Rant Why did I try to create a timesheet from scratchinstead of using a template (Excel rant, volume 689)

Sooo...I thought creating a simple timesheet in Excel would be manageable for me. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. I’m no Excel pro, but I didn’t expect to struggle this much. My first mistake? Forgetting how formulas work. Then I tried to manually calculate hours to compare, which, shocker, didn’t go well - nothing added up. Then I messed up the date formatting and ended up with days that didn’t even exist. I cannot even recreate my steps and if I tried to do this on purpose, I (for sure) wouldn't be able to. At one point, Excel decided to highlight everything in random colors, which felt like a personal attack. It's mocking me. After several failed attempts (and lots of frustration), I finally looked for a template online (got a couple of messages asking which one, so I'm sharing it here). Needless to say, I found one that works great, exactly what I had in mind. Why didn’t I just start there? Lesson learned: sometimes it’s better not to try to reinvent the wheel. Anyway, just ranting, while fully aware that I should learn Excel and am responsible for my struggles. Bear with me. It's Tuesday.

 

True, it seems you could be halfway there if you get the search right. This is why I think I'll go back to basics again; this should help me a lot next time I need to do something in Excel. But first I'll check if the solution already exists out there because someone made it and all I need to do is find and use it.

 

Excel: when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

I’ve committed more than a few crimes in Excel in my time… I’ve built some absolute monstrosities in VBa code and made Excel do things that no sane person should ever even contemplate…

 

I made it into a hotel booking system for college. Does making a spreadsheet into a database count?

 

The pleasure of doing something in Excel is the same pleasure you get from building a piece of furniture entirely out of pallet wood. Of course it's not a good piece of furniture; you built it out of pallet wood. But of course you're proud of yourself, because you built it out of pallet wood.

Clippy should appear after you enter your 20th formula and say, "It looks like you're trying to use this glorified CSV file as a coding language. Would you like to go learn a coding language instead?"

 

It seems to be a fairly common (mis)use of excel to create a database type thing. There have been many people try that at my work, then set it as a shared document (so others can update at the same time), then put it onto SharePoint. This is usually where it breaks, prompting a phone call/ email to me or one of my colleagues asking for assistance in fixing it. We *usually* manage to recover it then ask the question, "why did you not use the sql database we already have?"

 

That misuse of excel was my eventual gateway into SQL. It's a familiarity thing, Excel is usually right there as a standard install by IT on all work assets, people know it and are familiar with it, so just use what they have to solve a problem. Plus, ask someone to update a spreadsheet, they don't blink and do it. Ask them to update a database (unless you present them a nice GUI as well) and you can see the fear.

Dread to think of the hours I lost building over complicated Excel 'tools' rather than a proper database though.

 

We have one of these too, and an entire team of developers for making changes to it. I get the familiarity thing, excel is always there, but you would think that after losing your data multiple times you would welcome something more robust... Seems to be, for at least one of our teams, they don't want to put updates on the actual system because then other people would know what they were doing with their day. Either that or they don't want to interact with the development team, who are based in India, for some reason.

 

I confess, I did knock together a spreadsheet not long ago to track when I was in the office, booked off, sick, etc.

We have to be in the office for at least 50% of the time and it’s measured over a month. But Fridays and Mondays count for 1.5 days. In reality there’s no issue as long as you’re updating the desk booking system and your manager doesn’t have any concerns. But that’s not good enough for me is it, I have to know the percentage… I knew I could do that easily in Excel so… [shrug]

In my defence, I’m also turning it into a containerised web application as a vehicle to learn Flask…

 

This thread is pure gold. Thank you, guys.

 

This reminds me of the time that i read a news article about huge data loss for the Covid app - because someone was storing it in excel https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988

 

I still remember the spreadsheet program for the Acorn Archimedes - It had an embedded full flight simulator!

 

Wasn't there something like this in Excel?

 

[eye-twitching intensifies]

Sure. Yeah. Go ahead. How’s your feature engineering by the way, going well? How’s your million-row training set, you sure that’s enough data to represent the process you’re trying to predict? Good luck with writing your scaling & imputation algorithms by the way, isnt it a shame you’ve got to re-invent the wheel the hard way and can’t use scikit-learn…

[angry incoherent data scientist grumblings]

 

Yes, I saw that in the mid to late nineties, when I worked for a laptop servicing firm in Bristol.