I once got called in to diagnose why it took 5 minutes to open up a single Excel file. The PC itself was a little dated and underpowered, but the file size was huuuge…like hundreds of MB.
It finally opened. There was ugly table-formatting…to the entire spreadsheet. Colored cell borders, alternating background fill, text and font formatting applied to every single cell; columns A-IV and rows 1-65,536. I pointed that out and said the only way to fix is start a new one and not apply the formatting, or to try and remove it from all the cells. She outright refused because she liked the way it was. So I left, and she went back to looking at pictures of her cats
People do silly things. We have a department at work which pulls data from our ERP system to excel. They’re pulling 10’s of thousands of rows to return only a few bits of detail like product descriptions for a handful of items. I’ve offered to help them but they really don’t want help. They seem to be happy with this monster.
There’s another department which runs reports from our BI system, exports it to Excel, adds some calculations, then builds reports from that. They literally just need to ask the BI analyst to build them a report to their requirements.
I’m convinced people like screwing around in excel because it gives them something creative to do in an otherwise bland job.
