Fun With Spreadsheets
SteveLast night on the HR Happy Hour show I said something along the lines of 'Reading books is hard'.
And sometimes that is true. Some books are ponderous, way too long, or need to be spiced up with much more liberal doses of car chases, zombies, or game-winning baskets.
You know what else is hard? Math.
And calculations. And statistics (right akaBruno?)
For many 'non-math' or non-financial types, the bane of their existence is Microsoft Excel. That devious tool that forces one to put figures in little boxes, one after the other, row upon row, column upon column.
Ages and ages spent staring at tiny little numbers, hoping to decipher the mysteries behind such bizarre sounding constructs as VLOOKUP and 'Pivot Table Data Items'.
I'll bet, if you are like many HR or Talent pros, the urge to blow up the spreadsheet that you have been working on all week, that is full of source of hire, performance ranking distributions, or next year's salary planning data may have reached a full on boil by the end of the week.
While blowing up your worksheet, while fun, is ultimately ill-advised, as you'd just have to rebuild it all over again, and with an almost certainty that it would be impossible to replicate in the slapdash, barely decipherable manner in which it was originally created.
No, keep plugging away on the spreadsheet, it's Friday and you are almost done, ready to ship the file off to accounting, or to operations, or to whomever actually looks forward to receiving that kind of data.
Meanwhile - take a 30 second break and dream about a world where you really could destroy that spreadsheet, and what that world might look like:
Spreadsheet Invasion from Amy Thornley on Vimeo.
Have a great, number-light, idea-heavy weekend!
Reader Comments (4)
I love Vlookup. And pivot tables. And formulas. And data. But sometimes, it does make me want to rip my hair out.
Nothing better than dominating Microsoft Excel.
Now I feel like a total geek because I love spreadsheets. And VLOOKUP functions. And macros. There, I said it. I feel better.
I worked on a project to build an enterprise document in Excel, and built in some "simple" features like self-selecting rows, indirect data validation tables, nicely parsed macros and data tables. From the HR department. When I handed it to IT, I found out they hired an external Excel programmer to update it because no one in IT had the skill to handle it. It should have been flattering, but instead made me worry about all the other things I expect our IT team to handle.
I'm with Dwane. I once worked in a 24/7 facility with 300 employees. One of the managers was wondering what the vacation liability will be like as the employee's tenure increases. Easy to take hire dates and team position from the HRIS and create a simple spreadsheet, including some simple turnover assumptions, to show what year we expected it to peak, at what level, and how that impacted our approach to vacation scheduling. 30 minutes later - question answered.
Excel is my favorite tool! But I do wonder why our finance guys actually choose to write memos in excel....
Thanks for the comments all - I am still in the 'Excel is a tool of oppression' camp. Most of the time. Now Access, that is another story!