Excel has also finally added sum() and other functions that allow the spreadsheet to do the hard work instead of making you use a calculator to add all the numbers up.
>A elderly guy - maybe in his 60s - was writing his book of poems on his computer and brought in a floppy disk because he wanted some advice on printing. We managed to find a plug in floppy drive but there was only an Excel file on the disk. I opened the file and he had written his poetry book in Excel cells, with widened columns and rows, complete with spaces to center text and indent paragraphs etc. When one cell got full of text he moved to the next. New poems were started a couple of columns over. I remember he also asked how to change the size of the font for the initial letter of each verse. He must have been using Excel 2003 or something because when he saw the ribbon, which was new to Excel 2007 he said it might not work properly because he used Excel. I tried explaining he should use MS Word. He said "oh I got a disk with that on." He pulled out another floppy and there was a file called houseke~.doc. I feared the worst. He had a Word table over several pages where he kept his home accounts, all beautifully typed in by hand, decimal points all lined up (hell I can't even do that now), not a calculation in sight - they were all done by a calculator and hand-entered.
I long for the days of all-in-one word processor/spreadsheet/database apps.
Eons ago I owned the long-forgotten Cambridge (formerly Sinclair) Z88, their 1987 entry into the laptop market. Its main software was called Pipedream, and as I remember did everything in what was essentially a spreadsheet, with all three application types available in the same file. The software was available for DOS as well.
decimal points all lined up (hell I can't even do that now)
In Word there are different types of tab stops, notably Left, Center, Right and Decimal.
If you turn on the Ruler (View tab, Ruler checkbox) you'll see a little bold "L" at the top left where the side and top rulers meet - that's not an L, that's an indicator for the kind of tab stop that will be created when you click on the top ruler. You can click on that tab stop type indicator to switch between tab stop and margin types - or if you double-click on the top ruler to set a tab stop it should show you the tab stop dialog that also allows choosing a tab stop type for each defined stop (along with things like setting a tab stop leader for things like a dotted line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . across to a page number in a table of contents).
Meh, this is clearly fabricated. I was following along with someone using Excel as a word processor up until they were also using Word as a spreadsheet.
My partner and I are in the process of recording an Excel course because I walked past her desk and saw her doing her accounts in Excel … with a Casio calculator. She was reading a value, doing it on the calculator, and typing it back in.
She’s smart. She’s 43. She was a medical copywriter. But Excel: no clue whatsoever.
We just recorded a lesson where I showed her VLOOKUP and she almost cried with joy. “Oh my poor accountant…”, she said. Fun moment.
Lol, literally came across this situation circa ~2012. I was an intern at a big but old school corporation. Someone asked me to help someone on a PM team with Excel, come to find out she was running some accounting numbers and was literally doing this. Reading numbers, putting them into a handheld calculator, and typing them back out. I had the pleasure of being the first person to ever show her sum(). Talk about blowing someone's mind.
Anecdotally I believe this sort of thing is terrifyingly common - in fact I wonder about the person-millennia of effort wasted globally as office workers across the globe huff and puff using Excel as a glorified typewriter.
