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The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

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Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#11

Post by Jorslu »

css wrote: post #5

I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort. Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software…

The problem mostly lies in other people not wanting to learn. Anecdotally, I've found that people come to me with Excel questions because they want me to do something for them, not because they are generally interested in learning more or bettering their skills.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#12

Post by thrmsforbfast »

css wrote: post #5

I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort. Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software…

I think it's less "not wanting to help other people" and more "wanting to do what is valued". Value could manifest in many ways:

* purely intrinsic ("doing cool work" vs. "de facto IT guy")

* purely extrinsic (the year-end perf review won't give me kudos for helping with excel documents)

* a mixture (I want this organization to succeed, the best way for me to do that is by doing X, and instead I'm helping debug excel sheets).

Often it's a mixture since people often enjoy doing what brings the most value. I do volunteer stuff for a charity. A lot of the stuff I do is very interesting and challenging and valuable to the charity's core mission. But I'm also expected to help other volunteers with mundane helpdesk stuff like connecting to the wireless network. I don't enjoy it and also it distracts from a much more valuable use of my time.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#13

Post by css »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #9
css wrote: post #5

I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort. Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software…

It's less "not wanting to help people" and more "once people know you're 'the Excel person' they come to you for everything to do with Excel". It's very similar to being 'the computer person' in a family/group of friends and everyone coming to you with all their various tech support questions. At a certain point, it starts ruining your productivity since you get taken out of your regular job to do these one time help…

There is a difference between "doing other people's job" and "enabling them to learn on their own" in my experience. Explaining to someone why it is better to use INDEX MATCH in lieu of VLOOKUP will never ruin my productivity.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#14

Post by rhodysurf »

css wrote: post #5

I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort. Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software…

There is definitely value in teaching others, but first they have to want to learn. I work with a lot of mechanical engineers and I am the only real "software guy" in our office. Most of the time they don't want to learn how to do computer things themselves because (mostly the older engineers) consider it to not be their job or out of their scope.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#15

Post by wernercd »

css wrote: post #13
mynameisvlad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less "not wanting to help people" and more "once people know you're 'the Excel person' they come to you for everything to do with Excel". It's very similar to being 'the computer person' in a family/group of friends and everyone coming to you with all their various tech support questions. At a certain point, it starts ruining your productivity since you get taken out of your regular job to do these one time help…

There is a difference between "doing other people's job" and "enabling them to learn on their own" in my experience. Explaining to someone why it is better to use INDEX MATCH in lieu of VLOOKUP will never ruin my productivity.

Explaining it to the same person for the 15th time though...

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#16

Post by dragonshed »

I suck at excel, but confession: i know how to make Installer programs and I don't tell anyone anything about them, EVER. I learned how to make MSIs packages and NSIS installers about 15 years ago and it didn't stop until I completely redacted the info and experience and changed jobs.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#17

Post by semitext »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #9
css wrote: post #5

I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort. Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software…

It's less "not wanting to help people" and more "once people know you're 'the Excel person' they come to you for everything to do with Excel". It's very similar to being 'the computer person' in a family/group of friends and everyone coming to you with all their various tech support questions. At a certain point, it starts ruining your productivity since you get taken out of your regular job to do these one time help…

This is my experience working in offices like law firms that are filled with people that have limited technical aptitude for using software. Showing any sort of competency is a recipe for increasing your workload with no conferred benefits.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#19

Post by Loughla »

wernercd wrote: post #15
css wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between "doing other people's job" and "enabling them to learn on their own" in my experience. Explaining to someone why it is better to use INDEX MATCH in lieu of VLOOKUP will never ruin my productivity.

Explaining it to the same person for the 15th time though...

As a career educator, and ruling out learning disabilities that are not appropriately accommodated, I believe that generally means you're not doing a good job of explaining in a way the other person is capable of grasping.

Blame goes both ways. And the original point still stands. It is productive to teach someone to improve their own processes.

Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It

#20

Post by gknoy »

css wrote: post #13
mynameisvlad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less "not wanting to help people" and more "once people know you're 'the Excel person' they come to you for everything to do with Excel". It's very similar to being 'the computer person' in a family/group of friends and everyone coming to you with all their various tech support questions. At a certain point, it starts ruining your productivity since you get taken out of your regular job to do these one time help…

There is a difference between "doing other people's job" and "enabling them to learn on their own" in my experience. Explaining to someone why it is better to use INDEX MATCH in lieu of VLOOKUP will never ruin my productivity.

This doesn't scale well with the number of people who ask for help, unless you can organize a class - which is hard to do in a way that helps people when they need help.

I love talking about git workflow, and am happy to spend a half hour diagramming how your repo relates to origin, what branches mean, how pull requests and merges work, and what rebasing does. For people who don't yet grok git (or maybe just distributed source control?), this has proven to be very helpful.

I typically present this information about 2x a year. However, if I had people ask me for this kind of explanation every week, or multiple times a week, it would have a much larger impact on my productivity.

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