Sounds like a cool startup idea.
A legion of VLOOKUP gurus manning a helpdesk, only $20 per screen-share!
The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
21–30 of 435 posts
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#22I love being the excel guy at my office. I wish it was my only job.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#23Earlier 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…
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.
Yeah, it’s draining. They have no desire or intention to learn. You’re not helping them, you’re just doing their job for them.
Yours, former excel guy.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#24What's even worse is when you're good at actual programming and they know.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#25I 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…
I don't disagree with you but I was speaking to the premise of the article, which exposits that one should "run the other way" when people come bearing questions.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#26I 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…
The old "Can you fix my laptop?"
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#27Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#28I'm "the excel guy" for a lab of about 100 people, and it is indeed a challenge sometimes. Mostly I just yell at them and tell them to stop using excel sheets as makeshift databases. Then I yell at them some more and make them switch from formulas (which, being written in reverse Polish, are terrible to debug) over to macros. Then I yell at them for recording macros instead of writing them themselves. Then I just do…
There needs to be an Excel "pro mode" where the mouse is disabled and you have to do all navigation by keyboard. People would become so much more efficient that way.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#29Earlier 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.
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 distribu…
At least with Git there are _tons_ of ways to learn more. With Excel there are next to none because of the lack of developer community. There are few useful resources where someone can go to understand how they can best leverage their toolset.
Excel is also notoriously opaque when it comes to debugging, so there often are not useful questions to ask Google if you don't already know or understand what you are looking for.
Re: The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
#30Joel Spolsky used to be a Program Manager for Excel. He has a great, 1h long video doing an Excel demo a few years ago - here, now YOU can be the Excel guru https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c