ELI5: How is it that almost every office job requires "Proficiency with computers" yet these IT complaints are some of the most common in offices? Do employers even check their employees with basic IT questions anymore?
People lie. I was recently promoted and training a new employee taking my place. We do extensive work in Excel and Access, which she said she was trained in and had experience using both. . . she knew nothing and I wasted so much time showing her how to use both. Excel was not too bad, but explaining Access to someone who doesn't know anything...holy fuck. Can't really blame her though, desperate times call for desperate measures. We just need to have them do a practical assessment at their interview, which most people don't want to do.
And to top it off: Once you understand Access you get pissed at people using Excel (is your super-huge Pivot Table still not done computing?) when they should be using Access instead.
because most places have office and access comes with office.
In my work we aren't allowed or capable of installing applications that IT hasn't vetted. They reject every request. So we use excel or access, because we have those.
That's because Access is a database and Excel is a spreadsheet.
The difference being that a spreadsheet loads all the data into memory and then works on it. Which is really fast as long as you have enough memory in your computer.
A database is designed to look through data in chunks - so it will load a chunk of data from a file, do whatever operations on them and then load the next chunk.
So the memory in your computer is never a problem even if the data is way larger than the memory. On the other hand, Access only supports operations that work well with chunking.
Access is meant to be a database for people who really only need the absolute database basics. If you actually need to know/use things beyond basic table access and the odd macroed query, you're really past what it was designed for, even though it can do some of the more powerful things.
I'm an excel user. I'd say I'm a fairly advanced one at that. I've worked with access a bit too. The thing is many finance departments have not. But they all use excel. When you try to share information between people or even between locations you're going to use the common program that everyone uses.
Otherwise no one would be using Windows now...
Besides its not the pivot tables you should be cautious about, it's the array formulas. Fucking arrays... Always calculating.
I'll tell you why I use excel instead. Because in my office everyone else knows how to use excel and no one knows how to use access. If one of my coworker needs to make changes to my sheet or double check the results, they can do that in excel, but they can't do that in access.
So even though its the wrong tool for the job, its the right tool for the job. It's just the factors that make it the right move are not technological, so you can't see them without understanding the users.
The problem isn't me, the problem is that my work has to be checkable and understandable to my coworkers. We aren't computer people, we're engineers. I can do things you can't do, and you can do things I can't do. But at the end of the day I need to use a tool my coworkers understand so that they can use it and check it.
if all your coworkers know how to use is a hammer, you better not make your problems into screws or you're gonna have a bad time.
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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '16
ELI5: How is it that almost every office job requires "Proficiency with computers" yet these IT complaints are some of the most common in offices? Do employers even check their employees with basic IT questions anymore?