Sadly, this was the most interesting that that happened this week

Okay, it may have actually happened last week, but that would still make it a highlight. If you don't regularly use Microsoft Excel you can stop reading, as this post will have little meaning to you.

Part of the project I'm working on requires collecting and aggregating a bunch of data from different sources, and then comparing them to each other. In the past this has been done very manually, and it took days or even weeks to compile one page for a monthly review meeting. I figured some automation was in order, so I went to town with all the Excel I learned back in the day (and haven't used in years). I was throwing around VLOOKUPs and INDEX and MATCH and all the greatest hits. It was impressively complex, but I pretty much figured out a system to do what I wanted. It took me about two weeks to do this.

Sadly, the bright people at Microsoft already solved this problem. They call their solution "pivot tables." Redoing the same work using pivot tables took me three mouse clicks. I am not making that up. I had to walk around the building twice to calm down after coming to this realization. I'm an idiot. That said, if Microsoft ever removes that functionality, my spreadsheets are safe.

BTW, I really did just tell a story where the punch line was "All I needed were pivot tables!" Shocker... I'm still single.