Category: Excel Humor

Thanks to the Republican National Convention, which was held at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, there were lots more Excel twitters than usual this week. The first twitter explains the problem. There were also many comments on the new Microsoft ad, featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld at Shoe Circus. Hidden among all these twitters were a few thoughts on life with Excel.

Bad Spelling

• People: it’s “Xcel,” not “Excel.” Publicly traded utility, not spreadsheet application!

The Future. Delicious.

• name two delicious MSFT software programs. Beyond excel it gets hard…
• Two retirees eating churros doesn’t make Microsoft software suck less.
• I don’t care what a bunch of silly tech blogs say, I liked the new Microsoft commercial.
• Maybe the tagline for that spot should have been “Microsoft: A Company About Nothing”
• Everyone is talking about how awful the Microsoft/Seinfeld ad is. I’m guessing then that it’s a resounding success.
• If Microsoft’s brand message is, “We’re kind of old and a little confused about why we’re really here,” they succeeded.
• Ok this Microsoft ad I love, mostly for the use of Gates’ mug shot for his discount card.
• If Bill Gates is a PC, is Jerry Seinfeld a Commodore 64?
• Were you confused? Microsoft explains Seinfeld-Windows TV ad, saying it was ‘just a ‘teaser’
• Your ad strategy now is to force people to think of Bill Gates naked? “Vista: It’s better than Bill Gates naked.”

Life With Excel

• OK Fall TV can begin – I have Cynthia Turner’s excel spreadsheet: Fall Broadcast 2008-09 Primetime Schedule
• just rose to level 73 (medium wizard) in Microsoft Excel
• I hit on the wrong key in Excel and it made the paper clip guy pop up. I didn’t want him so I closed it down and he winked at me.
• Excel wastes trees… lots of trees…
• I use a combo of excel, a pda and a moleskin to doodle, tally & track every inane little thing
• Yes, Excel, I do want to keep this information on the clipboard so I can paste it into another application. THAT’S WHY I PUT IT THERE.
• if you can’t figure it out in excel, it probably isn’t worth figuring out

There were more Excel Twitters than usual this week, and some of that was thanks to Dick Kusleika, who decided to record all his activities in Twitter. I didn’t include those — you can follow Dick and read them for yourself! Anyway, here are some of the Excel comments that I found interesting this week.

Excel Health Hazards

• Just had a mini-heart attack – opened Excel db with 34 entries and it only showed 4. Damn you AutoFilter!
• Trying to coerce a 527 line excel spreadsheet into a coherent site map. Brain leaking out my ears….
• You ever get that effect after playing a game for a long time where you see enemies/whatever everywhere? Experiencing the same w. Excel now.
• Excel giving me fits. Wish “Help” was actually helpful. It probably makes perfect sense to a Microsoft software engineer.

Excel Hell

• Having to use excel for any kind of analysis is as engaging an endeavor as having to host my mother-in-law for four weeks.
• I love it when Excel says “Eh, I might have told you that your 4 hours of work was saved, but I’m a lying bastard. Start over.”
• Suspicion: in Hell they give you a Win laptop and make you do massive pivot tables in Excel ’00. You “recalculate cells” for an eternity.

Excel Links

• It’s Friday Eve: Use Excel as a Time Saver in Reading Back Long Legal Descriptions http://tinyurl.com/68qxt9
• Part 3 of 3 now posted. Dramatic change from the prior two…w/ li’l ol’ Excel 2003. Check it out: http://is.gd/1Z5S
• Curious tool – http://paraclouding.com (I don’t often think of 3D generative geometry being driving by MS Excel).

Excel Ponderings

• “bad-ass” and “excel charts” are mutually exclusive.
• It’s been more than a decade since I first heard the phrase “seemless integration”. Yet somehow, Word, Excel and Powerpoint still aren’t.
• you know your company is ‘maturing’ when you have 5 spreadsheets for every decision. Note: Andrew Carnegie did not have Excel.
• I wonder if the federal budget is on one giant Excel sheet?

Excel Is…

• Excel is a videogame. Business software never has so many pretty colours.
• MS Excel is like the Human Brain – No one knows how to use more than 3% of it.
• Excel is a horrible blind date revealed to be a ninja when you are attacked by thugs.
• there is NOTHING excel can’t do!! it’s a floor wax! it’s a dessert topping!!

Don’t Ask…

• Working on my excel that lists different types of death. Currently have 29.

This week there were several twitters about Excel and music, but no consensus on the type of music that works best. There’s also a growing number of twitters comparing Excel to Apple’s Numbers. There are the usual battles with Excel, and even a few people talking about pivot tables. And apologies to all the cat lovers, but the last comment in today’s list is my favourite.

Excel is Music to My Ears

• Sitting down in front of Excel for an epic planning session, and “Don’t Stop Believing” from Journey comes up on random play. Good or bad?
• Listening to the Across the Universe soundtrack and entering this never-ending mailing list into excel. Such a pain.
• Listening to Josh Ritter’s “The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter” while I enter invoices into my budget tracking excel spreadsheets.
• absolutely loving Pandora.com today. really helps me on days like this where i am using Excel constantly. 🙂
• Listening to Metallica, grinning like an idiot, trying to keep my head and feet still – trying to block out mind numbing excel work!

Excel vs Numbers

• Excel is ugly and smart. Numbers is pretty and stupid.
• When I open an excel doc in Mac Numbers I feel like I’m personally giving Bill Gates the finger…and I like it.
• Maybe so, but when I couldn’t add a trendline in Numbers, I switched to Excel. One piece of crap or another.
• Excel = bane of my existence. I hate virtually everything about it. Unfortunately, there’s no suitably powerful alternative. Numbers = joke.
• Figured out how to individual schedules for teachers using iWork Numbers. Not flawless enough for picky me, but more handsome than Excel.
• Just spent an hour debugging a cell forumlae in Numbers. Remembering fondly the VB back-end to Excel.

The Zen of Pivot Tables

• Ever say to yourself, “nothing in my youth prepared me to create pivot tables in excel” or is it just me?
• One of my staff is getting very excited about pivot tables in Excel. She is quite odd
• the zen of msft excel – find peace in your pivot table
• Pivot tables? No accounting for taste 😛
• It’s 2.30am, I got a problems with Excel pivot tables, half a pack of crisps, it’s dark, and I’m wearing sunglasses.

Let the Battle Begin

• There’s a minor Excel/Windows Vista tantrum going on in the living room. I’m readying the tranquilizer darts.
• pushing enter on an excel doc at work all day maybe merits its own drinking game
• welcome to the dark side, where we use Microsoft Excel and see little white boxes in our sleep, like a less fun Tetris
• no matter whose Office suite you use 20 years from now, you’ll be using the same Excel formulas. They’re not going away; learn them
• Excel Charts makes me want to punch kittens. It is SO Monday.

If nothing else, at least these weekly Twitters let you know that you’re not alone in your love/hate relationship with Excel. This week we look at the Good, the Bad, and the downright Ugly.

The Good

• I’d be happy if they’d switch to Excel. Anything’s better than ferreting the unanswered questions of out a pile of mangled Word docs
• they should release Excel on the Xbox.
• impressed with new found excel geekery but can’t help thinking it’d be easier to, you know, just do the calculations along the way on paper.
• Just discovered the “Format Painter” feature in Excel (and probably other Office apps). I like.
• You know I’ve been messing with Excel too much when the menu bar scrolls off the top of a webpage and I wonder why I can’t “freeze pane” it.
• I swear I learn more advanced features in Excel by preparing for fantasy football drafts than I do in my job. And I teach it!

The Bad

• learning the hard way that looping through every cell in an excel worksheet = not so good performance. 🙁
• Microsoft Excel–or as I call it, Microsoft’s “No, I didn’t want to get anything useful done today” Application.
• Dear Microsoft, do you really think that ‘undo’ in Mac Excel should undo me changing the zoom? Seriously?
• I wonder how many spreadsheets in the world have two extra, unused sheets thanks to Excel’s default (and what their carbon footprint is).
• The gods of formatting are angered. May my offering of a normalized excel chart with properly drawn lines be pleasing…
• i love excel like i love getting a tetanus shot

The Ugly

• Worked on taxes in excel for 3 hours. lost the whole thing. I’m cryin’ and heading to the fridge.
• Nursing head from 5h of excel budgeting on office big sceen. So not designed to be group activity.
• A hierarchical crap-ton of excel spreadsheets glued together with smb file sharing is, unfortunately, still not a RDBMS:)
• Just discovered a big mistake in the excel sheet has caused an assumption that we still have loads more money. Oh the pain.
• just updated a complex and possibly the ugliest excel in existence – mea culpa – i will attend to aesthetics when client agrees content 😉
• Just wasted my morning writing an Excel macro so idiots can do a job that we have 100 better ways of doing anyway. *seethes*

And my favourite comment of the week:

• Watching Excel churn like a Valium-saturated Amish buttermaker.

If people would stop Twittering about Excel, and just do their work, maybe they could go home earlier. Unless they’re using Twitter to ask for help, which a surprising number of people do. It’s hard to help them in 140 characters though, unless you just post a link to the Microsoft newsgroups.

Anyway, here’s another list of the things that people are doing, or trying to do, in Excel:

• established file sharing thru Office Live! Now we can share our Excel wedding spreadsheets more easily.
• Writing a script to merge data from different bank accounts into one Excel sheet
• Yep, some companies run their entire business on Excel. It’s a lot cheaper than SAP . . . .
• yeah Excel can do a bunch…I got an email with the game Sonic (from Sega) made in excel
• trying to figure out how to tape all of this olympic coverage. why can’t NBC have an excel export of the schedule for the week or two?
  Ed. note: I found this Olympic US TV schedule in Excel
• Moving our household budget out of the dark ages (Yellow Legal Pad) to Excel…
• anyone using a decent password manager other than a pgp encrypted excel spreadsheet?
• doing magical, magical things with mysql and excel pivot tables.
• work this week consists of entering in patients in an excel document & reading new moon.
• Working on a worship statistics spreadsheet…and I suck at Excel.
• a project is getting out of hand when you start making excel sheets to remember the names of people involved….
• working up a fitness and diet routine in excel, like the nerd i am
• just finished half my pile of entering 230 new email subscribers into excel
• working on some fancy Excel spreadsheets to help them predict the wind speed at the spaceport site.
• creating excel spreadsheet w/all of my health record data. and having fun doing it, damn it!
• You could export the playlist into a spreadsheet and print it from there. I’ve used Excel to do it before.
• realizing that when a non-engineer says “Matrix” they mean “Excel spreadsheet” or “Table in a Word document”.

And my favourite Excel Twitter of the week:

• if you hate excel, you should just get a chisel and a huge boulder… you can keep track of your stuff that way.

As usual, there are plenty of Twitters about people’s love/hate relationship with Excel. But what are they using Excel to do? Some pretty interesting things, by the sound of it. And sometimes the Twitters reveal a little too much information about their use of Excel.

The list of happy hours seems like a productive use of Excel though. Do you use Excel for anything unusual?

Excel Uses and Misuses

• Detailed schedules on official 2008 Olympic games site are presented in MS Excel files. http://en.beijing2008.cn/schedule/
• first box getting packed for the move. I’m using your Excel spreadsheet method for keeping up with boxes
• creating a detailed excel file containing my customers and their instructions.
• Going to try and do an excel based flight planner this time.
• is building excel model for analytics case competition
• just got emailed an excel spreadsheet with all happy hours in sf!
• For vacation I suggested we make packing lists in an Excel workbook with a summary sheet split into categories. Does that make me a nerd?
• there are 18 ways to get TV for three people. and that’s just from Dish. I need Excel for this decision. what exciting times we live in.
• What do you use to keep track of candidates you have sourced? We have an excel spreadsheet which is not working well! HELP!
• Wondering why I’m staring at an Excel spreadsheet filled with hydraulic gradients and slope failure analysis at 10:45pm…
• Working on our latest project – the massive 800CD track-by-track Excel database.
• writing an excel add-in to visualise the data our websites use.
• someone at my job used excel to create a web page. Try looking at that in notepad!
• wait til I show you my weekly meal plans and Excel workbook grocery lists (laid out in the order of the store!) sexy!
• if you want a job do not send me your resume as an excel file, or docbook. XLS is not an acceptable format for documents, EVER
• I love it when I get to do *my* work while being paid to do *another* job. = typing up Casting Director addresses in Excel spreadsheet.

Thanks for Sharing

• “Hi! Do you want to help me learn Microsoft Excel? It’s a key part of my job, I don’t know it and I was hired anyway! Awesome!”
• Doing overtime with Microsoft Excel because I said I knew how to use excel when really I don’t.
• Excel stole my mathematical ability. It didn’t gain much.
• If you have a real complicated looking excel sheet on your desktop, it really looks like you’re working hard.
• Listening to Dizzy Gillespie and working in Excel, I feel the two cancel each other out

If you’re visiting my blog from the Blog-to Show at the Successful Blog, thanks for stopping by. And everyone else, thanks to you too!

The blog has new posts Monday to Friday, with the occasional weekend post, such as this one. Today’s post is a summary of Excel comments found in Twitter yesterday, and as usual, it’s a love/hate thing.

There are those who express some love for Excel (I like the first one):

• The Windows Excel Help pages are surprisingly useful. Mastering pivot tables may double your income.
• Needing to learn Excel really badly—so I can trick out data stuff!
• i’m rockin’ the Excel sheets (for uses other than intended)
• I love using excel to reformat and create data providers for drop down menus.
• excel should not be used for project management.
• use Excel to track job optys, reqs to apply, deadlines, etc.
• Trying to make a link between word and excel, macro wise
• transcribing from my excel tracking sheet to paper ’cause the office can’t cope with electronic submission

And others who aren’t so happy, even those relentlessly cheerful Mac people:

• Second major Excel crash in 2 days – why do I still have to use MSFT software, even on a Mac?
• Excel just ran away with my processors again.
• I keep waiting for Excel to be friendly
• is skipping out on Excel Training, bc well it’s Excel Training
• dear excel 2008, I think it is so cute the way you hang every time I have to make a graph
• This sounds sad but it took me about a minute trying to figure out where the save icon was in Excel 2007
• ohh excel ribbon bar how i despise you
• wonders why the first option on right clicking in Excel for Mac is Help?

Last Saturday I posted Twitter comments about Excel. Since yesterday’s post was about PowerPoint, let’s see what people are saying about it. As with Excel, some people seem to love it, or are at least ambivalent. Others speak of PowerPoint and violence in the same sentence. No mention of versions though.

So which quote rings true with you?

PowerPoint Positives

• grabbing screen shots from video footage for PowerPoint to accompany streaming video clips. Just discovered screen dump straight to slide
• Wonders how meeting were ever interesting without PowerPoint? Overhead projectors rocked! He he
• Learning how to add PowerPoint images to a Livelink Wiki
• Pondering the power of PowerPoint
• sitting in a coffee shop (zoka’s), working on the PowerPoint presentation and the patent application
• Last minute changes to the mod, the powerpoint and my brain. Today should go ok if I can stop saying “Um.”
• Finishing up a PPT for a trade show in LV next week. Still love PowerPoint…very flexible and easy.

PowerPoint Peeves

• Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
• Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down
• wrestling with international flights and powerpoint.
• Good meaning deli-owner suggested I use Powerpoint to make websites. Hear that everyone? Who needs Drupal, Javascript, Vim, or Subversion?
• Tufte seminar just fantastic; losing count of ways in which one may bash the dreaded Powerpoint.
• Staring at this prof’s PowerPoint, I can’t help but think there is a need for a presentation design workshop at this university.
• I hated them both last week too. Powerpoint kept crashing.
• is suffering through death by PowerPoint for two hours. Where is @presentationzen when you need him???
• stalling – a powerpoint is due, but shopping online for faucets is more fun
• Two hours of work lost due to permanent hourglass, SharePoint, PowerPoint, slow laptop, and the related low amount of RAM.
• Yikes! Just got a presentation deadline pulled in sooner than expected. Please let PowerPoint be my friend!
• Keynote beats Powerpoint hands down
• I’m tired of PowerPoint. I want PowerfullerPoint, or maybe PowerTetrahedron.
• damn you PowerPoint – you locked up on me ARGGGGHHHH!!!!
• currently working on our JIU FGD PowerPoint. I super miss JTA! ( I want to go baaaaaaaaack!)
• Ugh. I just got the “I can do that in PowerPoint in three seconds” thing from yet another clueless producer. Stabstabstab.

These are some of the comments posted in Twitter recently, that give a glimpse into what the world thinks of Excel, and what people are using it for. Why are the Excel haters’ comments much more interesting?

Some people love Excel:

• A friend just sent me a real cool College Football schedule in Excel format … anybody interested?
• Love learning about new, useful Excel functions. COUNTIF is perfect for what I need right now.
• merging about 20 different excel documents together. must de-dupe!
• there is something about watching an Excel macro run that I find entertaining
• I just used Excel as a web page mockup tool. Co-worker wanted to “move stuff around” but doesn’t do HTML.
• Entering data into excel….I think I missed my calling
• Just solved something in excel using formula rather than the VBA I was expecting

Others, not so much:

• Office 2007 UI SUCKS!!!! Just wasted hours working on addins in excel and they are MS addins !!!!!!! YUUUUCCCKK!
• Sometimes I really hate Excel. Why isn’t it totalling all the cells in my range?
• Working on other people’s Excel databases is like being forced to use a completely different set of logic, that makes no sense whatsoever.
• discovering the secrets of excel. it’s like learning the rituals of a religion i have no desire to practice, except less interesting
• Yeah I pretty much hate all the other 2007 Office programs too, it’s just Excel I’m working in right now. Argh!
• Excel 2007 makes me insane! They tried to make it “easier” and just screwed everything up.
• The day’s not complete until Excel has crashed for the second time. For the same reason.
• I really really really hate excel right now
• Microsoft Excel is a crafty foe, but this is a battle I must win.
• waiting for excel to open. i’ve got 10 minutes…anyone need anything?
• The project for this week is done…the next person to ask me to make an Excel sheet with drop-down menus is getting stabbed in the eyes.

Finding new ways to make Excel interesting.

We’ll try videos, animation, whatever we can find (within reason!)