So, now working in an office-based job, so using a computer a lot. Specifically, a helluva lot of Excel - Excel 03. It's been a long time since I saw Windows 98 too!
Part of what they hired me the temp for is to update these spreadsheets that track firefighters' training. They're huge, monstrous things each with 40-50 tabs and macros and such... We call them Trackers.
So, the FF who gives me a hand on the service side figured we need a few new ones to deal with the Control guys (the people who answer 999 calls; they're firefighters too). He thought, and I agreed, that it would be easy to copy a random tracker, take off all the info and input the info we want.
...Shows what I know!!
Well, getting it to copy went strangely smoothly, even though 'Save As' was disabled. Editing the new spare tracker was fine. Saving it, also fine.
Closing it? Nope!!
I've never seen a file fail to close before. Open, save, edit, yes, seen those be forbidden... but closing?
I'm so thankful that IT is literally the next office down the corridor. Off I scurried and got the help of a lady who I found had actually built these trackers...two years ago, and her comment was "These things are bloody awful and I want to wipe and redo them!!" I was getting lots of runtime errors, and she revealed to me the mountain of coding behind these things... O.o
Had to fetch her later in the day as the failure to close happened again, with a normal tracker I had just opened to look at the data within!! I found it strangely amusing. I have no idea what I did, if I screwed my permissions or contacts or connections or... But it was all fixed in the end.
The lovely lady has offered to give me some training on the deeper details of these horrible things, seeing that I am now in charge of them. XD This will also, in me still wanting to help the FF in his Control trackers, see me picking up a little Visual Basic - actually useful stuff rather than playing with buttons in Year 9 at school ^^. I said I'm willing to learn, and she was surprised when I asked her for some background beginner reading to prepare for the training on Monday (she lent me a two-inch thick textbook) I've no idea what picking up VB in Excel means in the greater context, buuuuut... it'll help when the trackers fail to close again
Part of what they hired me the temp for is to update these spreadsheets that track firefighters' training. They're huge, monstrous things each with 40-50 tabs and macros and such... We call them Trackers.
So, the FF who gives me a hand on the service side figured we need a few new ones to deal with the Control guys (the people who answer 999 calls; they're firefighters too). He thought, and I agreed, that it would be easy to copy a random tracker, take off all the info and input the info we want.
...Shows what I know!!
Well, getting it to copy went strangely smoothly, even though 'Save As' was disabled. Editing the new spare tracker was fine. Saving it, also fine.
Closing it? Nope!!
I've never seen a file fail to close before. Open, save, edit, yes, seen those be forbidden... but closing?
I'm so thankful that IT is literally the next office down the corridor. Off I scurried and got the help of a lady who I found had actually built these trackers...two years ago, and her comment was "These things are bloody awful and I want to wipe and redo them!!" I was getting lots of runtime errors, and she revealed to me the mountain of coding behind these things... O.o
Had to fetch her later in the day as the failure to close happened again, with a normal tracker I had just opened to look at the data within!! I found it strangely amusing. I have no idea what I did, if I screwed my permissions or contacts or connections or... But it was all fixed in the end.
The lovely lady has offered to give me some training on the deeper details of these horrible things, seeing that I am now in charge of them. XD This will also, in me still wanting to help the FF in his Control trackers, see me picking up a little Visual Basic - actually useful stuff rather than playing with buttons in Year 9 at school ^^. I said I'm willing to learn, and she was surprised when I asked her for some background beginner reading to prepare for the training on Monday (she lent me a two-inch thick textbook) I've no idea what picking up VB in Excel means in the greater context, buuuuut... it'll help when the trackers fail to close again
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