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Cont: Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 11

But does anyone know what a card catalogue is these days? Or a Rolodex? Or cuneiform tablets?

A Rolodex of cuneiform tablets would be very loud, wouldn't it?

My favorite idea for a database is to write each piece of information on an index card then tape it to an animal's stomach and set it loose in the wild. Anybody wants data they're going to have to really work for it. Especially the eagle and shark fields.
 
Most enterprises have their own, which were originally developed decades ago by people who didn't know what they were doing.
Oh **** yes. Idiots with delusions.

But does anyone know what a card catalogue is these days? Or a Rolodex? Or cuneiform tablets?
I once created a database (in Access) that was used to print labels that were stuck on index cards.
 
FFS! It's 2023. It's beyond time people understood what the "subject" field in an email was for.

There's another job in our queue where someone tried to type up their whole issue in the Subject field, and it was, of course, truncated so we don't know what's actually going on.
 
Also, remember I mentioned our Cyberark system which is supposed to manage all of our elevated access permissions and passwords? It's down right now, which is making it difficult to do the New Starter Requests for Monday because that process requires elevation several times.

There are workarounds, but it's hard to describe how badly this affects my (probably) autistic and highly process-dependent brain. I'm literally getting cripplingly confused at every step. Fortunately I have coping strategies in place - I'm referring to my checklist for literally everything.

Finally, does anyone know how to tell Excel 365 to paste only the value when using Ctrl-V? NOTE: I don't want to use Ctrl-Shift-V - that would require changing my muscle memory. I have checked File - Options - Advanced, and none of the options change the default pasting behaviour. I've found one ******** source that says to use a macro (**** that).

No, don't bother. I'm using ******* Notepad instead. :mad:
 
FFS! It's 2023. It's beyond time people understood what the "subject" field in an email was for.

There's another job in our queue where someone tried to type up their whole issue in the Subject field, and it was, of course, truncated so we don't know what's actually going on.

I had the opposite problem in one job. The office manager, otherwise a capable and intelligent person, always sent out emails with one word subject lines like "Problem" or "Dec 26."
 
Also, remember I mentioned our Cyberark system which is supposed to manage all of our elevated access permissions and passwords? It's down right now, which is making it difficult to do the New Starter Requests for Monday because that process requires elevation several times.

There are workarounds, but it's hard to describe how badly this affects my (probably) autistic and highly process-dependent brain. I'm literally getting cripplingly confused at every step. Fortunately I have coping strategies in place - I'm referring to my checklist for literally everything.

Finally, does anyone know how to tell Excel 365 to paste only the value when using Ctrl-V? NOTE: I don't want to use Ctrl-Shift-V - that would require changing my muscle memory. I have checked File - Options - Advanced, and none of the options change the default pasting behaviour. I've found one ******** source that says to use a macro (**** that).

No, don't bother. I'm using ******* Notepad instead. :mad:

Umm...right-click, then the paste button you want has "123" in tiny text on the icon.
 
Umm...right-click, then the paste button you want has "123" in tiny text on the icon.
Again, I don't want to upset my muscle memory. I want Ctrl-V to do what it is supposed to do, which is paste only what I want it to. And it should know what I want without my having to tell it every time. That's what "default behaviour" means.

Also this is one of those situations where I'm alt-tabbing and using my keyboard, so taking my hand off my keyboard to mouse over and right click actually takes longer.
 
Again, I don't want to upset my muscle memory. I want Ctrl-V to do what it is supposed to do, which is paste only what I want it to. And it should know what I want without my having to tell it every time. That's what "default behaviour" means.

Also this is one of those situations where I'm alt-tabbing and using my keyboard, so taking my hand off my keyboard to mouse over and right click actually takes longer.
Don't know if this helps, but apparently you can restore the "previous" shortcut behaviour.

https://insider.microsoft365.com/ja-jp/blog/paste-text-only-shortcut-in-word
 
Also, remember I mentioned our Cyberark system which is supposed to manage all of our elevated access permissions and passwords? It's down right now, which is making it difficult to do the New Starter Requests for Monday because that process requires elevation several times.

There are workarounds, but it's hard to describe how badly this affects my (probably) autistic and highly process-dependent brain. I'm literally getting cripplingly confused at every step. Fortunately I have coping strategies in place - I'm referring to my checklist for literally everything.

Finally, does anyone know how to tell Excel 365 to paste only the value when using Ctrl-V? NOTE: I don't want to use Ctrl-Shift-V - that would require changing my muscle memory. I have checked File - Options - Advanced, and none of the options change the default pasting behaviour. I've found one ******** source that says to use a macro (**** that).

No, don't bother. I'm using ******* Notepad instead. :mad:
I don't have O365 to hand, I'm on #2 tablet, but IIRR it's in Options under Advanced. There should be an Edit (?) option where you can select a few options, including somehing like "Paste values".
 
Dear Users,

If the problem really was important you wouldn't forget about it until you saw me passing by on the way to fixing another issue for someone who actually knows how to use our ticketing system and put a trouble call in properly.

In fact in general I don't find the fact that you have a problem every time I see you anywhere near as cutesy poo or charming as you seem too.
 
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Finally, does anyone know how to tell Excel 365 to paste only the value when using Ctrl-V? NOTE: I don't want to use Ctrl-Shift-V - that would require changing my muscle memory. I have checked File - Options - Advanced, and none of the options change the default pasting behaviour. I've found one ******** source that says to use a macro (**** that).

No, don't bother. I'm using ******* Notepad instead. :mad:


Just a quick warning that pasting in Excel can result in some really weird stuff.

For example, if Excel decides that something looks like it may be a date, it will convert the text into a date and store it as a weird number in the cell.

I ran into this problem a lot when dealing with street number ranges in addresses, for example Excel would convert the number range 1-11 (one to eleven) to 1 November.

The way to avoid that kind of thing, was to specifically set a cell's format to 'text' before performing a paste operation.

(It was really annoying to find that Excel had polluted thousands of addresses in an extract in this manner)
 
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Dear Users,

If the problem really was important you wouldn't forget about it until you saw me passing by on the way to fixing another issue for someone who actually knows how to use our ticketing system and put a trouble call in properly.

In fact in general I don't find the fact that you have a problem every time I see you anywhere near as cutesy poo or charming as you seem too.


"The IT guy is hot but he has no clue when people are trying to flirt with him!"
"Let's break some more stuff and you can try again!"
 
I would be very reluctant to use Excel for any modelling leading to significant decisions, and over the years I’ve broken a few colleagues’ fingers for trying to do so, but on a lot of my data analysis tasks I tend to throw the initial datasets into Excel first of all just to get an ideal of look and feel. It has some useful functionality for first pass reviews.
 
"I don't understand why the Apples Generator can't exactly reproduce the work you did in the Orange Productor."
 
I hate Fridays now. I slack off on Fridays, which means I don't do anything. But apparently other people slack off on Fridays by continuing to do stuff, but switching off their brains. So far two different people have asked me what the difference is between the "exclusion list" and the "inclusion list". Gee, I don't know, it's a huge mystery. Better budget half a million bucks for a deep-dive exploration by committee.
 
I hate Fridays now. I slack off on Fridays, which means I don't do anything. But apparently other people slack off on Fridays by continuing to do stuff, but switching off their brains. So far two different people have asked me what the difference is between the "exclusion list" and the "inclusion list". Gee, I don't know, it's a huge mystery. Better budget half a million bucks for a deep-dive exploration by committee.

POETS Day, innit, mate!
 
Spent an hour in a chat session with LG support.

I had a month old TV and the remote stopped working after stuttering a little bit.
I did all the obvious stuff: batteries, re-paired , & etc..

The clincher, was that I have another LG TV and the remote is working fine with the new TV . I provided this information more than once in the discussion that followed.

I know the support person has to follow a script, so I patiently went over everything they wanted me to try.. Well, I lied, because i had already done it.

They wanted me to check for debris ( crumbs ) around the keys.

I explained the Power On/Off key was not working, so all the Dorito dust on the other keys did not matter.. They chuckled at this.

When all was said and done they were going to send me a new remote.

We spent another 10 minutes verifying my particulars. When I pointed out I was registered at LG, and they already had all this information, and it was good, otherwise I would be concerned about getting the new remote they are sending me.

They conceded, and there you go.

Their flow chart should consider that people will lie about going through the check-list, and they should just get it over with, and save everyone a little time and money.

I realize if it was the TV itself, or another high cost item, they need to be a bit more circumspect, but the remote? Come on..

I gave them 5 stars for solving my problem.. All the bull crap I had to go through was not their fault.. I've been there.
 
Spent an hour in a chat session with LG support.

Just an hour? I spent months trying to get them to fix a fridge! Hours and hours on the phone with idiots! Weeks of buying ice to stick in a cooler and keep us going.
By the time they'd fixed it, we had bought a new one from someone else. Which was broken on arrival.
 
I'm back! What'd I miss?

That's not true. Excel is not dumb and it's not feature free. The problem with Excel is that it is not scalable either in size or to multiple users.
Excel has spreadsheet features, and quite good ones, not database features. The requirements are different.
 
I'm back! What'd I miss?

Excel has spreadsheet features, and quite good ones, not database features. The requirements are different.
Quite true. Excel is effectively a bunch of relational tables. So you can "sort of" cobble it together to make it run as a fairly effective database. And that's often enough for the single user with a basic requirement.

But if you want to get into the full database mode - fully linked tables with different types of linkages, views, sharing and locking, transaction logging & rollbacks, etc. - Excel ain't it. For that, you need...Access! :D
 
Quite true. Excel is effectively a bunch of relational tables. So you can "sort of" cobble it together to make it run as a fairly effective database. And that's often enough for the single user with a basic requirement.

But if you want to get into the full database mode - fully linked tables with different types of linkages, views, sharing and locking, transaction logging & rollbacks, etc. - Excel ain't it. For that, you need...Access! :D
Exactly. Excel is great at what it is designed for - number crunching.

What really annoys me is where someone has used Excel for text-only data. Excel is for numbers! If you want to use words, use... well... Word. The Table functions in Word are fantastic.

Use the right tool for the job, damn it!
 

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