If Excel was an animal, it would be an Ox: Perfect for plowing fields and pulling carts.
In this analogy, Japan uses the ox for everything! As a pet, to milk, for sports, pollination, pest control! You name the task and they’ll figure out a way to use the steady ox!
Just my daily rant… As an IT consulting, I’m reaching my breaking point trying to steer an “Agile” project through millions of Excel files…
33 comments
I feel you, their obsession on Excel is no joke.
Let me rant too, my past company has been consistent on not using jira or any tools for project management and still uses excel like it’s the only way.
On the other hand, there are progressive companies who are moving away from excel and are using proper tools which surprised me in a good way haha
I feel you. I work in consulting too and regularly have to fight the ox.
Some of the stuff they create with Excel is awe inspiring. I once saw a 200+ page technical specification document all written in XLS.
Kids in Japan use notebooks with regular grids that look like an Excel worksheet.
I suspect that adults still remember those notebooks and it makes them prefer Excel for non-spreadsheet tasks.
Been applying to jobs and most of the time the university’s resume form will be … an excel file. With complex, detailed instructions on how to fill it in.
Firstly, please just come to some arrangement whereby I make one resume with all the relevant information on it which can be sent to any school.
Secondly, please use a program more suitable to word processing than excel.
Thank you!
Same at my company.
When I joined, I remember opening up Word to type up some meeting minutes, and my boss was incredulous that I was using Word as opposed to Excel. Made me switch back to Excel “because that’s what we always use here”.
If people used word and its autocorrect feature English texts’ quality would improve drastically
Saw someone use excel to make a PowerPoint presentation and was just baffled because it looked broken.
I got an application for the Vaccine Passport a few months ago from my city office. Form fillable PDF? No, Excel of course.
But not just Excel. Incredibly formatted Excel. Like, “Jesus fuck, you had one job with Excel and you STILL managed to mangle it.”
It was just a mess of formatting and badly merged cells. Like when you get a Word document from a colleague and everything is laid out with spaces, carriage returns and random fonts, while tables are made out of multiple square shapes aligned by hand…
I regularly get excel files that are nothing more than a photo, with an arrow pointed to it and short description. Zero spreadsheet functionality needed. Would be better for Word, or PowerPoint or in the body of an email.
Why Japan?? Why??
Yeah it is terribly overused. OTOH, that’s part of the big opportunity in “DX” here.
I remember once that I got an email with an excel file that had the PDF I needed inserted into it. I asked why they didn’t send me the PDF instead of going through all those hoops, and the response I got was that they didn’t know how to attach a PDF to an email.
WTF!?
Your complaint has been received. To better support you, we will be switching to the lotus 123 and lotus notes for mail.
In other news, I just learned that IBM bought Lotus at some point. I wonder if it’s still shit to support.
My wife’s hospital is using Windows 7.
No, it would be a faxed picture of an ox.
Excel would be infinitely better if they replaced their stupid VBA macros with a custom python API.
and what VERSION of Excel is that…
Excel? Lucky sobs. Here my customers send us I dont know what files that is stacked sheets with images and text that can only be viewed with pgup pgdn (not pdf, interface looks like a win95 app).
What is better than excel tho? What is the current trend?
My Japanese co-worker was given an excel spreadsheet with a mess of bizarrely sized and merged cells and told to use it to make nametags for an event. I showed her how to use mail merge and a template in Word so that she didn’t have to do each name individually and so that she could just update the data source for future nametags. Someone complained about her not using the old excel.
Fuck I thought I was the only person that thought this, I’ve been trying to introduce new ways to communicate outside oF EXCEL but nobody wants to listen lol I fucking opening my emails already lol
My best one so far was when implementing a modern BI solution, the main concern of the company was not setting up good dashboard or queries etc. It was what excels will be exported from the BI solution so they can do their work. Total waste of an implementation.
Oh fuck, this is so true in my experience. I’m in IT and:
– Bug tracking? Excel
– Task lists? Excel
– Translations? Excel
– Time sheets? Excel
– You-name-it? Excel!
Aarrrgh!
During my security training:
Me – “So please use a different method to send a password when you send an encrypted document via email. Teams, Skype, WhatsApp, heck you can even call the person if you have to..”
A lady who I am sure is very lovely outside of work: “Like another email?”
Me: “No, that does nothing. If the bad guy can read the first email, they can read the password email as well.”
Lady: “Can I put the password inside the Excel sheet?”
Me: “Yeah I guess? The other person needs the password to open the Excel sheet, though.”
Her: “Then I will email the password.”
That is a very summarized version of the real convo. We agreed to just have her contact me before sending PII info… Fortunately, she got a decent handle on things about half a year later.
To be fair, Excel is just a 2D functional programming environment. You can build anything.
I joined an IT consultancy firm last year, and all the onboarding documents were excel files in Google Drive folders, mostly outdated, containing many sheets each, just utterly impenetrable. My brain shut down. I pretended like I read them. You can find a few Chrome plugins to translate them automatically, but it doesn’t do a great job.
Excel is a beast.
Japan is the only country I know that uses Excel for word documents. They do some cool stuff with it but also some awkward / cringy stuff.
Excel’s cool (I’ve worked in IT roles with heavily locked down computer systems and Excel is the GOAT for handling lotsa fiddly stuff, particularly when you can’t download/install other apps so need to make your own. Once you know VBA, you can create just about anything with Excel. I literally used it to build a makeshift enterprise systems when a previous employer spent $30 million hiring a heap of contractors to cobble together a shitty system that didn’t work. Solution? Excel, VBA, Gambizzle and a LOT of coffee / bacon & egg rolls).
However, I cringe watching junior admin staff in Japan who are forced to carefully resize cells because somebody’s made a newsletter (for example) that relies heavily on a clump of cells being the exact same size/position (often with hidden text and the like padding things behind the scenes once you do a deep dive).
I find it impossible convincing people who’ve created such documents that ‘yes I get that Japanese text is different… BUT… you can insert tables into Word and set it to do text vertically if you want!!! I promise that once you learn how to use it properly you’ll never use Excel for another flyer again!!!’
In my introduction/conduit manual I was given a list of excel shortcuts. In hindsight, that should have been a red flag…
Yep, I’ve seen it here too… school minutes? Excel. School map? Excel…
I remember living in a share house and this girl doing a presentation. You know how you can import pictures into PowerPoint? She like skipped a couple steps and tried to import the entire excel sheet to show one picture from it. As the most tech savvy person in the house I was asked to help, so in the chair I went. I spent 1 hour explaining that putting the picture directly into the PowerPoint was better than what she was trying, she did not believe it. I had to spend time trying to do it her way until she realized that it was acceptable to go for the version I made in 1 minute.
I hate japanese use of Excel.
I regularly receive Excel files from large Japanese clients that contain screenshots of PowerPoint documents, etc.
Worked with a Japanese guy in Australia at a little corner shop. He bought it as an old defunct store and was building it up. A new Point of sale system was about $10, 000. Fully computerised. Stock tracking, profit and loss statements, tax statements, automatic reordering, the works. He wasn’t interested. He had 20 interconnected Excel sheets with the most convoluted formulas I have ever encountered running everything. He manually input everything at night. Took about 7 hrs every day. New owners came in. Bought the POS system. Lockup of the shop took 15 minutes.
This isn’t just Japan. This happens everywhere. MS Office included Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. Sometimes it includes Access, but no one knows how to use it properly, and everyone learns how to use Excel. So, the first step to make any set of computations easier is to throw it into a spreadsheet. By the time something goes to production it should have been converted to a database and called by a well design program to do the calculation more simply, but that is not how businesses or engineers work.
Haha… I actually banned people from giving me excel sheets when I was a developer at a Japanese startup. I would get text translations in fucking excel.. I spent so much time just scrolling over to highlight text in a cell so see what row I was in then scrolling back trying to keep my row position to find a bit of text I needed…
Nope.