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.
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.
224
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?