God, I Cannot Wait to Overcomplicate This Spreadsheet

Power on your PCs, my gentle users, because I just found a fresh Excel file to overcomplicate. Hoo boy, I can’t wait to rework every cell of “Company Staffing.xlsx.”

Most peons at this company think a spreadsheet is just a tool to create a budget. Not me. Not us. You see, there’s one of us in every organization. Though it’s nowhere in our job descriptions, we spend hours crafting Gordian knots of obscure Excel features so that even the simplest files become unrecognizable monstrosities.

Before we do anything with these measly kilobytes, we need to duplicate this file. Several times. Then we add an underscore, “NEW,” and a different numbering convention. The filename should evoke the image of an overbaked Feast of Assumption turducken.

There. We’re ready to open “Company Staffing_NEW_FINAL_003.xlsx.”

Sweet mother of Steve Ballmer, we have only three columns here: “Name,” “Hire date,” and “Salary.” Time to really balloon this “dataset.” With one well-spent afternoon, I can 5X this amateur foray into spreadsheet-making and split that puny “Name” column into “First name,” “Nickname,” “Mother’s maiden name,” “Middle name,” and “Surname.” Have to make some educated guesses for most of these values, of course. God, I obfuscate so much for this company.

These greenhorns are so lucky to have a power-user like me. No one asked, but I’m going to add a Pivot Table. Don’t know what that is? It’s just an advanced feature I learned from one of my many yellowed manuals that will make looking at this list feel like lifting Russian nesting dolls. Only under each doll lie increasingly larger horned dolls, with monospaced-font tattoos of VLOOKUP function incantations.

When I’m done, the whole thing will be the spreadsheet-equivalent of a Picasso. Except instead of having one crooked nose, you get twenty misshapen noses along with a bunch of unnecessary ways of sorting and filtering the noses.

Speaking of fine art, the newbie who gave me this canvas didn’t pick a theme. Holy guacamole, I am so excited to click on that “Layout” tab. I’m thinking fuchsia and teal zebra stripes for the row backgrounds. Ah, that’s better.

My coworkers are really going to be late when I fire this baby off in an email two minutes before our next all-hands meeting. They always need a lot of time to process my changes.

Ugh, the boss keeps asking to meet with me and HR. I wish she realized I was deep in the weeds, making this dim doc into Frankenstein’s monster of Excel. She doesn’t even realize that once I’m done, I’ll be the only one who can maintain this thing.

Geez, I almost forgot to freeze one of the columns for no reason. Let’s go with “Hire date.”

Almost done revamping the look of this number dump. But we need more columns. I yearn to see the triple alphanumeric cell name AAB:012 in all its glory.

If I play my cards right, people are going to have to scroll so far horizontally that their wrists cramp from dragging their way across the screen.

Whoa, I found another tab. “Planned Layoffs – Sheet 2.” Hey, why’s my severance pay “#VALUE!”?