this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Could you imagine blowing their mind with like, 1999 excel
"So you do vlookup like this and then drag it down to autofill."
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xlookup rather than vlookup - we're not living in the Ubaid period.
Ah, the Index/Match technique, I haven't used this one since Heian era
Kind of unrelated, but a coworker shared a spreadsheet with me the other day, and instead of dragging down to autocomplete the row number or using ctrl+d, he wrote a β1β then βA1+1β and dragged that down. It kept breaking because the rows had to be rearranged, and if you initially highlighted a modified row before dragging it would propagate the error down.
Youβre an engineer, damnit.
It's a valid method that avoids some edge cases where Excel's autocomplete gets confused. He just forgot the last step of copy and then paste back into the same cells as text to remove the formula.
My pet peeve is my coworker who finds it easier to write macros to analyze the data instead of setting up formulas, and then I am completely unable to follow his analysis logic because it's all just columns of numbers with no way to tell what was used to calculate what.
We had, let's say very educated people, who would consistently create tables in Excel by hitting Ctrl-A to highlight all the cells and then create the table.
Then they would call me because their sheet kept locking up their computer every time they entered a number, because it's was updating literally all of the possible cells you could fit in an Excel file.
In the end, it was cheaper to pay me 14 bucks an hour to fix it than it was to train this department on how to not do that.
Excel is legitimately incredibly impressive though. Thatβs like saying imagine how impressed they would be that weβve been to space and eradicated diseases.
Iβm not a computer person though, so maybe Iβm just the easily impressed Sumerian farmer, proving your point.
ftfy
An uncomfortable amount of my ability to sell myself as an employee is how good I am with excel, and yeah it's an impressive piece of software. Hand written spreadsheets are a useful accounting tool that can be bastardized for purposes that can be framed in accounting language (stuff like unit conversions and keeping track of inputs and outputs).
But excel does stuff like allowing you to make values change as dependent values change. It goes from the Sumerians tracking how much wheat each person has and the taxes they owe being calculated by hand to, in the size of a few clay tablets being able to automatically calculate it, factor in debts, and then look at every prior year. And it takes no more space for the tax collector to fit all the people they collect from. And they can share it with the Temple easily. And that's without considering all the ways it'll help merchants and be useful for distributing resources to the wards of the temple. And depending on the math abilities of the craftspeople they may also find it useful
Or how zero could be a number instead of a null value