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?

If he didn’t know, he didn’t know.

Not everyone thinks in this way though. It doesn't make them stupid, or lazy. Just different.

Here is one of my secret santa gifts.

I get called an excel whizz at work but I grew up with excel at school.
There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know how to use but I look it up and it amazes me.
Show somebody how to slice a pivot table and they’re baffled 😂

It’s far quicker to click on the cell at the bottom of the column or end of a row and hit ALT and = it does the sum formula for you.

The what???

I'm old enough to have used Lotus 1-2-3 at work. When I was at school, we got 15 BBC model B computers when I was in lower 6th (y12). I had one at home so by week 3, I was teaching the teacher how to do stuff. When I started my 1st job, we had some "portable Apple Macs" which were amazing if quite limited by today's standards. In that job I had to do some data handling so I did learn how to use Lotus.

Now I teach. I use PowerPoint for lots of lessons and my mark books are all Excel spreadsheets. My line manager is younger than me but scared of Excel and maths things in general, so I help her. However, when I have questions about it or Word, I ask my daughters for help and they talk me through things.

What I would really like is:

1. Excel and Word courses for people who aren't beginners but aren't whizzes at them.
2. To know about the hidden flight simulator in Excel

There is way to do the same on a row but I’ve never tried. I usually have to send a report and ALT = puts in a sum formula of the full column above.

I'm 65 and I'm the one the office go to for help with Excel. Because 20 years ago, on being made redundant (first time), I did a Pitman course covering the Microsoft programmes. You don't wake up and know this stuff ...

Worked for a major league accountants in London, one of the senior secretaries was adding numbers up on a calculator and putting it into Excel. A course was organised - I caught the trainer beforehand, she'd been told it was an intermediate training. I suggested she check first. When asked "What cell is this" the answer from two people was 3C (correct being C3).

There's stuff like Alt+0178 = ² which my office of engineers use daily and none of them know.

Give it a try, it puts in the sum formula so instead of typing =sum(b21:b246) just click a blank cell under the columnn (don’t highlight the column)c then hit ALT = and the sum appears.

A colleague was asked to send sections of a spreadsheet to whomever it referred to, she printed it out and cut each section up and popped them into the right pigeon hole, she was shocked when she found out Manager meant to copy and paste into an email to each of them. She laughed about it all the time, she was bloody clever at other stuff and was the fasted typer I'd ever seen at the time.

I think it’s fine that he didn’t know Excel could do sums, but I’m intrigued about what the heck he was using Excel for if he wasn’t using it to do sums? Just to put numbers in columns neatly or something? He could have done that in Word…

I taught myself how to do stuff in Excel using YouTube, there are loads of great tutorials on there.

Make damn sure you trust your data though, and you check the formula does what you want it to. Nothing like only calculating the last 50 rows instead of all 2000 because someone else has left a cell blank rather than entering a zero.

Not knowing how to do something because they've never been shown doesn't make someone less intelligent. What an awful thing to say. You sound sneery.

I work with excel all day every day, but a lot of it isn't intuitive. If I want to do something I just google how to do it. It doesn't help that the excel hacks are often written by geeks aimed at geeks though.

I can do simple formulae, vlook up, xlookup and various other basic functions, but I have no idea how to write macros or do graphs because I don't need them.

I had to help DD out with some university work because until then she hadn't used excel and had no idea where to start.

A colleague never knew about the search and replace function in Microsoft Word. For years he'd been going through massive documents looking for errors to correct

I'm in my 50s and the third year of a degree and I have only just realised Word does references.

No-one teaches you this stuff when you're older, it's a random series of finding / guessing / Googling!

When DD was a student they had a whole lecture about referencing.

This is the modern way to teach it…

I'm not sure why you're shocked he doesn't know something he's never been taught or why you think this reflects on someone's intelligence.

Yes, ours was on what system to use and how to write it. Not that you can do it in Word!

The absolute satisfaction when you get a snazzy formula to work in Excel though. Not much like it 😆

That’s true lol as you don’t highlight it yourself but I normally remove blankets before adding and sometimes just highlight the row by dragging from top to bottom to make sure it matches if it looks off. I build the reports I do from beginning to end so I usually trust myself.

i also recently found the &”” function as I have a column of references I need to add a letter to the end of. I also have to flip my numbers from negative to positive and got that ‘Hack’ from google lol

You can just highlight all you need, and the total appears in the bottom right hand corner. No formula required 😂

I only got taught this about 5 years ago by my partner when he saw me adding up Excel stuff on a calculator 😓. Mind blown! 😂

I suspect it was to record things in a neat table. My workplace is terrible for using spreadsheets for the purposes of formatting. Probably 90% of Excel spreadsheets I see at work are just very big tables.