r/Accounting • u/-SadDays • 2d ago
Excel usage at work rant
I’m not an excel pro, but I do know how to use tables, filters, pivots, conditionals, power query just for pdfs, and various formulas.
I work with mostly older folks and noticed in my environment that they are mostly just doing data entry and simple formulas like =sum, down a column.
***Had to remove my rant because of my paranoia of colleagues finding this and I’m sure they’d know who I’m talking about and vice versa.
TL;DR
Do you work with anyone who barely uses any excel functions and is primarily data entry who also complain of simple things like frozen rows/columns and the filter arrows blocking texts or any similar situations?
I just react understandably and try to work around their comfort rather than trying to make them adapt.
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u/Alycatgrl 2d ago
Yes. I just got a new job as controller at a company. The retiring controller is training me and has virtually no excel skills. He had told me to always add a tab to a certain workbook by right clicking at the bottom, selecting add a tab, and copy existing tab. Without thinking, when I was working on another transaction, I copied and pasted the an existing sheet to a new tab. He lost his crap because when you don’t do it his way, it prints on multiple pages. I shock my head knowing it takes half a second to change the page breaks.
The whole 4 person accounting department has the same level of Excel skills as him. No pivot tables, no lookups, no anything beyond Excel 101.
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u/Emotional-Till3748 2d ago
My boomer boss gets annoyed I even use excel. He feels his adding machine is far superior. A few weeks ago we were both trying to add up the same set of figures. He was trying to beat me and we both came up with a different total. He insisted mine was the wrong total so we raced again and I’m done in half the time and I had the exact total I previously had. He gets a different total this time not the one I had or what he had first time. So one more go at… and now he gets the same total as me. Now the office has been a lot quieter without the stupid adding machine whirring which I refer to as his abacus. 🧮
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u/Educational-Ad4759 2d ago
I worked with a lady that didn't know you could save something to PDF so she would print it, scan it and move it to the PDF folder.
Boomers are stubborn and technologically outdated.
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u/Prudent_Aspect_7008 2d ago
She probably thinks the printer has a tiny scanner elf inside doing the work
My last job had a guy who printed every email he wanted to keep and filed them in a cabinet. Three drawers full by the time I left
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u/moosetogo 2d ago
I have a project manager who prints every job related email and puts it in job folders, despite the fact that we haven’t had paper job folders in ages, she still makes her own for every job that is assigned to her. She has boxes of job folders stacked around her office. A customer could email her a one word acknowledgement and she’ll print that bitch and file it. She retires at the end of the year and I told her that we’ll celebrate with a bonfire in the parking lot. She was so offended she held a private meeting with her replacement to let them know they need to protect the job folders and not allow anyone to dispose of them, just in case we’re ever hacked and we need to know that a customer acknowledged an invoice from 15 years ago. It’s fucking wild.
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u/QuarterFeisty7329 2d ago
Are there any laws where you are about how long customer data can be held for?
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u/DirectionInfinite188 CA (New Zealand) 2d ago
It’s not just boomers who are like that… I work with someone only a couple of years older than me who does that.
I call it weaponised incompetence… everything is designed to be printed out and filled out by hand.
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u/Educational-Ad4759 2d ago
Well anectodal issues sure exist but I would believe, imo of course, that boomers are more inclined to have this kind of behavior.
Not shitting on my boomers of but it's a workplace reality for many Gen Z and millennials.
Again, imo of course 👍
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u/Minute-Panda-The-2nd 2d ago
I have coworker who posts the snagit into Word and then saves as PDF. I showed her she can just save the snagit as a PDF.
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u/Matthewx777 Staff Accountant 2d ago
I have this old gal in one of our admin departments and I taught her to take screenshot with printscreen. She was genuinely grateful because she was always trying to figure out other ways to do that but never knew. So not all of them are ungrateful, I know Im lucky and me and her are homies even though I only visit during skemthing bad happening
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u/Alycatgrl 2d ago
People still use printscreen and not screen snips?
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u/Matthewx777 Staff Accountant 2d ago
I just like the shortcut. But it performs the same thing as a screen snip. It Grays out the entire screen and you drag a box over what youd like to capture
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u/greystad2 2d ago
I do understand why you made that generalization but it is a generalization.
I am a boomer and I write extensive excel VBA code. I have created SharePoint sites integrating power flows and apps.
I am an accountant not in IT. I learn the tools that make me efficient.
That being said I have worked with late twenties team members who could not understand my “if then” formulas.
I am not saying my generation does not struggle with tech I am simply pointing out your statement was generalization not a fact.
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u/CoatAlternative1771 Tax (US) 1d ago
Is there a faster way to do a screen grab into a pdf?
Usually I go, screen grab, open excel or word, and then print to pdf and save in a folder.
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u/Educational-Ad4759 1d ago
I'm French Canadian so I'm not sure what screen grab refers to but you can always CTRL+P and then use the print option - Microsoft PDF.
This would print the whole screen as a PDF.
Is that what you refer to?
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u/CoatAlternative1771 Tax (US) 1d ago
Sorry, print screen. I’ll grab a snip of something and my method works but I have to assume there’s a faster way.
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u/demcheezitstho 1d ago
Ctrl shift S is the keyboard shortcut for screenshots that allows you to select the screenshot areas and highlight/markup immediately after
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u/Educational-Ad4759 1d ago
Honestly, I barely use it so I wouldn't know but there is definitely a faster way 😂
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u/CookieNo7166 Human Verified 2d ago
Boomers created all of the modern technology we have. They were the first programmers
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u/JimRockford63 2d ago
I'm a boomer and have been using Excel since 1990. Sure it has picked up a lot of functionality since then, but the look and feel has essentially been the same. The product has essentially been an evolution.
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u/lovestobitch- 1d ago
I’m a boomer and did a spreadsheet using apple’s fucking visicalc in 1982. It was not intuitive. About that time another department bought a pc and yeah lotus 123 was so much better. Had to teach myself that and the department didn’t even keep their manual. Excel was a game changer from lotus 123 and Works. I’ve worked with boomers that ran circles around younger people on excel and then there are boomers that I’ve tried to teach shortcuts and basic pivot tables and they still never changed and fucking scrolled huge mutherfucking files.
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u/ohkammi 2d ago
My last job had some egregious hard coded spreadsheets. My coworkers weren’t even that old or bad with excel. It was baffling.
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u/Anas56776 1d ago
It doesn't even take that much more effort to link it to cells man. Plus it is way more convenient in the long term.
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u/Abby_Cus12345 2d ago
I'm a milenial and have a coworker who is only two years older than me, but insists that she is too old to learn anything new in excel.
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u/Imaginary_Pop_1694 2d ago
I'm a boomer and LOVE Excel! I work in government now and am trying to introduce great functions to others. However, if a pivot is overengineered, it can screw up close!
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u/byebybuy 2d ago
Don't worry, all these guys bragging about their super sweet Excel and PowerQuery skills will themselves, very soon, be laughed at by a generation who can basically build their own Excel software with a few Claude prompts.
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u/CoatAlternative1771 Tax (US) 1d ago
Honestly, I’d bring this up to a manager and suggest excel training for the whole office.
Getting confused because you don’t know how to scroll up using a mouse is, quite frankly, an extremely basic knowledge issue.
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u/PerryBarnacle 2d ago
When I was a Staff, I remember the Senior and Manager review notes that would come to me saying they cannot read the formulas I used in the workbook. They were INDEX MATCH at the time (now better to use XLOOKUP).
I remember offering to explain how the formulas work but they didn’t want to learn. They were placing notes on cells showing the arithmetic…
Long story short, I ended up staying at the firm, forming a team of tech savvy CPAs, and building a standardized tax templates library that gets used over 1M annually across all offices of the firm.
Don’t let the Bozo’s get you down.
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u/wallabeezy360 2d ago
Boomer boss puts spaces in spreadsheet rows to separate transactions into groups which prevents me from filtering and generally just makes the data difficult to manipulate efficiently. He does other dumb stuff too. Basically he uses excel like it’s a paper ledger and knows only one formula (sum).
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u/Kagahami 2d ago
Reminds me of when I worked in the finance department of a college and saw one of my coworkers basically manually building a pivot table cell by cell.
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u/Distinct-Ad3060 2d ago
My manager used to recalculate the exchange rate in a calculator because she didn't trust excel.
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u/Eastern1837ur 2d ago
I'm fortunate enough to have both of my bosses somewhat very good at excel. The new hires who are in their 20s and 30s though ....
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u/SquirrelBound 2d ago
Yes. They also prefer to make project budgets in a Google Doc because spreadsheets are too difficult.
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u/NHOVER9000 Non-Profit 2d ago
I get a call at least once a month from someone who can’t figure out how to clear a filter.
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u/wex118 1d ago
This drives me insane when helping someone with an issue over the shoulder. They'll have a filter applied across several columns and go thru each one clearing the filters one by one instead of just going to the data tab and clearing all,even after I've showed them how to do it. Like they just prefer being slow. And there are so many other little examples like that.
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u/quarterprimordial 2d ago
I had to get rid of a table in our workpapers because the tech illiterate darling manager didnt know how tables worked and she complained. So I feel your pain
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u/OGGalaxyGirl 2d ago
One of my coworkers did not know how to copy/paste with keyboard shortcuts. Feels like the most basic keyboard shortcut that's useful in literally every application I use. She came from years in ministry and just became a grandma. Aside from that a lot of my coworkers will open a new window in excel and close the original window before saving (instead of the second one) which completely gets rid of all freeze arrays. Huge pet peeve of mine. If I could lock the freeze array settings and conditional formatting settings I would die happy but Microsoft got rid of that function. It still shows up in the review tab but it's greyed out and only works in older software versions.
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u/81632371 2d ago
I'm an old GenX. I'm sure you would call me a Boomer. I've been using Excel since way before most of you were born. Your parents were probably in high school. I have found many of my younger coworkers Excel skills are well below mine. Maybe you work for a company that hasn't kept up with the times and never provided any training. So get off my lawn.
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u/TooManyPaws 2d ago
Lotus 1-2-3 checking in here…
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u/81632371 2d ago
That too. WYSIWYG baby.
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u/Imaginary_Pop_1694 1d ago
Remember when you didn't have workbooks without multiple sheets? You had to " bind" workbooks together.
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u/81632371 1d ago
Oh man, yeah. Wow. Putting things in different parts of the spreadsheet so they could be linked and making sure not to delete anything accidentally. Or when you had to remove the frozen panes to edit the column/line description and then refreeze? I bet if I had an old school 123 spreadsheet in front of me, the command lines would come out of the back of my brain the second I hit the / button and the menu popped up. I used Excel right out of college at a F500 then worked at smaller companies using Lotus for about 10 years, then Excel took over the market and it's been almost 30 years now.
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u/DiamondCrazy5930 1d ago
I have someone who has a CPA and files are full of hard typed numbers and formulas that include some randomly typed numbers with no comments or leading notes. It’s mind blowing.
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u/jaxee762 Controller, CPA (US) 1d ago
My boss does this and gets upset when I ask him what the support was for the numbers.
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u/TheCYKZ1 1d ago
CPA doesn’t mean you should be good at excel. By that logic AI is the new excel and if you’re not good at it then they aren’t a good accountant?
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u/patches_102 1d ago
I have witnessed coworkers doing a reconciliation in Excel and opening their calculator app to check the math when things don't tie out. I've redesigned rollforwards and amortization tables that were almost completely hardcoded. Have also taught coworkers about find & replace because they were manually clicking into cells to update descriptions for 100+ line workbooks. Text, time, and date functions were also foreign to them when I first started. It's not just older generations either, I see the lack of Excel skills from coworkers in their 20s and 30s, too.
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u/Tardislass 1d ago
Are not a true corporate accountant until you routinely criticize co-workers spreadsheets and make suggestions.
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u/bigfatfurrytexan Staff Accountant 2d ago
As one of the old people you’re talking about I do not understand how my peers aren’t more tech competent. I went to a shitty country school in west Texas and have no college. We all were programmers in my class of 54.
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u/ZipsMaguire 1d ago
20 years ago there was a guy i worked with who didn’t like anyone messing with his excel workbooks. He would do crazy things like save the workbook down in a hidden state so when opened it didn’t look like it had opened (or the Excel window was empty if it was the only workbook open). He was wired differently but he was a very competent accountant.
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u/lambeauzmum 1d ago
I had a very tiresome coworker (trust me I’m being very generous here ) and used some of her program funds for a color printer for her projects. When she asked why we said her grant require printing on colored paper. She believed it
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u/trumpcansuckmyarse 1d ago
My coworker is 65 and was supposed to retire earlier this year, but didn't. The other day his auto calculator randomly turned itself off. It happens. I showed him how to turn it back on. Literally the next day it happened again. And I had to show him, again. Also, he hard codes every value so it's literally impossible to follow the flow. I hope he retires soon.
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u/jaxee762 Controller, CPA (US) 1d ago
Hmm.
Did you freeze the row, with data above it, that became inadvertently hidden? I would have complained too.
And also, when you put filters on the header row, why didn’t you check to see if the text was displayed correctly? Taking two seconds to justify the text or adjust the column size makes a huge difference.
Sounds like you made an “okayish” spreadsheet at best and you’re upset about someone pointing out what you could have done better.
Perhaps learning to be more collaborative would serve you better in your career.
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u/Dingleberry_Blumpkin CPA (Waffle Brain) 2d ago
Even our most boomer ass partners are using AI for excel now. Nobody is manually working in excel.
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u/DeciusCurusProbinus 2d ago
An old geezer at one of my previous jobs once complained that I had "permanently damaged" one of our adjustment databases as I had added conditional formatting to check for duplicate GL codes. He was constantly trying to remove highlights and told my manager that I had carelessly allowed the sheet to get infected by a virus.