XL: More Than Just A Shirt Size

My boss announced his retirement next year, and when he talked to me about it, he said that he would like for me to become as proficient in Excel as he is.  Now, I'm far from a novice at Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Publisher, but I'm nowhere close to being as good in Excel as my boss.  I don't think that with a month of training I could be as good as he is.  His area of expertise in Excel lies in copying and pasting from screens in our computer system called Syteline into an Excel spreadsheet.  Sure, anyone can copy and paste, but he is the king at tweaking it and using shortcuts and adding many, many formulas in the sheets.  I recently had my Level 1 class, and it was quite an experience.

First of all, the class was at a learning center, that had 3 or 4 large classrooms with computers and a large room full of individual cubicles.  I was in the back of the room on the end in my own little work station complete with not one but two very cool monitors.  The other few people in this room and I wore cool headphones with a microphone so we could talk to our instructors.  I felt like I was in Mission Control at NASA or else playing "Call Of Duty."  But I digress.  As I said, it was quite an experience.

The class had 16 people, and I was the only one in the EST zone; everyone else was an hour behind me in the CST zone.  Due to technical difficulties, the instructor started an hour late, which made us an hour later going to lunch, and ultimately an hour later getting out of there.  I'm a stickler for punctuality and this bothered me.

But going to lunch and going home later didn't bother me nearly as bad as my classmate "Debra" from New Orleans.  When we gave our introductions over our microphones, Debra said she used Excel some.  Debra was being way too modest.  I'm surprised that Debra was even able to find her way to her learning center in New Orleans.  We would have gotten out earlier than what the ending time was originally supposed to be if the instructor hadn't spent 20 minutes out of every hour trying to help Debra with her spreadsheets.  Luckily the instructor was able to connect to our computers remotely and show us how to do something that we didn't understand.  I think he was connected to Debra's computer pretty much most of the time.  

Debra's biggest problem was in the simple tast of grabbing onto a cell by the little spot in the lower left corner and dragging it.  I give major props to the instructor because he never once lost his cool nor did he even sound exasperated at Debra.  I know I wouldn't have had near that much patience.