PG finally finished a detailed Excel spreadsheet for his accountant today.
He used to be quite efficient with Excel when he used it on at least a weekly basis.
However, although his fingers sometimes seem to remember what to do, PG’s gray matter has lost both domain knowledge and speed over several years of less-frequent encounters with spreadsheets.
He’s bone-tired of columns, rows, and if-then formulas.
Well, it beats doing it on paper with a calculator, doesn’t it? (Especially if you have to make changes…)
I do try to remember that whenever I have to tangle with Excel. I wasn’t even in the accounting profession, but Lotus 1-2-3 was like a gift from Heaven.
I was introduced to the TRS-80 & Visi-Calc simultaneously, very early in my career. It was the first exposure I’d ever had to the concept of a spreadsheet (much less a computerized one). Eye-opening.
I now nurture these baroque overgrown spreadsheet monstrosities that only I can understand, as I begin my descent into (as they like to say, and I only hope that’s all it is) “age-appropriate” mental fuzziness, like distant foghorns warning of “better clean this shit up now and simplify while you can still understand it” ahead.