Little random note

[selenay]

I have a feeling that Excel taking ten minutes to calculate all the cells in the spreadsheet that I'm building implies that I've got way too many cells with formulas in.

It's only 3000 rows. With eleven columns. Of VLOOKUPs.

Erm.

I think that I need to figure out another way to do this. 'Cos my super whizzy, 2GB of RAM machine is almost falling over each time the cells calculate, so the rest of the office on their 256MB of RAM may have problems.

Did you know that it's possible to get 100% CPU usage in your task manager that way?

I think that I need a break. I've obviously gone insane. Or possibly I just need an insanity icon.

Comments

[gmul.livejournal.com]

They don't let us have admin level access to our computers.

That's annoying.

And essential in an organisation of any size, unless it's willing to adequately fund its IT department to support almost as many different configurations of PC as there are users. Which they never are. Top-mid-level management are usually the worst, somehow having the time to play with their machines, break them and then demand that someone stops whatever they're doing, whatever and however important it is and fix it. But I digress (in a bitter and twisted fashion even).

Moving to XP and Office 2003 will be requiring a lot of work, mostly behind the scenes that the users won't see. Lots of details to deal with, including migrating everything over from Notes, configuring machine images, migrating workstations, upgrades, making sure drivers are available for all the odd bits of hardware that are floating around and so on. Upgrading a small office from NT4 or 2000 servers to 2003 takes me at least 4 days, maybe 5 if you have to apply too many software updates to the workstations, or too many won't migrate automatically. And that's just changing the server, upgrading the workstations as well would take at least another couple of days, if you're going to make sure all the things like IE favourites and other such little things are retained.

The thing about OpenOffice in Sel's sort of context is that everyone would need to be using it. There'd be little advantage in having some people using it and others not by the time you allow for file interoperability (or lack of) between MSOffice and OpenOffice components, licencing costs, training (yes it's very similar but not exactly the same), macro support, getting people trained up on the helpdesk and so on.

Do excuse me, I may have done some of that rant before. I've not forgotten I was going to find you a Group Policy setting for something, I've just not had a spare moment when I've remembered to do so, sorry!

[paranoidangel]

And essential in an organisation of any size, unless it's willing to adequately fund its IT department to support almost as many different configurations of PC as there are users.

I wasn't suggesting that they necessarily should give everyone admin access to their computers - I know most companies don't. I'm very glad ours do, though, because nothing would ever get done. I am not exaggerating.

The thing about OpenOffice in Sel's sort of context is that everyone would need to be using it.

I actually meant that maybe it would be useful for copying data, doing some calculations then putting it back into excel and saving it. I didn't mean that she should be saving things that way.

I've not forgotten I was going to find you a Group Policy setting for something,

It was to do with the windows updates being set for installing at 4 o'clock and then restarting your computer when you least expect it. But dad had a search and found a program to install that sorted it, so now I can install my updates whenever I like, or most usually, forget and do it when it reminds me when I shut down.