[Novalug] Excel Introduces Errors into Science Spreadsheets

Peter Larsen peter@peterlarsen.org
Fri Aug 26 16:21:32 EDT 2016


On 08/26/2016 12:12 PM, Roger via Novalug wrote:
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/26/an-alarming-number-of-scientific-papers-contain-excel-errors/

To me, this is an "old" problem, and definitely not MS specific. I've
cringed since my Wordstar and WP days on how few "professionals" knew
how to use these basic but vital office tools. Word processing,
spreadsheets and basic graphics are not a trained skill. Instead, people
are simply assumed they know how to use them. All through the 80ies and
early 90ies one of my most common "corrections" and teaching moments I
had with secretaries and WP, was their use of the spacebar to indent,
using blank lines to break pages etc. watching them struggle to make
even simple edits constantly doing "preview" and test prints. I remember
one secretary looking me in amazement when I showed her the basic
Formular editor in WP, as she was writing all the technical engineering
papers for her area, and was trying her best with underlines and symbols
to create the math. That little move alone saved her hours of daily work
and things looks a lot better too.

It amazes me that people aren't taught these tools. They're VERY
advanced today. Few people know more than 5-10% of Words (or
LibreOffice's Write) features. And I can't really fault people who's
never received training and are assumed to know these tools. When time
after time, we see results of how people not only waste vast amount of
time using these "easy" tools, time they wouldn't need to spend if they
knew the tool and didn't fight it, and time means money and hence more
expensive for a company. I do miss the time of the secretaries - they
kept things flowing, knew how to optimize the internal flows of
information and you could concentrate the expert features on a few
hands, to create huge documents. And no, the Technical Writers I've meet
falls in the same category of not knowing the tools.  Just because you
went to college, doesn't mean you have a clue how to use a word
processor optimal (or spreadsheet).

So it's no surprise to me, that scientists have no clue how a
spreadsheet works. I also find a lot of these "easy" functions were
added because people had no clue how to put dates into a spreadsheet, so
to "help" features like the mentioned ones were added. And this is the
result. Clearly this feature "improvement" came a high cost. But I guess
it's hard for non-techies to understand, that dates and times are really
numbers to a computer, so let's hide it making them think they're just
text. Yeah right - we see the result of that. People need to know the
tools they're using. If used right they are huge time savers and a great
help. Used wrong, you spend more time than using old fashioned pen and
paper, and a calculator.

//
  Peter Larsen





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