Why should there be a difference ?

Well you might be CEO/CFO/CTO because you're an expert in the field and make money for the business. But you see you clicked to embed this table as an active-x direct-wibble object rather than an in-line OLE direct-fooble object, so you can no longer do Excel stuff in it when you're not in Office365 inside our cloud infrastructural nodal-thingy

CxO: "All I hear is bollocks IT excuses about why this isn't doing what I need. FIX IT!"

Which again is a perfectly reasonable attitude to IT

You don't expect the office workers to change how they work to accommodate how the power grid operates, you expect the grid to deliver power. Nobody complains that the CFO doesn't understand load factor balancing in HVDC grid interconnects

It is and it isn't.

I tend to think if someone has IT in their job title, they should have some idea what they are doing.

I agree with this.

CEO? Doesn't care, doesn't need to know.

"IT Manager", though? Clue's in the title. Or so you would hope.

These types of managers are the same sorts who demand you "fix" a printed photograph because it does not respond to their attempts to "pinch zoom" it.

After all, it "looks like" their smartphone screen. /sarcasm

And I agree with you. Seriously.

I've seen horrendous abuse of Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. Arrogant PFY-me did laugh at the abusers. Not that I'm much less arrogant nowadays but at least, I recognise the total lack of training on these matters. The company just expects that all staff expertly know their ways around the MS Office 365 suit. Spoiler: they mostly don't.

I don't think I have seen training courses for Office products for years, companies expect you to know it - and for the school leavers they should have been taught at school. This does leave a massive skills gap.

One of the people you used to work for my brother - made a spreadsheet, had a column of numbers - added them up in a calculator and then input the result manually. It used to annoy my brother as he would change a number and then wonder why the totals didn't update.

I mean I will admit to writing multi chapter technical documents (a wifi requirements document came in a 130 pages - which included various easter eggs to prove people had read it) but I use Word for the text, and include a lot of tables however those tables are probably 4 rows and 3 columns. Diagrams are done using a proper application and inserted as images etc.

if you are wondering about easter eggs then in an explanation of wifi mobility the reason for moving from one building to another was quoted as "better snacks" which somebody found - there are still some others that haven't yet been located.

>Diagrams are done using a proper application and inserted as images etc.

Especially Excel charts.

You get the chart vaguely readable and embed it in word and then the axis label text is unreadable because somehow Word has a different set of fonts to Excel.

Then you have to fight with word to embed a figure as an image, no don't link it, don't insert it as whatever-Microsoft-is-calling-OLE-today

...blame the messenger?

I won't hear a bad Word about them

I hope Val was able to Excel elsewhere

I hope he was professional to the last and fully wrote up the ticket so that anyone who needed to would be able to be aware of the correct solution in case of a recurrence of the problem.

With OLE (since somewhere around before Office 95?) you can embed a working excel sheet into a word document.

And generally that's where the problems start...

There's an alternative view that it's with the existence of OLE that the problems start.

A former (non-technical) manager of another department insisted on using Word for everything, even as a file explorer, and would use Word's file dialog box to move files around and try to open them, and I'd frequently get calls complaining that files were missing, simply because Word kept defaulting to only listing Word documents, not random file extensions. I'd regularly get whole-screen grabs of a small unreadable error dialog box pasted into a word document and emailed to me, where I had to go and see what the error actually said as the tiny blurred thumbnail was illegible.

Worse, she was the type who insisted that her underlings did everything the way she did and would get irate if one of her staff did something different, so this behaviour spread (this was back in the early 2000s so there was a little less existing knowledge).

She banned one of my team from talking to her underlings because he showed them it was quicker to cut/paste with Ctrl-C/V rather than the way she insisted they do it of going to the application's edit menu and choosing the option, famously saying of her staff 'they only have little brains, and it confuses them'. She was very effective at what she did, but utterly useless at managing other people and these days would have been constantly in breach of workplace policies - I'm always amazed she was not once called before any unfair dismissal tribunal or anything.

Had the opposite one place I worked long ago: the Accounts team insisted that they would only use 2 x systems - the Finance system and Excel. So they were constantly ringing us up to complain that Excel was really poor as a word processor which I would counter by saying that I'd tried to use the Finance system for presentations and it just wasn't up to the job.

After a few deeply tedious months when their manager was constantly complaining about how the new system (there wasn't one, they were using the same Excel version - just in a bonkers way) was taking up a vast amount of time they quietly gave up and started using Word for documents - just like everybody else did.

Labor Hire Company?

It's where you get people to work in The Business Factory

The technical term in freelancing is "pimp" although I've also heard of them referred to as "agents".

I did work with a guy - a manager who had been on all the IT courses, who didn't trust excel, so he typed in all the numbers, then got out his calculator to do any calculations.

It was painful to watch.

He really didn't believe the outputs when I extracted data from the ERP system directly into Excel, built out the calculations that I wanted, and got the results in a fraction of the time (I would send him the spreadsheet, and he would look through the ERP system to verify that I had the correct data, then use his calculator to verify the calculations!)

"I did work with a guy - a manager who had been on all the IT courses, who didn't trust excel, so he typed in all the numbers, then got out his calculator to do any calculations."

I once had a VAT inspector like that. He would not believe my computerised accounting (QuickBooks), and insisted on cross checking invoices against register entries etc.