Fun With Spreadsheets

Last 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!