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The thieves of time in Microsoft Office

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17th Nov 2014
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Where does the time go, wonders Simon Hurst in this exploration of the futility that often surrounds use of Microsoft’s so-called “productivity suite”.

I’m sure there’s loads of things I do, where somebody else would recoil in horror at the roundabout way I’ve done it and how much time I’ve wasted by being unaware of an obvious better method or technique. This particularly applies to my use mobile phones and potato peelers.

So, having made that admission, I don’t feel too bad at listing some of the most time-consuming wrong ways of doing things I’ve come across with the major Office applications. If you recognise any of these examples as something you’ve done, don’t worry. I was talking about someone else (probably).

Word

Generally, the failure to use styles costs UK plc £2.74bn per annum (remembering that 84.63% of all statistics are made up on the spot). In particular, I’ve lost count of the number of times that new accountancy trainees have sobbed uncontrollably when I’ve shown them how to use styles and outlines to fully automate complex document numbering schemes. Clearly, the realisation that they could have had days of extra time to devote to revision, rather than continually renumbering their thesis manually, was too much to bear.

PowerPoint

There are two candidates for the Time Wasted with PowerPoint Award. There was the firm of accountants (actually they were solicitors, but this is my attempt to preserve their anonymity), that had someone enter their logo separately 5mm down and 7mm left from the top right-hand corner of 67 slides in a single presentation, when they could just have added it to a single master slide. Then there was the 173-slide presentation that had each element of each text ‘build’ set up as a separate slide, rather than using text animation.

Outlook

Outlook might be less susceptible to direct time wasting than the other applications, but individually apologising to 232 people for disclosing their email address to 231 other people through using the To: rather than Bcc: address field would probably take an hour or two. Also, typing your name and job details at the end of every single email you write, rather than including it in your automatic signature, would probably cost about a year of your life.

Excel

There are so many candidates. Whole worksheets’ worth of calculations that could have been replaced by the use of a single Excel function; all the manual copying, pasting and manual changes to formulae that using the Excel Get External Data command could have avoided; all those extra formulae typed and checked because people didn’t know how to use the dollar signs to create absolute formulae. However, I do have a very specific and, of course, entirely fictitious example in mind for Excel. One of my clients took on a new employee and asked if I would help them over the phone with a project they were working on. I did my best but, as time went on, I began to realise that they were in the process of using Visual Basic code in Excel to create some sort of complicated database application. I did suggest they considered a different approach but they insisted on ploughing on regardless. In the end, they spent about 9 months producing an astounding VBA-driven application that seemed, remarkably, to work. However, within weeks of them moving on to another job, it became obvious it was almost impossible to support and maintain. I reckon that, had they used a simple database application rather than Excel, they could have produced something workable, and maintainable, in about 3 weeks, and that would have include one week learning how to use the database application.

Please free to add your own examples. Just one request: if I was implicated in any way, please pretend it was someone else.

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By max.lee
21st Nov 2014 22:41

Outlook is the worst offender

Very amusing article thank you but the notification bubble in Outlook has been proved to cost British business the equivalent of the GDP of Bolivia and for good reason. Every time Outlook announces that you have received a spam message you are distracted for 1/2 a second, lose your train of thought for maybe 10 seconds, more if it is not spam, with no gain whatsoever. For some reason people like it. Every few weeks I go round the office furtively changing people's settings but they usuallychange them back again. If someone could show me how to set up a GPO in server essentials I would be very grateful.

BCC is bad but reply to all is far worse. I appreciate that etiquette requires you to copy in those people that the original sender felt would be interested in the subject, but once a two way conversation has been established reply to all simply increases the number of useless notifications and doubles the time you spend replying, thinking about the other, non-interested parties who may receive the email. If someone is copying the world in to cover their [***] then let them forward replies to their boss if they must.

Finally,why is it that people will delete an email but somehow cannot reach closure by emptying their deleted items folder when they exit Outlook?

 

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By growson
22nd Nov 2014 17:50

Excel

Honest to God, I've seen this happen THREE times in my 24-year professional career:

Some user uses Excel (or Lotus 123, Quattro Pro or any other spreadsheet) to lay out a table of data -- then MANUALLY adds up the rows/columns and enters the totals as raw values in the total cells (instead of a SUM formula).  Would be bad enough for one-time tables but these were on-going templates that were constantly being updated (and re-totalled manually!).

And I echo max.lee's comments -- a particular sin of accountants -- always using Excel when a proper database application would be the better choice.

 

 

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Replying to stepurhan:
AS
By AS
04th Dec 2014 11:36

Excel

growson wrote:

Honest to God, I've seen this happen THREE times in my 24-year professional career:

Some user uses Excel (or Lotus 123, Quattro Pro or any other spreadsheet) to lay out a table of data -- then MANUALLY adds up the rows/columns and enters the totals as raw values in the total cells (instead of a SUM formula).  Would be bad enough for one-time tables but these were on-going templates that were constantly being updated (and re-totalled manually!).

And I echo max.lee's comments -- a particular sin of accountants -- always using Excel when a proper database application would be the better choice.

 

 

I once saw a colleague using a calculator while starring at an Excel spreadsheet. I found out that he did not know you could multiply and divide in Excel. His reaction was amazing when I showed him how to do it properly in Excel. We had several courses from beginner to advanced level that the staff could book and go on but this person was too embarrassed to go so carried on for a few years with very little skills!

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Replying to Nickwood1:
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By Cantona1
04th Dec 2014 16:35

Excel is a calculator.

AS wrote:

growson wrote:

Honest to God, I've seen this happen THREE times in my 24-year professional career:

Some user uses Excel (or Lotus 123, Quattro Pro or any other spreadsheet) to lay out a table of data -- then MANUALLY adds up the rows/columns and enters the totals as raw values in the total cells (instead of a SUM formula).  Would be bad enough for one-time tables but these were on-going templates that were constantly being updated (and re-totalled manually!).

And I echo max.lee's comments -- a particular sin of accountants -- always using Excel when a proper database application would be the better choice.

 

 

I once saw a colleague using a calculator while starring at an Excel spreadsheet. I found out that he did not know you could multiply and divide in Excel. His reaction was amazing when I showed him how to do it properly in Excel. We had several courses from beginner to advanced level that the staff could book and go on but this person was too embarrassed to go so carried on for a few years with very little skills!

Funny enough!

I see this everyday. 

I have not used a calculator for over 15 years whilst I am in front of PC. I always open a new book, use it as calculator, but I do not save the file and forget it by the end of the working day.

  

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Replying to stepurhan:
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By John de Montfort
05th Dec 2014 13:38

Excel can add up

Yes, I can confirm from firsthand experience that this happens.

 

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By GORGIA ALDEN
04th Dec 2014 11:23

Can anybody explain how to stop Excel turning some of my figures/calculations into some sort of code, usually beginning with E.

Thanks

 

G

 

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Replying to Nickwood1:
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By androo235
04th Dec 2014 13:43

@Georgia, I expect someone can. And. Training.

Try an excel forum, or the help.

The only formal course of Excel I ever took was an advanced one (Excel 2003 at the time, though it was probably about 2007). It didn't cover PIVOT tables, matrix operations, solver, the stats functions, getting and linking to external data, even simple macros or named ranges all of which I had been using (external data, PIVOT's, names and macros everyday... and always) for years. So, it didn't seem all that advanced to me. I'd learnt from the help system and bought a book or two.

Only thing I recall it introducing to me which I wasn't already aware of was the watch window and error checking, which I now use occasionally.

Word styles. Now, that I can totally echo. However, my experience is that it is generally senior, not junior, members of staff whose ignorance of Office causes the worst productivity misses and so often causes lower levels to dumb down their work. For example they might ask you to update, say, an Accounting Procedures Manual, of which there are multiple copies and no clear master, and which you discover has been written entirely without the use of styles (which have been available at since the early 90's). They then wonder why it takes so long to update and hence, why it gets updated so rarely in huge efforts rather than in an ongoing fashion and incrementally. They don't understand what you are trying to communicate to them in saying that it is worth the investment to rewrite it with styles. Just an example. Of course that never happened to me.

Emailed spreadsheets, even network stored spreadsheets versus sharepoint, Don't get me started there....

Still for all my IT skills, my experience is that to get on, at least the places I've been, it's much better to be socially adept and technically useless than technically able (assuming you aren't a complete rain man) unless you are young in which case senior staff don't feel threatened by you.

Languages (real one's not IT ones) are similar, we're always being told how valuable they are, but, even with them, for the most part I've found that it's social connections that count more.

I guess I'm a glass half-full guy....

 

 

 

 

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Replying to Nickwood1:
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By eirman
04th Dec 2014 13:26

This might as simple as increasing the width of the columns

 

More likely it's the number format...

Right click on the cell and choose Format cell and change the format from general to number with a

zero number (or whatever number you want) of decimal places.

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Replying to Nickwood1:
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By growson
04th Dec 2014 13:56

Scientific Notation

Gorgia,

What you're seeing is a numeric value being expressed in scientific notation format.  Easiest way to explain it is through example:

235,100,000 = 2.351 X 10^8 = 2.351E+8  (where "E" means "base 10 to Exponent of ___" ("8" in this case)).

99 out of 100 times in Excel, scientific notation is used when there's a very TINY value being presented -- usually when performing calculations where you rounding is needed.  so, 102.00000000004  would be expressed as 1.02E+2  (Excel is "smart" enough to realize that the very small decimal portion is irrelevant but, it will tend to express the number in scientific notation anyway - a hint to you that the value isn't exactly 102).

How to fix:

- use the ROUND(x) series of formulae in the cell in question

- use cell formatting to control the outcome presentation (this is probably the most common approach used)

Hope this helps!

 

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By zigojacko
04th Dec 2014 11:36

Great article, we find the more powerful systems we upgrade to over the years, the more Microsoft do a great job of ensuring their latest MS Office suite completely uses approximately 100% of your CPU usage. It's absurd.

We made the business decision of switching away from Microsoft a few years ago now although there's frustratingly always the need to revisit Word and Excel occasionally.

Microsoft aren't alone in being the biggest thieves of time in the world of software either!

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By Fenella
04th Dec 2014 11:43

MS Project - now they've made it all whizzy bang

I'm sure the original MS Project software was simpler. Ok it didn't do so much but neither did it 'recalculate' (ie delete) loads of your work without asking or offering an undo option.I think in giving it more 'functionality' MS have made it harder to use and understand, and still it can't seem to look across projects to see that person A is working on 5 projects in week x, and can't be in those 5 places at once!

 

Is anyone doing a retro version?

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By bygwyg
04th Dec 2014 11:47

funny :-)

Funny article, but so far from the truth. I've been consulting on spreadsheets, primarily Excel, and Microsoft Office for almost 20 years. Although I've come across one or two "hohos" they are few and far between. 

The issues described here are mainly TRAINING issues, easily overcome with a quick helping hand. 

Whatever you do, don't think of this article as being indicative of the majority of users. It's a fun article and no more than that.

 

 

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By iainhunneybell
04th Dec 2014 12:11

Changes to the user interface

It’s not just people missing useful features or doing something in an inappropriate tool, but the way Microsoft like to ‘enhance’ the product by changing the user interface (UI). Personally I deliberately kept away from Office 2007 and then moved from 2003 to 2010, but that was painful as pretty much everything had moved location…I could find nothing and had to relearn the new locations of often-used features.

It wasn’t as if the organisation was actually better, there were (are) still inconsistencies, it’s just it was now inconsistent in an entirely different way. I do wonder what the UI designers at Microsoft might think if they took their car in for a service, only to find when they collected it, some well-intentioned mechanic had entirely changed all the controls around ‘for enhanced ergonomics’, but which meant they could no longer find any control.

At the time of my migration to Office 2010 I saw a wonderful ‘rant’ by someone doing a little maths based on the number of people in their Corporation each spending just 10 mins finding where some often-used function had moved to. I certainly used a lot more than 10 mins finding numerous functions in different parts of Office. By multiplying things through they easily got to a cost of $10M for the change between Office 2003 and 2010 and wondered if Mr Balmer would like to credit them for their loss in productivity.

Personally, I think a big part of the issue is Office is getting to the point of VCRs which seemed to come out with more and more unused functions to entice people to upgrade machine, when all they needed was record, play, rewind and eject. Office is in a similar position as it does more than enough for most people, yet Microsoft needs a way to ‘add value’ to keep up revenues which is why they’re now so keen to move people to a subscription basis and Office 365. My view is much of the ‘UI tweaking’ is as much to do with their revenue targets as it is really adding to the product…all IMHO of course :-)

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Replying to ketteringUK:
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By Fenella
04th Dec 2014 12:05

Totally agree

I was 'out of the office' (working with my hands, not in prison!) when this change happened, when I came back I had to virtually relearn how to use excel!

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Simon Hurst
By Simon Hurst
04th Dec 2014 12:15

Not a criticism of Office...

Thanks for all the comments so far. I'd just like to point out that the article was not intended as a criticism of the software itself, but rather to emphasise how useful training can be in avoiding wasted time and effort. But then, as someone who earns their living by training on the Office products, I would say that wouldn't I?

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Simon Hurst
By Simon Hurst
04th Dec 2014 13:29

E - scientific notation

Hi Gorgia - this is Excel's 'scientific notation' number format. It is often applied automatically if a column is too narrow to display a large number. First thing to try would be to make the column wider. If that fails, check the number format and if it is set to scientific, try a more 'normal' format - possibly with a wider column as well.

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Replying to djtax:
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By Cantona1
04th Dec 2014 16:42

Format it as text

shurst wrote:

Hi Gorgia - this is Excel's 'scientific notation' number format. It is often applied automatically if a column is too narrow to display a large number. First thing to try would be to make the column wider. If that fails, check the number format and if it is set to scientific, try a more 'normal' format - possibly with a wider column as well.

Simon,

Another way would be to first format the column(cell) as text in a new blank column(cell), then copy the data with sci format in to the newly formatted column. Now, you should be able to see the entire column. It may not work if you try to format it on the original(existing) data.

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By androo235
04th Dec 2014 13:51

shurst and eirman, so galant......

show a man (person) how to fish and all that.....

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Simon Hurst
By Simon Hurst
04th Dec 2014 14:14

Excel and fishing

Well androo235, I wouldn't want to leave someone floundering...

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Simon Hurst
By Simon Hurst
04th Dec 2014 17:02

Scientific format

Hi Cantona1

Unless I've misunderstood your suggestion, I think at a particular point (E+11, E-10?) the format will switch to scientific notation even when formatted as text.

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By Cantona1
04th Dec 2014 20:34


Hi Simon,

No, so long as the copied data are pasted on the same formatted cells.

Let' say, you have your sci data in column A. Let's also assume column B is blank. Format column B as text (Entire column). Then copy column A in to column B and see the result. The data are now read by excel as text.

Yes, if you paste the sci data in to column or cell which are not formatted as text, it will revert to sci format.

 

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Simon Hurst
By Simon Hurst
04th Dec 2014 21:08

Happy Christmas

Hi Cantona1

It didn't seem to work for me with values over a certain level. On the plus side it did seem to generate a passable imitation of a Christmas tree...

 

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Simon Hurst
By Simon Hurst
04th Dec 2014 21:14

Back to the point of the article

I think we might have collectively found another way of wasting vast amounts of time using Excel, discussing number formatting...

It was probably just as well no one took the bait on the fishing diversion. Not even any sole practitioners...

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By agillies
05th Dec 2014 09:33

Excel - there is always another solution out there

I'm think I'm  pretty good at excel now -  I learned the hard way!!

Many moons ago I had to get an expenses excel form out to staff and I a looking for a grid outline- either in a table or a  sheet.  (Mind this was pre google)

I tried and tried - couldn't find it in help - the more I tried the more I could not see it.  In desperation I found a rather long winded solution - I outlined every single box on the sheet one at a time (around 200+) -  I got it done and it did work.

In taught me the importance of searching for a better solution if its taking too long.

 

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By rogbiz
05th Dec 2014 11:45

Office has become bloated

I would certainly agree with the comments so far noting that Office now contains far more functionality than anyone will need, in the interests of making it (a) universally applicable, and (b) a reason for a new version therefore requiring upgrade and driving revenues. My personal bête noir is the Themes facility, which is not much use to most users who only need one or two templates, is unfathomable to the user who has no desire to go through a lengthy learning and familiarisation process, and obscures the styles which is all most users are interested in. 

There's lots of useful 'under the bonnet' stuff in recent releases, I know, but in terms of the actual user interface, I think Word peaked several years ago.

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By AndrewV12
12th Jan 2015 15:56

Forget word ect the internets the killer.

Its the same for all Computer Software, keep everything as simple as you can.

 

Word is fine, up to a point, Excel is great, but do not over reach yourself, - ignore bullshit upgrades its the same thing they try to sell you twice or thrice .......

 

Outlook and emails are a waste of time, its just a way of covering your back.

 

Oh yes the internet is the best thing ever whilst also being biggest waste of time ever.... dont ask.

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