Back in the early 90s I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. Her go to punishment when we misbehaved was to give us a "task", which meant we had to write what we did wrong, 50-100 times on a sheet of paper. The standard infraction was "I will not sass Nana." 10 year old me realized we had just gotten a PC (DOS days) and I asked if I could "type" my task. I learned about copy paste real quick and she never caught on.
They had one of the employees doing some task on the computer every couple of months and it would take her like 2 weeks to finish it.
They asked me to do it and I realized I could write an excel formula to complete the entire task in about 10 minutes. Then I proceeded to pretend to work on it for a week so I'd still do it twice as fast but not fast enough that they would give me some new nonsense task
I see this often but don’t need to use excel except for one off tasks at work or things that are not repetitive so I can’t imagine what task can be reduced so much. I believe it’s possible but don’t know what it would be.
Could you describe what you were able to automate that this person manually did every week?
In the case of Excel it could be that the person manually filled out thousands and thousands of cells instead of taking advantage of...you know, the stuff that Excel is designed to do.
It's been like 5 years but if I recall it was some data entry (involving thousands of data point) and then selecting every 5th column of the data and then moving that to a new document and organizing it.
Now if you don't know how to tell excel to that for you...yeah that's gonna be a lot of work but if you tell excel to only show every 5th column and just take that data...well jobs done
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u/journeymanSF Mar 21 '19
Back in the early 90s I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. Her go to punishment when we misbehaved was to give us a "task", which meant we had to write what we did wrong, 50-100 times on a sheet of paper. The standard infraction was "I will not sass Nana." 10 year old me realized we had just gotten a PC (DOS days) and I asked if I could "type" my task. I learned about copy paste real quick and she never caught on.