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?

Dh taught our kids this method as they just couldn't grasp the "normal" way of doing a bow I was trying to teach them.

It does a stable knot - so not sure it's wrong and meant they could finally cope with laces.

Well, while I understand your frustration, Excel is not the easiest software to use. Especially if you are not good at maths, when trying to create a complex formula.

If someone hasn't been fortunate enough to be taught all the functions of excel, then it doesn't mean their behaviour is completely bizarre and illogical. It just means they were never told. Excel is a very powerful tool and although I am pretty clued up on IT etc, I can't do everything I know it is capable of doing, because I have never learned - and help facilities don't always help. For that reason I have said YABVU. Sorry.

I can’t tie them the bow way, only the bunny ears method. My bro couldn’t either and my son can’t. Those family members who can have been unable to teach us to.

I’m ambidextrous - I can write, draw, catch and bat with dexterity but still bunny ears shoelaces.

My former boss was training me and she had absolutely no idea that you could save as a pdf. She individually printed sheets and then immediately scanned them onto the system before saving the scan.
Because she was the type of person who wouldn’t take kindly to being told that she was doing something the wrong way, I spent weeks of watching her doing it (and probably destroying a rainforest or two along the way). Cowardly but definitely the sensible option as I valued my job.

Absolutely this. And whilst we're at it, left-handers are not fair game for sneering at either. Around 10% of the population for whom everything is the wrong way round yet some right handers seem to think it's okay to criticise, tell us we're doing things wrongly, etc.

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?'

<laughs nervously>

Hahahaha! Who doesn't know that? Hahahahahha . . . 😬

<quietly begins to experiment with "alt tab" thingy>

<mutters "Whyyebuggerman!" under breath>

Oh bless him.

I saw a colleague do this - given our particular industry I was and I’m no whizz. The day I cracked vlookups I was so proud of myself

It's different on every photocopier. Mostly, it's in the finishing tab. However, it can also be found in the print settings or the nested print server settings from your computer. It varies from program to program and document server to document server whether it listens to the Ctrl-P instruction, the server print page or whether it's just going to ignore you altogether and chew up half the last ream of A3 before running out of staples, jamming, complaining that there's no Cyan toner left when you're doing an entirely B&W run, bitching about waste toner or paper left in the sorter tray whilst the instant you fix all of that, some fucker comes along, takes advantage of your job being interrupted and puts five reams of pink paper in Tray 1, does three copies and then walks off.

You're looking for a combination of paper size, paper source and whether you want staples or not. And whether you want colour or b/w. Sometimes if you want an A4 booklet, you have to select A3, sometimes it does it automatically, sometimes if you want your A4 pages in an A5 booklet, it does it automatically or other times, you'll have to tell it to reduce the sizes. It's rare that you have to tell it to print two sheets per page of A5/A5, but there are some manufacturers where you do. Very, very occasionally, you just select booklet on the main screen and it all happens perfectly. And then the repair company says they can't get spares for that model machine anymore and you'll have to use a different one which has an entirely different method.

Tl;dr Network photocopiers/printers are the advance guard for The Rise of the Machines.

Not surprising to me at all. I hate Excel with A Passion. It stresses me out completely to the point where I looked up dyscalculia because I thought my aversion wasn't normal! Not helped at all by my exec Director being an absolute whizz at it and thinking that putting various things in a spreadsheet is helpful to me.

Thankfully, the most I have to do is record what I've spent of my budget along with my staff costs and I still do it all offline and then (very carefully) put the figures in.

But if someone hasn't showed you or you don't know that function exists how would you?
My kids are always showing me functions on my phone I was unaware of.

I don't see that it matters if it achieves the desired end. People are too judgemental.

I can't speak for all jobs but when I was teaching, until 2005, there was no training on the use of the increasing amount of technology, even then. White boards were just beginning to be used, the expectation was 'it's in your classroom, learn to use it'. As a Maths department we seemed to spend a lot of time helping the English, History, French etc departments turn their test results into percentages.
My late OH had to input data into a spreadsheet, not as part of a job, and his life was transformed when I showed him how to use the tab key and the lick'n'stick feature!

I'm surprised.

When recruiting, we expect a basic knowledge of Outlook, Excel, Word and PowerPoint. We ask questions to test knowledge. I'm adding a question about adding numbers.

I find the more senior colleagues (of any age), have poor skills and knowledge Office products. This is confusing to me because reviewing data and presenting is part of their job. Recently, I have had someone return a spreadsheet because they couldn't find data. It was on another tab. Another did not know about notes pages in PowerPoint.

I like a pivot table, conditional formatting and autofill. It is important to learn new skills and keep up. This year, I will learn how to use Power BI.

Alt tab will change your life! (well, when you're on a computer anyway!)

OP, I Have had to show numerous people including secretaries and PA's how to use scheduler in Outlook to find available time slots for meetings. Rather than constant emails to meeting participants asking "are you all free at X Time/Date". Frankly I'm embarrassed for them.

Frankly I would be embarrassed to work for a firm that doesn't offer staff training for essential parts of their job. It sounds a bit like working in the public sector!

Yes, I see this a lot. But… if you think about it, what does ‘shift’ mean? ‘Caps Lock’ is (reasonably) obviously for doing capital letters, ‘shift’ isn’t. If nobody has actually shown them, it’s not intuitive and they are just kids.

It’s kind of mad that we still call it ‘shift’, which was related to how typewriters shifted the mechanism up so the tape would be on the capital letter of the key. We’ve at least colloquially renamed the ‘return’ key to be ‘enter’ in many cases, but that was also to do with ‘returning’ the mechanism and paper back to the start of a line. We need to rename ‘shift’ to ‘caps’ and then there’s ’caps lock’, which will be more logical.

I find Excel baffling and am in awe of anyone who can use it properly. However, I have to marvel at someone not understanding you can use it to add up - what did he think it was for?

Is that public sector bit sarcasm that I'm missing?

I am membership sec. of a local sports club. My predessessor had all the membership lists etc on Excel.

I have no idea how to use it or what it does (or why).

I have shifted the whole thing onto Word which I can cope with.

Never been taught what Excel can do or how to use it. Your DH has my sympathy.

I can't find the post now ( and have to rush off to argue about physics revision with one of my teens ) - but the auto read thing in word - is life changing for me - so huge thank you.

I'm dyslexic proof reading what I've actually written is a huge issue for me. Annoyingly I'm mid IT applications course - pre kids was a software developer/.programmer and while know basics want to brush up - and no-one mentioned it in word section of course.

I've picked up quite a few quicker ways of doing things - most things I'd have brute forced or found a longer way to do- but this is huge for me and no one mentioned it.

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

A lot of people use them as databases rather than having tables in Word. No numbers or calculations involved.

I'll see your concatenated formulae and raise you bimbling along making edits to VBA and SQL in Access before pottering around in CFML to get a form looking good and happily appending records from SQL before tweaking a bit of XML for a data import somewhere else. And then when somebody declares something utterly ridiculous and generally accusatory by email, your response is to send them the relevant section of code so they can highlight their suggested alterations (knowing that they don't have a single Scooby about any of them).

Best bit? 'How do you know how to do this? Did (a man, obviously) teach you?' Nah, had a look at it one day because I was curious and it kind of made sense <shrugs shoulders and wanders off>.

As highlighted above just make sure there are no blanks in your column. I showed find and replace to a colleague’s weeks ago to today up her data she was astounded that we could remove the messy part by replacing it with blank info.

And now her job is under threat?

Only joking, but in some workplaces not using automation is very much done on purpose.

This is news to me!