Stupid Questions

What was the last stupid excel based question you were asked by someone in your office?

Mine – “What does =sum do?”

My favorite was "what's the Excel function to calculate an average?"

My favorite is not a dumb question, but dumb remarks by IT personnel. Examples

"You can't do that in Excel" ( I just did)
"You can't modify that workbook, it's password protected" (Not anymore)

lenze

The most recent one (I doubt it will be the last)...

"Why won't this let me save this file I opened out on the network drive?"
I walk over and glance down.
"You see up on the title bar, where it says '[Read-Only]' after the file name?"
"Yes."
"Means it's 'read only'. No 'writie, writie'. If you want to save any changes you must use a new file name."

Asked by the Director of HR.

"How do you add two cells togetherin Excel?"

I thought some part of the education might include spreadsheets, guess I wrong.

Cal

Hi All

"Help !!!, my monitor is faulty, it keeps blacking out every few minutes."

Try setting the screen saver to something other than none and change the time to something more useful, like 10 minutes or more.


" Wow, I didn't know I could do that"

Michael M

This is not so much a stupid question as a stupid thing to do:

A while back, someone told me that they received a file from a client, and they needed to make many changes to it. Somehow, multiple versions of the file got saved, but the updates were scattered among many files. They needed to get all of the changes together in one file. So I looked at it, and I saw these file names like:

File
CopyofFile
CopyofCopyofFile
CopyofCopyofCopyofFile

They swore that they did not change the names of any of the files.

So I researched the original file the client sent us and discovered that the file was marked Read-Only, but also had the AutoSave feature turned on (every ten minutes). So if you had it open for more than ten minutes, it would resave it, but under a different name because of the Read-Only setting!

I explained to them that you probably never want to use both Read-Only and AutoSave on the same file, as they contradict what the other one is trying to accomplish!

Joe -- that reminds me of an interesting thing that happened a few weeks ago...

Doing the shared workbook thing on a network drive (same group of folks involved in my post above). The workbook contains macros (written by yours truly) and consequently my digital signature. For some reason if a user opened the workbook and had autosave turned on, it would void out my digital signature when doing the autosave. That one took me a while to figure out. So now the WB's _Open() contains Me.EnableAutoRecover = False

Sorry to pick on you, but....

http://www.mrexcel.com/board2/viewtopic.php?t=213397

Working for a large corporate, all faults go to a help line. One day my monitor decides it doesnt want to work, no light or sign of power at all. SO I phone up the help desk. I describe the problem. The first thing they ask is "what's your IP address, I'd like to remote log onto your PC".

Now I dont know my IP off by heart as they are quite regularly reassigned, I cant see my PC to get the current IP, and I am a really little unsure how you diagnose a dead monitor by remote acess......