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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

If you really want to hit your face on a desk, wait until you encounter a user who doesn't know how to tabulate or sum anything in Excel, and uses it as a big grid-based text editor, manually using a desk calculator to sum up columns, or perform various other formulas on some selection of cells.

also, prepare for the user to suffer some sort of existential crisis or breakdown, possible tantrum after you show them how to do these tasks automatically with a simple excel formula.

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My first job had a coworker who didn't know how to sort the spreadsheet. She printed it out and cut it into strips, then sorted them while watching TV at home in the evening, then taped it back together. I was shocked and in the decade or so after that I have yet to run into anything like that again.

My introduction to Office/office horror was a colleague writing her message in PowerPoint, attaching it to an email in Outlook and sending it through. It turned out to be a standard practice in the academic institution I was in.

Not quite the same, but in several community email lists, sending emails via a JPG or DOCX is the norm. Type it up in Word, and attach it to the email.

My institution's administration does this. Every message from them is typed in Word, then attached to an email whose body says "Please read the attached message". They do this for every message, no matter how trivial.

I asked them why they do this, but haven't received a reply, perhaps because my question was in an attached gzipped Postscript document.

I encountered exactly this when my brother went to film school. The students would rotate roles and it was his turn to be the producer. One day I came home from work and he was having problems with his Excel-based budget sheet. I noticed that his row of sums at the bottom of one sheet had hard-coded values rather than formulas. Thinking he had inadvertently pasted over them, I told him, "Look, you killed your formulas." "What are formulas?", he asked. Turns out that he had been tallying up the columns with a calculator and then typing those totals into Excel.

Also, if you think this type of user is going extinct as the new generation who grew up with computers will intuitively understand how to use the basic features of common software.....wait until you see a 24 year old with a bachelors degree doing stuff like this. Turns out watching youtube on an ipad from 2 years old to adulthood does not confer magical computer skills!

A 24-year old was born in 1997. iPad was released in 2012. Your comment does not make sense :)

A loong time ago when I first encountered spreadsheets, I thought it would be a neat way of making the monthly reports, just adding up columns and rows of a 30x30 table. My boss was not happy about the use of "sum" and made me add up the rows and columns on a desk calculator to check that they were right.

I'd almost prefer to see this behavior than the handful of people I've encountered who do this same exact manual math in ..... Word.

For many people they’re all just digital paper - and they work with it like they would with a notebook.

Why the OS doesn't allow you to select some text and perform system-wide actions on it is a mystery. Calculate, Upper/Lower/Sentence case, Search, Dictionary, etc etc

Like this? https://www.muo.com/tag/add-useful-options-mac-os-x-services...

Seems so, https://www.gingerbeardman.com/services/

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