#4 Excel Formulas
Jan 16th, 2009 by pfi
This one shouldn’t come as a suprise at all: accountants love excel formulas. Formulas are wonderful things that can update fields, add amounts, and solve equations. Once it’s entered in, all an accountant needs to do is copy it 200 times and the work is done.
If you were to approach an accountant at work, you will find multiple excel spreadsheets open. Even more spreadsheets can be found if they have a dual monitor setup. Accountants feel more comfortable with Excel than most things in their lives.
The beauty of Excel is that even when all the work is done in Excel and checks out, accountants can spend as much time formatting the work for presentation as they did creating the work. Spare functions in Excel such as drawing arrow objects, highlighting cells, and formatting decimal places bring pleasure to accountants as they seek to wrap up their work.
It doesn’t matter that what they have been working on is nothing new and that there are endless templates available for them to use. The time spent working with formulas and formatting a workbook is a precious way for an accountant to express their investment of time.
Ah…. something that accountants and IT nerds can agree upon. Excel is irreplaceable.
Excel understands me. I somewhat understand it.
Love it!! I’ve been referred to before as “spreadsheet queen”. I would go into withdrawals without it and by chance, I happen to have it open right now 😉
=sumproduct ftw!
Excel is great, but let’s not forget acellerated depreciation and bonus depreciation. It is a way to look back and say, hey I can’t believe it’s already been six years since we put that appliance on the books and already it’s been fully depreciated. It feels like only yesterday. 27 and half years is far too long.
Excel even tells me where to go for lunch!
=INDEX(B2:B65000,ROUNDUP(RAND()*COUNTA(B2:B65000),0),1)
(put your list of choices in column B starting in the second row)
The best thing about excel: the “Comments” box. You can hide all sorts of goodies there!
Repeat after me (like a mantra):
Excel is my friend. Excel is my friend…
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This is so true. We also use Excel to scare off non accountants, all we have to do is tell them why we needed Excel 2007 (I have one spreadsheet open right now with over 600,000 rows).
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Working with of those right now
In English, the plural of ‘formula’ is ‘formulae’.
Did anybody mention that accountants, particularly, love pedantry?
So all the excel masturbatory stuff I’ve been feeling guilty about all these years just means I’m normal. For an accountant, anyway. Should be a relief, but somehow I’m disappointed.
“Accountants feel more comfortable with Excel than most things in their lives” – SO TRUE!!!
Love your posts :).
LOL! As I’m reading this I look down and I have no less than six excel sheets open, and it’s the beginning of the day! Love this blog!