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First computer I ever used -- working for the Civil Service (UK government admin job), it sat lonely in the corner of the room. I read the documentation and di
by jjgreen 3y ago
First computer I ever used -- working for the Civil Service (UK government admin job), it sat lonely in the corner of the room. I read the documentation and discovered that it had what was called a "spreadsheet", wild, that was one of my jobs, to tabulate and add-up metrics from various sections on a big bit of paper. I typed in all of the numbers and it all worked, so I printed the results and handed to my boss. She was not impressed so made me add up all of the numbers by hand "the usual way" to check that the machine actually worked.
- Joeboy 3y agoHere suspicions were not unreasonable, to be fair[0] [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spreadsheet-errors/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spr...
- KineticLensman 3y agoOne other problem not mentioned is that biologists have to name genes in a way that they won't be autocorrected or reformatted by Excel, especially those that Excel thinks are supposed to be dates [0] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17104-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17104-3
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoOr they could just learn to use Excel and prefix text with an apostrophe.
- olddustytrail 3y ago[flagged]
- Asooka 3y agoI see nothing stupid in learning to use a tool the correct way.
- olddustytrail 3y agoOk, how would you implement this? The data is not being typed in by hand.
- jjgreen 3y agoTrue enough, though in that case the machine did agree with the additions done in the proper manner.
- rikroots 3y agoStarted in the Civil Service in 1989 as the lowliest of the low. My first experience of a spreadsheet was some software called 20/20 (by Access Technology?) which not only allowed me to play with numbers in various ways but also gave me macros which could be accessed via user-defined buttons/menus inserted into the spreadsheet itself. The software may have been on a computer accessed with a terminal/screen, because I remember when our office got our first desktop Apricots I'm pretty sure they came with Lotus123. Desktop PCs were rare until the new financial year came round and enough budget was found to give us all our own Apricot. A few years later they all got replaced by Dell PCs, by which time I had to go down to the smoking room for my cigarette break because the bosses also banned smoking-at-your-desk. One of my jobs was to check expense claims. I had to do that job using a huge brick of a calculator which dated from at least the mid 70s. Strange how that machine outlasted all the Apricots ...