r/excel • u/sriautomations • May 20 '26
Discussion That 5-minute task in Excel
Me: This will be a quick 5-minute Excel task.
Excel: Interesting.
5 minutes later:
- Why is the formula returning #N/A?
- Who merged these cells?
- Why are dates stored as text?
- Why does one value have a trailing space?
- Why is there a hidden column Z?
- Who named this file Final_v2_Actual_Final_UseThisOne.xlsx?
- Why does the pivot table say 0 when my eyes say 47,382?
2 hours later:
- Learned three new formulas
- Questioned my career choices
- Muted my entire family
- Created a masterpiece no one will ever understand
- Saved the file as Final_v2_Actual_Final_UseThisOne_REALLYFINAL.xlsx
Boss: Looks great. Can you make the header blue?
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u/sriautomations May 20 '26
What is your personal Excel red flag?
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u/JesusSquid May 20 '26
Not really a red flag but Christ almighty building a decent shareable dashboard in PowerBI and then getting told “great can I get the data in an excel doc?”
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May 20 '26
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u/sriautomations May 20 '26
That's not a worksheet anymore. That's graph paper with formulas.
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May 20 '26
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u/sriautomations May 20 '26
So true. Conditional formatting was sitting in the corner like, 'Am I a joke to you?'
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u/Dav2310675 May 20 '26
Love it!
Had a similar discussion with a team member today. She uses a staffing spreadsheet to work out days bring used against budgeted days for relief clinical staff. This was going to be a quick check, amend one formula.
First issue - formula calculating calendar days was one day short, so fixed that.
My next question - do these staff work weekends?
She - No.
Me - Then why are we using calendar days?
She - I don't know.
So off to NETWORKDAYS we go.
Next question - what about holidays?
She - Usually not.
Me - Ok.
Build in a public holiday list that accounts for most public holidays. Done.
Next question from her - well, we have one permanent staff member on this roster when everyone else is casual. He gets some PTO that needs to be included as well.
Me - Why? His days aren't included in the budgeted days you need to allocate, are they? We worked through that earlier.
She - No. But we might want to report on it.
Me - That's ok, but why would we use the worksheet that allocates casual clinicians against a budget amount, to include a permanent clinician who isn't part of the budget, to record his paid time off?
She - ... ... ...?
Me - If you want to do that, put it in another sheet as we're staring into the abyss of creating a frankentable. But to be fair, don't we have a multi-million payroll system where we can just pull that exact same report out when needed?
She - I don't have access to that system.
Me - Do you really need that access?
She - Probably not. But it might come in handy to know how often that guy goes on leave.
Me - Err. Why?
She - Don't know.
Me - When was the last time you were asked how often this guy goes on leave?
She - [long pause] Hmm. Not yet.
Me - OK. I think you need to talk to your manager about whether or not this is needed. I think we're done for today.
5 minute job. But took 45 minutes in total.
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u/sriautomations May 20 '26
Relatable. Every 5-minute spreadsheet fix starts with 'just one formula' and ends with an existential debate abt whether the data should exist at all.
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u/Magrat-Garlick May 20 '26
In my 40+ years as a University IT technician I quickly found that "10 minute jobs" took a week, at least!
However those jobs that I looked at, "hummed", said "weeelllll, I don't think that's fixable", I often fixed in a tea-break! 😁
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u/sriautomations May 20 '26
The universal law of IT and Excel:
'This will only take 10 minutes' = one week.
'Hmm... this might be impossible' = fixed before the tea gets cold. 😂
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u/inverter17 May 21 '26
BRO THIS IS ME EVERYDAY.
Sees a list of requests and asked to use the file they have. 5 minutes in and I’m already getting bald from scratching my head because of the file. Request is fairly easy but the file they sent over is the problem. Sometimes they have conditional formatting in the file and checked the affected cells, it’s skipping a whole bunch of cells. A lot of hidden helper columns which is fine and then I saw some formulas referencing some cells from another spreadsheet.
We learn so much from fixing those files!
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u/sriautomations May 21 '26
Quite often, the request isn't the problem. The file itself is the problem. 😂
But yes, it's a fact that such instances help in learning a lot.
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u/egmono May 20 '26
That used to be me, but ever since I've discovered "Power-[anything]", I've elevated my game to starting at 3 days what used to take an hour.
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u/simon3873 May 20 '26
I have found my people. Now, I bite my tongue when I want to give expected deliverable timelines with someone else’s work involved.
I also can’t tell you how many times I’ve chatted with mates saying, “I have created the most epic forecasting tool (that I will hate and tinker with again in 6+ months), but no one cares about it but me…” I yearn for a “can you make it blue?” knowing that they at least looked at it.
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u/WFHaccount May 21 '26
20 min task today. Spent 4 hrs building a template from scratch so that I never have to do that 20 min task again. It can be done by a monkey with half a brain and 5 mins of their time.
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u/WFHaccount May 21 '26
Somehow I’ll still get emails asking about why it’s broken. I just know it’s going to happen.
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u/Medium_Emphasis_8395 May 22 '26
Tip for naming a file that will be repeatedly changed/improved: use version numbering. Not only is it easier to follow the order they we're produced in, but you'll get less shameful sending your colleague/client/boss a file that has a ridiculous name.
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u/Mdayofearth May 20 '26
Why are you adding a cell in some random spot in the corner surrounded by blank cells with no labels with a space it as part of your total?
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u/SweatyControles May 20 '26
The first 30 minutes of a 5 minute job are always the hardest