An Excel spreadsheet is not a bottomless pit. It has an end. A YouTuber put this to the test by figuratively throwing a pebble into the spreadsheet abyss – and it only took him nine hours.
Hunter Hobbs held down the arrow key and waited to reach the bottom. Nine and a half hours later Hobbs eventually reached the end: The 1,048,576 row finish line.
Hobbs busied himself during his YouTube stunt with energy drinks, food, and phone calls. He was mostly lost in what appeared to be futile despair. But he didn’t remove his finger or take a break.
He could have saved himself nine hours, of course. He could have simply hit ctrl+end or ctrl+ the down arrow key. But Hobbs didn’t want to take any shortcuts. He admitted in the video's description that he didn’t use ctrl+down on purpose. “[I] just wanted to make a challenge no one else has done!” he said.
Then again, he had high ambitions with this task, calling it "the dumbest challenge ever that someone had to do".
You can watch Hobb's video below. Don't worry, it won't take you nine hours to watch the video.
Have you done any similar Excel stunts? And have you seen a more pointless use of Excel?
Replies (6)
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Only wasting 9 hours by doing something in Excel that could be done almost instantly in another way would struggle to make it into my top 100 of dumbest uses of Excel...
"*Only* wasting 9 hours".....?
Go on then, Simon, how many hours have you wasted on one task? Me, I'm off to create a spreadsheet to estimate my total hours. May need a pivot table too.
And what's your TOTP dumbest?
Well, I did come across an investment management system that someone took about a year to put together in Excel with loads of Visual Basic code. After about 2 years the organisation realised it was unmanageable and replaced it with a database.
Me, I've wasted an entire career on Excel...
on my first day at a new company I was approached by a senior manager who was filling in a spreadsheet with the latest uplift to individual disciplines rates.
Basically he had a list of about 5k rows and each row held a position and a benchmark rate.
For each line he would read the existing rate, type this into his desk calculator and add 2.5%, then type the result from the calculator into the next column in the spreadsheet....."surely there must be an easier way than this..." he enquired....
How many columns?
hi Kim,,,,it was s single column but he was laboriously working with pen, calculator, spreadsheet and a jotting pad for doodling numbers on in case he 'forgot' them.
Made his day when I copied 1.025 and used 'paste special/multiply'
I recall him saying "what kind of magic is this...."