MorganO
Active Member
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2006
- Messages
- 483
Originally posted at TheDailyWTF.com but I thought the crowd here would enjoy.
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So Many Spreadsheets (submitted anonymously)
A few years ago, I had the misfortune to train a really nice, but really dim employee on our accounting system. I sat with her for several days, showing her the ins and outs of the admittedly complex system, but she could never quite figure things out on her own. I recommended that we have someone else do what she was supposed to do, but management insisted that she do those things.
Fast forward a year and several big screw-ups later, and management decided that she was better off as the receptionist, after all. Fortunately, we were able to get a really competent gal to take over her tasks.
When I was chatting with the new girl, she told me about all these spreadsheets that she had been sorting through from the previous employee. Dozens of them named things like Customers1.xls, Customers2.xls, and Customers3.xls. She said that she stared at these things for the longest time, trying to figure out why they were in separate documents, since they seemed to be continuations of the same data.
And then it dawned on her. Each of the documents had about 23 rows of data. 23 rows is what was fitting on a screenful in Excel on that computer. The previous employee didn't know you could scroll down.
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So Many Spreadsheets (submitted anonymously)
A few years ago, I had the misfortune to train a really nice, but really dim employee on our accounting system. I sat with her for several days, showing her the ins and outs of the admittedly complex system, but she could never quite figure things out on her own. I recommended that we have someone else do what she was supposed to do, but management insisted that she do those things.
Fast forward a year and several big screw-ups later, and management decided that she was better off as the receptionist, after all. Fortunately, we were able to get a really competent gal to take over her tasks.
When I was chatting with the new girl, she told me about all these spreadsheets that she had been sorting through from the previous employee. Dozens of them named things like Customers1.xls, Customers2.xls, and Customers3.xls. She said that she stared at these things for the longest time, trying to figure out why they were in separate documents, since they seemed to be continuations of the same data.
And then it dawned on her. Each of the documents had about 23 rows of data. 23 rows is what was fitting on a screenful in Excel on that computer. The previous employee didn't know you could scroll down.