10 things I hate about ms excel

vvv

1.     How interviewers think you should be castrated if you don’t know Microsoft Excel. Interviewer: Tell me about yourself? Me: I am a nuclear physicist.I solved the Einstein Zebra puzzle when I was only five! Interviewer: That’s great, that’s great. But can you solve it on Excel? Me: Uhhh… no? Interviewer: NEXT.

2.    The complicated formulas. Why do we need to put sigmas and equal-to signs before and after everything? Why can’t we just write a simple order: “ADD my list, and arrange it alphabetically and step on it, you slow poke!” and just get what we require?

3.     The Excel showoffs. They think it’s a great idea to put any and all useful and useless information on MS  Excel. I know a housewife who writes her entire groceries list on Excel, divides it into categories, adds all the costs together, and then makes a graph of her savings each month. She even filters expensive items when showing the list to her husband to get him to pay up.

4.     Using Excel on a projector. No matter how good you are at Excel, as soon as you are using it on a projector in front of the company CEO, you forget every formula in the world.

5.   How simple it seems at first. You open it up, look at the millions of empty square boxes and think, how difficult can it really be? I mean, I make killer presentations on Powerpoint, know everything there is to know about Word, so Excel will be a piece of cake. Wrong! Excel is worlds apart from these two applications. No no, scratch that — Excel is evil!

6.    The hide/filter option. I spent an entire day redoing my entire list over and over again only because some jerk from work decided to screw with my head by hiding the data repeatedly. He had the guts to tell me, “You never save your data, that’s what Excel does every 5 minutes, it erases it all.” Five hours of my life wasted!

7.    The useless help option. I put in a simple query. “How to add data? These were my results: ‘Load or unload add-in programs. Load the Solver Add-in. Enable or disable add-ins in Office programs. Add a shape to a SmartArt graphic. Add clips to Clip Organiser.’ If it can’t tell me how to add 2 and 2, what good is it really?

8.    Excel courses. More than a few companies have tried to lessen my disdain for the program but each time I come out only “Excelling” at deleting and merging columns!

9.    The updated versions. When you finally learn to add data, your company decides to update the Microsoft package, leaving you battling with the latest version of Excel which is evil-er than the last one.

10.    My inability to add data on Excel. For God’s sake, will someone please help me add my list?!!

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, May 1^st, 2011