FEATURE ARTICLE
Excel – just a tool or a window to the soul ?
By Martin Hadfield
Remember how Sherlock Holmes could look at a tiny piece of evidence like a used toothpick and deduce that its owner was a 6ft tall Welsh man with a limp and a gold pocket watch ?
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’ m afraid we can ’ t all be as intuitive as Mr Holmes but in this more modern age you can tell a lot about your work colleagues from the way they build an Excel spreadsheet . I ’ ve had the privilege ( or is it curse ) of unpicking many an Excel file and in those quiet moments when you ’ re dragging both cells and your heels , the mind can tend to wander .
Let ’ s start with an obvious example . Have you ever played Snakes and Ladders with someone else ’ s spreadsheet ? You know the game ;
Cell C4 equals cell P278 on Sheet 24 , which then equals A6 on Sheet 7 divided by 12 and on and on until eventually you find a mysterious hard keyed number upon which all the calculations depend .
Chances are that if you looked in the car of the person who built this file , you would find chip wrappers , empty soft drink cans and month old newspapers . Their kitchen sink at home would probably contain the remnants of last Tuesday ’ s dinner .
The rule of thumb is that people organise their Excel files in the same way they organise their lives .
See the loudmouth in the corner of the office who ’ s always on the phone ? He hasn ’ t got time for things like formatting , correct spelling or even a relevant file name for that matter . Look in “ Book 27 . xls ” and you will see that he believes his work to be self-evident , so he doesn ’ t even need column headings to provide any hints about what he ’ s doing and why .
All style and no substance ? Who ’ s that team member squinting to see their own reflection in their monitor ? They ’ ve spent all day selecting just the right tone of grey to shade the top row of their report . They can deal with facts and figures once they ’ ve decided between 26 % and 27 % greyscale . This person doesn ’ t seem to be too worried about test checking any calculations or referencing the wrong data in their VLOOKUP formula .
Can anyone please tell me why another colleague has split one page of information across nine different sheet tabs ? And why are most of the cells password-protected and linked to something on another server ? Is this because they actually enjoy categorising things into neat little bundles , but don ’ t like to share their masterpiece ? They clearly had time to do all this between sharpening their pencil to within an inch of its life before locking it in their desk drawer while they went out to lunch . This type of super-organised person possibly has their kitchen spices at home locked in a cupboard and alphabetically sorted .
We reveal our habits and personalities in the work that we do . Be careful the next time you email a spreadsheet to a colleague , because you may be communicating more than just a few facts and figures .
And as for those people who don ’ t set up correct page breaks … www . revenuemanagement . com . au
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