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I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people. Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved. Yes, some problems are too complex to solve in a few minutes, but pointing someone in the right direction requires little to no effort.

Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software. A lot of people struggle to find answers specifically because of this lack of community around using Excel as a tool. I know I personally have floundered learning things that would have been simple to understand had there been someone to guide me, so I try to provide that same support to other people when they face the same obstacles.

Yes, its fun to cringe at people's inexperience. It is also important to recognize we all started there.

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It's less "not wanting to help people" and more "once people know you're 'the Excel person' they come to you for everything to do with Excel". It's very similar to being 'the computer person' in a family/group of friends and everyone coming to you with all their various tech support questions. At a certain point, it starts ruining your productivity since you get taken out of your regular job to do these one time help requests.

This is my experience working in offices like law firms that are filled with people that have limited technical aptitude for using software. Showing any sort of competency is a recipe for increasing your workload with no conferred benefits.

Yeah, it’s draining. They have no desire or intention to learn. You’re not helping them, you’re just doing their job for them.

Yours, former excel guy.

I always looked at it as being great job security.

"You haven't completed any of your assignments while your co-workers all exhibit improved productivity. For this reason, I'm giving you a poor performance review."

Never once seen it play out like that. Most people understand that your work comes before the help they need.

That's fine, the problem is that you also get all the blame as well. Once you "fix" a computer, everything that will break will suddenly be your fault.

Very true. I once installed a printer driver in a friend's company. I got blamed for missing files by several employees during the following weeks.

I've heard that auto mechanics know these as "Ever since you..." stories.

My former boss, in process of bidding for a bigger highway maintenance job, started with me with How can we do this in excel? Can we get all these X? etc basic questions, solved with vlookup or index or things. Things slowly shifted to just do this this & this, no desire of learning 5o know how, & the tasks became my extra responsibility, & anything breaks in that sheet because of long tangled inter-dependent cells, it will be my fault. Too much draining & taxing on mind.

It's quite similar to being a senior programmer and assisting junior colleagues instead of doing their own work. Though in this case I suppose the blame falls on management for not allocating time properly.

Since I work in technology, people would sometimes ask for my help fixing a computer, to whom I would clarify: no, no, no, I'm a Software Engineer -- I'm the person responsible for breaking the computers.

And it's one thing if they actually appreciate your help.

In places that people don't realize it's part of their job to learn the tools, it often turns into complaints of "why they designed it that way?" going on and on with dissatisfaction of the system that doesn't read their mind. (And certainly, they will come back with the same question in few days...)

I've been there a decade ago and it was DRAINING that I was just better off not offering the help altogether.

There is a difference between "doing other people's job" and "enabling them to learn on their own" in my experience. Explaining to someone why it is better to use INDEX MATCH in lieu of VLOOKUP will never ruin my productivity.

In my experience not 1 person in 50 of people who "aren't computer people" will retain that information regardless of how much time you spend. I once worked with a guy who would come to me for everything from excel stuff to "help I can't find this email in my gmail account". I tried to stress to him that I had my own work to do (write code) but he whined that it would take me just a minute and it might take him 15 or more! This had been going on at least 5 times a day for months and so finally I angrily asked him what I couldn't do faster than him out of his tasks and why shouldn't I just do his job and get his paycheck too. The requests slowed down after that. Being the one technical person available is almost always a shit experience.

Show him how to use Excel to make an invoice for your time he's wasting.

Savage. Wish I had thought of that.

This doesn't scale well with the number of people who ask for help, unless you can organize a class - which is hard to do in a way that helps people when they need help.

I love talking about git workflow, and am happy to spend a half hour diagramming how your repo relates to origin, what branches mean, how pull requests and merges work, and what rebasing does. For people who don't yet grok git (or maybe just distributed source control?), this has proven to be very helpful.

I typically present this information about 2x a year. However, if I had people ask me for this kind of explanation every week, or multiple times a week, it would have a much larger impact on my productivity.

At least with Git there are _tons_ of ways to learn more. With Excel there are next to none because of the lack of developer community. There are few useful resources where someone can go to understand how they can best leverage their toolset.

Excel is also notoriously opaque when it comes to debugging, so there often are not useful questions to ask Google if you don't already know or understand what you are looking for.

Actually there are some bloody good books on the subject. The help files and online from MS help are not too bad.

Debugging: "excel debug a spreadsheet" - quite a few decent returns on page one and two. Related searches in Google gives some more hints.

A shameful secret: I firmly believe that the moment I became a programmer was when I discovered Debug.Print in VBA in some elderly version of Excel (97, probably) while bodging pretty charts together for someone to print and fax to someone else.

I'm willing to bet that I am not alone.

Don't be too hard on Excel - some of today's clueless spreadsheet monkeys will be real bona-fide developers in fifteen years.

Many zillions of years ago (OK about 23) I was taken on, fresh from the dole, by a factory that made pies (pasties, sausage rolls, pork pies etc (south west UK)) to do the whole IT thing. Anyway, apart from a few other handy skills I learned to bodge a pretty decent spreadsheet, building on experience starting with Super Calc.

I converted planning from Lotus 1-2-3 to MS Excel (for shame) and then with my smart Pentium 60 based machine, developed a nearly complete finite capacity planner for the factory - in Excel. The devil is of course in the detail but my labour plan and forecasts beat the planners most of the time - except at Easter and Christmas.

Today, I'm really not a developer 8) I grew up and became a sysadmin (oh and a managing director - but that's another story)

From memory help for the MS Office products was actually really good. You had sections that showed their object model in a very nice hierarchical manner and you could easily drill down to the individual methods of the objects mentioned. They also had a solid base object library across the Office applications. Things seemed to get more difficult with Office 2007 though, as compared to Office 2003 and earlier. With 2007 and later I believe you were supposed to use Visual Studio to extend it rather than using the inbuilt VBA. Also there was a lot of individual web pages describing how things were done and stackexchange questions answered for Excel and other Office products so it was pretty easy to get decent information to help you. The exception being when searching the internet the only answer to a question was that it was 'impossible to do' when actually it really wasn't, with the effect that most people reading the answer will do it the long and more error prone way.

Warning: This is from memory quite a while ago and it was a very minor part of stuff I did at my job then.

Explaining it to the same person for the 15th time though...

As a career educator, and ruling out learning disabilities that are not appropriately accommodated, I believe that generally means you're not doing a good job of explaining in a way the other person is capable of grasping.

Blame goes both ways. And the original point still stands. It is productive to teach someone to improve their own processes.

One difference between your experiences as an educator and the parent's experiences as an Office Excel Guy is that educators have a position of authority, and there is generally an ethos of paying attention and trying to remember what they're telling you!

^ This. Office Excel Guy is just glorified IT help desk. People don't want an explanation, don't want to learn how to use excel necessarily. They want want to push one button, and get a result. Spend longer than 5 minutes explaining it and you will be told you're wasting their time.

You spend time explaining on what is essentially deaf ears, and being on call all the time

Educators tend to have alignment on students' skill levels too, and perhaps not so with "Excel support." It's actually easier to help someone who knows nothing about the subject. What I struggled in the past are those who think they know what they are doing, yet require help in narrower scope.

They often have often accumulated bad habit, and won't listen to you because "I have been doing this way for years."

Also, it's interesting to observe that many who struggle in Excel (or many of "consumer" applications) actually are struggling in basic computing skills. (e.g. can't tell difference between left and right mouse buttons, don't know how to copy files, etc.) It often result in infuriated people, pointing out that they need to learn basics of the operating system.

This is a reasonable approach for someone whose primary role is educating others.

It rapidly recedes from the realm of reasonable considerations once we're talking about someone providing informal Excel support to colleagues as an extracurricular activity.

I disagree. You tell them how to do it. You ensure they have no questions. You have them show you that they know how.

Then you destroy their work area with a hammer when they come back for more help on the same thing. (obviously humor)

It's just like teaching.

Source: I'm the 'excel guy' in my service area. I tell them I'll show you twice and I'll make sure you don't have any questions. Then I'll show you youtube videos. I'm not in the business of 'doing' for anyone.

There’s a clear trade off in terms of time and annoyance, and getting good at teaching or communicating with different people.

Being able to share mastery is a key part of being a master at a subject, which is a political and image advantage.

I used my excel ability to learn how to best explain vlookup and got good at it.

I did get taken advantage of early on, but I learnt how to deal with those specific types of users, and not do their work for them.

In contrast to those people, there are others who genuinely respect you for your help, and then use your training to make their life and yours better.

Not to mention, many excel problems are not that hard. If you know what you are doing, it’s an easy win/goodwill for you, and a major problem for someone else solved.

In my experience it's less that people don't grasp it and more that they have no interest in learning and hope to survive as parasites forever. I've worked with people who will try to stop you from teaching them almost immediately and interrupt with some nonsense that amounts to "can you just do it for me, though?". A lot of the time this happens when the task is time-sensitive and they're likely afraid of missing a deadline by trying to figure something out themselves, but you'd think they would recognize the pattern after showing up with the same frantic plea enough times.

You can't teach someone who doesn't want to learn. Most people in this situation don't want to learn and actively tune you out. They just want you to fix their problem and if they have another problem (or the same problem again), they'll just call you over to fix it again.

Thanks! I didn't know about INDEX and MATCH, and VLOOKUP always bothered me.

So basically it's separation of concerns, but for people.

The old "Can you fix my laptop?"

I think it's less "not wanting to help other people" and more "wanting to do what is valued". Value could manifest in many ways:

* purely intrinsic ("doing cool work" vs. "de facto IT guy")

* purely extrinsic (the year-end perf review won't give me kudos for helping with excel documents)

* a mixture (I want this organization to succeed, the best way for me to do that is by doing X, and instead I'm helping debug excel sheets).

Often it's a mixture since people often enjoy doing what brings the most value. I do volunteer stuff for a charity. A lot of the stuff I do is very interesting and challenging and valuable to the charity's core mission. But I'm also expected to help other volunteers with mundane helpdesk stuff like connecting to the wireless network. I don't enjoy it and also it distracts from a much more valuable use of my time.

I don't disagree with you but I was speaking to the premise of the article, which exposits that one should "run the other way" when people come bearing questions.

It isn't about being helpful or not, but about letting yourself be abused or not. Often times, the only difference between myself with a technology and the person asking me for help is that I am willing to read the documentation while the other isn't. Often, the person seeking my help doesn't even realize they are abusing me but still, if I point out that they can read the documentation as well as I can, I get a look of disgust. There is countless sources of documentation, howtos, and useful tricks in both document and video form on Excel available for free on the internet. People just refuse to use that, even when I point them to it. More over, if I hold firm and say you can read this yourself, the person often will just ignore me and try to find someone else to do their work for them.

My high school history teacher used to say "there is such thing as a stupid question: it's one that you have the resources to easily answer" and went so far as to tell people that she was not going to answer a question that they had in class because it wasn't a good use of time.

I feel the same way about technology questions. I'm really glad to help when someone asks something that they have looked into ahead of time, or if they're interested in learning a skill that they know I have rather than just getting me to do their work. It really annoys me when someone has just not put in enough effort and would rather have me expend the effort in solving their problem.

On the other hand, if somebody asked me what resources they could use to figure something out, then I'd be more than happy to help.

> I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people.

You, sir, have not been the victim of help vampires.

> A lot of people struggle to find answers specifically because of this lack of community around using Excel as a tool

I am unaware of this lack of information. Perhaps I am not doing the really, really, really exotic stuff but every question I have ever had on Excel has been answerable via Google.

Agreed. Most Excel stuff is extremely well documented on Stack Overflow, numerous blog sites, and message boards. I wrote a fair amount of VBA today(something I've only done a few times before) and found it to be quite straightforward.

The ability to compose queries and sift through google results and find the answer to a question in a timely manner is a skill in and of itself that not everyone has.

But - this is a skill that will repay the learner in gold and good times. And no one is prevented in the learning.

You never learn if you just depend on others.

>Excel lacks the community programmers have and also lacks the learning opportunities given by open-source software.

Source needed.

There’s crap tons of excel help, and the amount of excel queries+answers will easily put other languages to shame.

The difference is that excel is not usually treated as an engineering tool, with the various rituals that go with it.

In contrast, take a look at how financial analysts learn excel - a field where excel IS an engineering tool.

It’s the differences between being a home cook and a professional chef.

>excel is not usually treated as an engineering tool

This is a good point. I've seen C# & Python devs who read the release notes and adopt new features of C#\Python with alacrity while at the same time their Excel development work, which they spend considerable time on, evolves not at all. E.g., still using IF(ISERROR(...)) rather than IFERROR; VLOOKUP rather than INDEX(MATCH()); slow & brittle array functions rather than SUMIFS; employing many intermediate columns to clean out errors rather than using AGGREGATE(); doing things in VBA that they would never do in their primary programming language (v = Worksheets("pnl").Range("N22:N77").Value).

Ooh aggregate, I didn’t know of that. Seems like overkill for my use cases. And as you know, there is no kill like overkill

So, yes, there is content that exists. What does not exist are real-world examples of problem solving a la open source. As I said in another comment, debugging Excel is incredibly opaque (#NA) and most people will never find what they are looking for when they Google "=GETPIVOTDATA #NA error."

There is no GitHub for Excel workbooks where people build and extend generalized solutions that people can read, understand, and learn from. There is also a total lack of comments in Excel formulas (short of VBA custom functions) so good luck deciphering the 5 line SUMIF in the 10 year old model you inherited.

You can get many, many excel sheets and examples which highlight problems and provide solutions. You can dowload a 3D graphics engine in excel if you so desire, as well as more mundane examples and videos.

It’s not couched in engineering terms, but effectively a body of work and reference does exist to help people use excel - I’ve constantly used it to improve myself.

It is definitely not made by engineers and coders, but by normal people and excel jockeys.

Agreeing with you: just Google excel howto, then see results.

The problem mostly lies in other people not wanting to learn. Anecdotally, I've found that people come to me with Excel questions because they want me to do something for them, not because they are generally interested in learning more or bettering their skills.

There is also a lack of what is considered "Excel best practices", for want of a better word. The only resource I've seen along those lines is Joel Spolsky's "You Suck at Excel" video (which is excellent, and should be necessary viewing for anyone who use Excel on a regular basis): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Yeah, great video. I often send this to colleagues. Another blog I recommend to others is https://itsnotaboutthecell.com/

>Enabling people to learn more about the software they use every day is better for everyone involved

I agree, but the flaw in your assumption is that the people who want help from "the office Excel guy" want to learn more. Much like being the "family computer guy", the person asking for help is really asking for you to just fix the problem.

Indeed. I actually really enjoy teaching and mentoring, and do a lot of it. I’m also quite experienced with Excel, used to be an analyst before I became a dev, so I’m often the “Excel guy.”

When other devs come to me for help, they generally want to learn, and I’m happy to teach them. Most devs are really into learning technical skills. Same goes for MOST product managers, sales people, etc. But there are definitely SOME people on the business side who actively DON’T want to learn technical skills. They have some report they have to do, it involves Excel, and they just want me to do it for them, they don’t want to learn how to do it themselves. Generally I’ll help these people once or twice, but after that it’s “Google it.”

In many companies, once you touch something, you own it, regardless of who's responsibility it was prior to your involvement. In that type of environment, it's often best to feign ignorance, while sending them links to resources while saying something along the lines of, "I think this may have something to do with what you're trying to accomplish."

> I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people.

Not to pile on or anything, because that phrase seems to have touched a nerve - but, I don't mind helping other people at all. I do mind when I spend 8 hours at work helping other people, and don't have time to complete the work that I was actually supposed to be doing, and then get criticized for not getting the work I was assigned to do done. It doesn't help to err in the other direction, either, though - once everybody knows that you know how to do "x", even if you're swamped with other work, you can't turn them away, or it'll haunt you on your next performance review. Hence the article's original advice: never let anybody know you're good at "x".

Write down the hours you spend as a consultant to teammates. Then discuss with your boss how you should best spend your time. It’s not complicated.

Source: am manager who deals with this every day.

Edit: I understand this advice is worthless if your manager is a dolt. In that case run for the hills.

> I do not understand the mindset of not wanting to help other people.

I love helping people, but I also want them to become self sufficient. My first question when someone asks me for help is "have you typed into Google exactly what you just said?"

Then you clearly dont have a lot of help parasites. What do I mean by help parasite?

Asks you to do the work for them, instead of asking for help solving the problem. Asks for the same answer to the same problem over and over again to the point where any person would have pattern recognition. Uses imprecise language even after being provided it to diagnose and troubleshoot an issue.

While there's plenty of people who are well meaning and want to learn, being the "thing" guy is not that - its a slow death to the choking off of your job description by others using your time and resources to do their jobs.

There is definitely value in teaching others, but first they have to want to learn. I work with a lot of mechanical engineers and I am the only real "software guy" in our office. Most of the time they don't want to learn how to do computer things themselves because (mostly the older engineers) consider it to not be their job or out of their scope.

At my previous job in the power industry we had to clean up our shared drive and move all the CAD files of one type into a certain new folder, and the CAD files of the newer type into another, and PDF outputs in another, GIS exports in another, etc. Three people were dragging-and-dropping by hand for hours until I had some free time and made a Python script in 10 minutes to do this all. Got a few free drinks that day.

It's amazing what scripting allows one to do. If I was in charge of hiring any technical roles, any non-developer job would still require basic coding proficiency, or at least a candidate who agreed to seriously give it a shot and try to learn.

I think there are jobs that people need to have done, and know that they can't do themselves, but that they consider to be menial and lower class. Like being the bass player in a band. (Disclaimer: I'm the bass player in a band).

They may think that the difficulty and expertise are gratuitous -- if software were written right, it wouldn't need an expert.

Helping others is great and I think most people enjoy it. I think what most people don't like is when it impacts their own work. I've definitely had this issue in my own jobs.

If they haven't learned how to "Google" for the solution and help themselves by now, they are lazy and do not deserve help.

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