's wrong: 1:60 becomes 2:00 etc. We spotted it quite quickly but it was only by chance once that we found out our analytical department colleagues had the same issue, but had been correcting it by hand! We showed them how to sort it though.

Years ago I put a process into a mail merge and my manager at the time checked every single letter produced. I really don't think she understood that providing the data was correct, the merge would be fine.

Not necessarily. (I can explain by DM if you need). I'm still a bit traumatised.

My biggest tip would be learn VBA.

You can do it by recording macros in Excel and then viewing the code they generate.

Or you can ask ChatGPT to write you a code snippet.

Once you learn to automate excel with VBA adding buttons etc you will literally look like a God compared to the average Excel user.