As someone who spends a great deal of my life working with spreadsheets, I am familiar with their moody and temperamental nature, their tendency to collapse when overwhelmed without giving very much communication of trouble, their penchant for stony and sullen silence. Since my expectations for communication with Excel is lower even than my fairly modest but still unfulfilled expectations of communication with other people, I generally go about my business seeking to make up for the lack that is present in the software that I use, and suffer in relative silence, as it were. After all, if my complaints about the difficulty I have with people I know, who could be reasonably expected to respond to such matters, often try the patience of others, the complaints I have about software programs to large software companies like Microsoft are not likely to be treated with anything beyond cold indifference, with nothing practical or tangible gained by my ranting except for the dubious value of a release of pressure in a way that sets a bad precedent for future conduct.

So, when earlier this morning a coworker of mine asked me how to deal with a problem he was having with one of the reports he runs, I was able to tell him that it was thanks to a quirk that Excel has every other day. In one of the large reports I run for an external customer, every other day the pivot tables that pull relevant data from the spreadsheets call a previous version of the file and not the version that is actually open and edited. Every other day it refreshes without a difficulty, but the other days require a manual change of the references or a find and replace of formulas, depending on the report that is run. Now, while I am intellectually aware that if I am suffering from a problem or difficulty, I am probably not unique in having that problem, however unusual I may be in my means of articulating such difficulties and in seeking to address them, or not, as the case may be. The fact that my coworker was having the same difficulties, though, allowed me to explain the nature of the report, even though I do not know why Excel would refresh easily every other day and then be irritable and sullen every other day, but one can recognize a pattern even if one does not know how to deal with it in an efficient manner.

Both my coworker and I discussed the solutions we had for our different reports. I mentioned to him that for the pivot tables I run I change the source by deleting the previous file being called in the Analyze/Change Data Source option. For my coworker’s report, he removes the offending file references to previous versions of his report by using the find & replace option, which is an elegant one I use for other Excel quirks. Both solutions may be easy to manage depending on one’s particular approach, but they represent elegant efforts at working within the limitations of the software one is dealing with, which behaves according to a logic and order that is difficult to understand and clearly alien to my own way of thinking. Not everyone, though, seeks to deal with such problems productively. For example, the user forums for Microsoft Excel are full of people who are quite furious about the problem that my coworker and I, and no doubt many others in similar data science-related jobs, deal with on a regular basis. A great deal of these problems result from the fact that the ease of use of Microsoft Excel as a place to store and manipulate data and the lack of widespread knowledge in how to properly use databases has led for Excel to be used far beyond its areas of competence, and so since I know that Excel is doing what it was not meant to do the best it can, I seek to treat it with compassion and understanding, and more than a little empathy, empathy that seems to be lacking from others who are only thinking about the frustrations they deal with and not the limitations of the tools at their disposal or their own knowledge base.

After all, dealing with the fussiness and moodiness of computer software is good practice for dealing with those same qualities in others, and in recognizing the existence of those same qualities in ourselves. Computer software, after all, is designed by human beings with our own characteristic temperament, strengths, and weaknesses, and the same sort of patterns can be seen for dealing with human beings that we see in dealing with computer software. As a person, I seek to be aware of my own limitations and vulnerabilities and act in ways that serve to develop competence or to at least develop the resources to provide strength and wisdom to those who are weak where I am strong, and to seek assistance and counsel from those who are strong where I am weak. So long as it is our aim to dwell peacefully at others and to write no one out of our life completely or to wish or pretend that they do not exist, we are compelled to take steps to do so effectively, to understand those around us and their unusual ways, whether it is people who may rub us the wrong way or computer software full of quirks and idiosyncrasies that are baffling and irritating every other day. Even if those steps are not easy, and even if dealing with understanding is more challenging than simply storming and ranting, I would like to think that the effort is worthwhile in making us better people, hopefully people who are more easily dealt with given our own quirks and eccentric and puzzling ways.