Today at Work

We were shown a spreadsheet that would help maintain some metrics based information until we get the software (which will do just that) up and running – so about two months.  The meeting went something like this:

Behold our amazing new Excel workbook, color coded for Projects that are in progress, preparing to start and not started/on hold.  The thing is full of formulas to make all the important calculations easy, it’s not locked in any way so we will have to trust the twenty-five people this will go to, to NOT change anything.  Those twenty-five folks will fill it out and send it to one person who will compile everything into one spreadsheet – which should be as easy as cutting and pasting.  We will then have our on-going metrics regarding multi-tasking.

“Um, can we lock the cells so things can’t be altered?”
“No, if we lock the cells they won’t be able to populate the sheet AND have it calculate correctly.”

“Well, I know if I got this the first thing I would do is add and delete columns, so can we add more columns for people to doodle in?  If we don’t they’re just going to add them in themselves”
“Sure,” additional twelve columns added.

“Can we make the blue cells aqua?”
“Can we add a pattern to that?”
“Can we change the font size/style/color?”

Great, it looks like a bunch of clowns vomited on my Excel program THANKS!

The sad thing is that this is NOT the first time I’ve run into this.  A spreadsheet was sent out with three simple color codes: Yellow fill (need training), Yellow Fill with Red Font (Need training this day), Green with black font (took training this day).  Then each of the dozen groups would slightly alter it “I don’t like that shade of green,”  “we changed the green to blue because we like it better,” “I decided to make my own color codes, the legend is on the second page of the workbook.”  Ugh, people, can’t live with them, can’t randomly bash them in the head for their stupidity.