Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Ode to Excel (& pasta machines)


At my corporate office job I often end up teaching a colleagues to do the basic stuff you ought to know how to do in Excel. I may be biased since I am an avid fan of using Excel (no, I’m not being sarcastic here, I’m totally a fan of Excel), but I just CANNOT UNDERSTAND how people who work in desk jobs with a lot of numbers and statistics have been able to do their work without knowing how to do Pivot Tables, how to Filter data, and quick-write formulae! Just imagine the time probably WASTED on doing the same calculation over and over and over and over (about 200 times, at least) again. Or clumping numbers together, by hand! It just boggles my mind!

Excel is your friend. Excel does it all for you. It’s like a pasta machine: you just pop in a blob of dough and out comes beautiful strands of fettuccine or spaghetti. Or, if you want it to, a nice, smooth and equally-thin-in-all-places flat bit of pasta dough that you can make ravioli or lasagna or tortellini with. Much in the way you can make pretty graphs with the calculated numbers that Excel just gives you, on a silver platter. I’m so thankful for Excel. And I’m so thankful for my freakish father who taught me all about it (and still today is my open-all-hours-helpline when I hit the infrequent bump. Thanks dad!)

I have excel, but I don't have a pasta machine, but if I did have one I would make these things from Lady & Pups (none of them is pasta, but hey, it's always more fun using machines for things they were not originally intended for, right?)