Colm O'Regan: How Microsoft Excel can become a column of your existence
What has 17bn cells and turned 40 years old this year? No, it’s not the American private prison system. It’s Excel, the much-maligned spreadsheet programme.
What has 17bn cells and turned 40 years old this year? No, it’s not the American private prison system. It’s Excel, the much-maligned spreadsheet programme.
It’s always been condemned by lazy fools as somehow the death of creativity. It’s shorthand for a job that oppresses the soul. But I think it deserves its flowers.
It’s not all good. Of course, it’s frustrating. There’s the mystery of printing: For some reason, a short to-do list has come out of the printer as 400 pages with nothing but a one-inch cell border on each and your actual list spread across 10 others.
But then you discover ‘Page Break View’ and your life changes for ever.
There’s the delicate matter of charts. Everything looks fine. You’ve successfully graphed the survey results from a statistically insignificant eight people for your college project and you decide: “I’m just going to change one tiny thing.”
Suddenly, the chart has lost its pleasing shape. One axis has emigrated. There’s one pink dot where all your results were. You are like a time traveller who was a stone three million years ago and now humans have three ears. Tip: If the chart looks grand, leave it.
Yes, there are the error messages that feel like Excel is annoyed with you. Did you have the temerity to include a ‘circular reference’? “Try removing or changing these references” it suggests passive aggressively. ‘Try not being a gobshite” is what it means.
Sometimes, it drops the passive pretence completely and just shouts at you #DIV/0! Yes “You can’t divide by zero. Also, you’re a Div.” #NAME? #REF! #VALUE! #NULL! #WHAT ARE YOU AT?!
But, for all that, it’ll do nice things for you. When you get your ducks in a row (and in a column), you can spend ages deciding what colour to make the totals column. Put a nice border on it. You are like a child decorating a homemade birthday card.
And there’s the giddy feeling when Autofill understands, just knows you so well, that it knows what you want to write.
You put in January and drag the bottom right hand corner of the cell to autofill and Excel says “It’s months isn’t it?” and fills it out all the way to December.
It doesn’t know everything. Just days of the week, months and a few formulas but I’m hoping it’ll get smarter with AI and help you rank your friends or favourite children.
I’ve never been to the end of the worksheet. The current version is 1048576 rows long and 16384 columns wide. Maybe there’s stuff lurking in Row: 563536 Column: JJX: The third secret of Fatima or the reason why Jim Gavin was picked as a candidate.
But some people have been there. People who use it to analyse millions of figures, multinationals who draw in data from a hundred factories. I’ll never use Excel to its full potential. I imagine it sighing in boredom whenever I open it to do the Vat.
“I could be your own personal data centre, Colm, but, sure, here is a list of the four invoices you sent this quarter.”
Now that Excel is 40, it’s old enough to have its own podcast, where it says things it can’t get away with in the mainstream media. Actually, there are several podcasts about Excel.
That’s probably where you’ll, no doubt, learn where it’ll take its awesome power for the next 40 years. No doubt, AI and machine learning are involved. Automation. Connecting to your fridge.
You’ll come home one day and the family are just chatting with Excel and asking you who the hell do you think you are and how did you get past security. Excel will guide you to the door and, on the way, auto-fill you in.
