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Not News
Life, an excel workbook
By FBSilveira
17 October 2006
First time sharing my work online, so please go easy people.


Life,an excel workbook.


An excel sheet to many is a tool that helps manage their daily work ,be it providing accounting figures, tonnage reports or even a little soccer team. It can even go so far as be a platform for many office games that are known to pass a lot of those extra overtime hours.
However, little do people know how similar an excel sheet can be to life.
Note: If you find this to be too low brow thinking for you esteemed intellect, then please exit the application immediately, otherwise scroll down.

Rows & Columns:
How much we accomplish in our lifetimes is limited to the dreams and efforts put in. And of course how long we live!
In other words, we have nearly an endless amount of time on our hands to achieve those impossible dreams, and yet we chose to restrain ourselves from utilizing all the time we have been given and spend it worrying about the past or tomorrow. This in itself could be the 65,536 rows or the 256 columns an excel sheet provides us. Is this limited? Yes it is! But how many could actually say that all those 1, 67, 77,216 cells are used in what business guru’s today define as “productive ways”.
Can’t think of anybody having the data nor the manpower or the expertise to actually utilize all those rows & columns. That does not however mean that cells don’t exist.
It’s just that the common man does not use it. Then again there are those who invest the time, patience and intellect in fully utilizing those cells, those who chose to achieve something seemingly impossible given every stepping stone they can.
Not many would agree with this blatant comparison between the number of cells in an excel sheet and the years in a human being’s life, but it is an objective view.
These people are free to exit the application at any time.

Sorting:
Moving on, an excel sheet provides users the ability to sort a number of values depending on the users requirement. This is usually done to organize large chunks of data in what would seem appropriate to the end user. Do I dare say that we have large chunks of events taking place in our day-to-day life? Events that directly or indirectly impact our surroundings and ultimately our behaviour. We chose to sort these events based on their importance. However do keep in mind that ‘sorting’ is left entirely on personal decisions.
We might chose to sort the following in descending order meaning we classify the highest value as the most important and then move on to less important events.
-Personal Work, Party, Office Work, Friends, Family-
Might not seem like the most ideal sorting, but I do ‘personally’ believe that my personal work comes first followed by a bit of partying and so forth. Self-centered, maybe but I am only associating not trying to preach a perfect life.
At this point of time please remember to save the file.

If by now you cannot see the similarities between the two please by all means go ahead and delete the above from your hard disks and yes, you may quit the application.
But I should say quitting so soon does imply lack of character. Not judging just commenting.
On the other hand if you find this entertaining scroll down.

Reviews

Written by Snodlander (501 comments posted) 17th October 2006
I had a colleague that was outraged that he could not have more than 64K rows in a spread sheet, as he could not see every line item that we had sold that week. 
 
Of course that's what you get when working with old software. The most recent versions have many more possible rows. The problem with having so many rows, though, is that the information gets lost in the mass of data. I find I can accomplish much more if I limit my choices and concentrate on just a couple of rows at a time. This is why successful managers are those that can summarise data in pivot tables. 
 
But of course, this is all lost on someone that doesn't use spreadsheets.
All very well...
Written by Talisker (1326 comments posted) 19th October 2006
Clever etc... but a tad off-topic methinks? 
 
Oli
Interesting thought...
Written by JourneyAtNight (314 comments posted) 19th October 2006
...and a good read, although I can only really take your word for it since word processing is about the only thing I can manage without having a nervous break down! I tend to keep my distance from spreadsheets etc. 
 
Enjoyed this. 
 
Take Care. 
 
E x 

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