Slow Spreadsheets

There are not words to describe how much I used to hate spreadsheets.

I used to do the scheduling for my school. I don’t mean a little bit of scheduling, either. I mean I created the master schedule for what classes every single teacher in the school would teach, when they would teach it, and what students they would have. So not only was I making the school schedule and the teacher schedule, but then I was scheduling all of the students too. This would take pretty much the entire summer (so much for that “teachers get the summer months off” myth). And when I say the entire summer I even mean my time at home, which is why I ended up taking my personal laptop back and forth to work with me ::sigh::

Well, if you’ve never done something like this you’ll have to trust me when I tell you that it takes tons of revisions. I’d think I’d have everything hammered out and the principal would come in and decide that no…really we need to have smaller regular classes here and bigger honors classes there and then I’d have to (not maim him) and redo everything. About halfway into July some of the spreadsheets were taking so long to load and save that I was convinced something was wrong with my computer and that I was going to lose all of the data. Panic attack. Our IT guy looked it over and told me I just needed to defrag the computer. Really? I didn’t have a virus? My computer wasn’t about to die from old age? The files weren’t corrupt? Nope. Just needed to defrag because of all of the constant use and changing. Whew.

First time I defragged, it took forever. But then I got paranoid and did it a few times a week (I said I was paranoid, shoo) and it took no time at all. Best part? Everything sped up and I never lost any information. But I still don’t like spreadsheets….traumatic memories and all

What is your worst spreadsheet story?

Photo Credit Roland

June 16th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in System Performance | (2)