Family tree

I love spreadsheets. They make certain sorts of information so much clearer and more usable. I got my hands on my first one (Framework) in 1986 and created lots that I didn't really need (the petrol consumption of my then Landrover, for example) just so I could find out how they worked. As well as making manipulation of data easier, they also help me work out where my thinking is missing something. If I tabulate a problem and there's an empty cell, it prompts me to ask why. There may be a good reason, but there may be something I haven't considered.

I didn't get to use Lotus123 until 1990, by which time it was eight years old and fairly widely used in offices, but it wasn't that hard to switch from one to another. Excel won the duel that waged for a few years between those two and I've been doing all sort of things with Excel ever since including, uselessly, making the cells tiny and filling them with different colours to create a pointilliste picture of hills, fields, a river running through with the odd cow or two. Just because I could.

The one bottom middle is the one I used for this series of blips and yes, I have used them to make family trees.

Many years later I knew that Secondborn would love them and I gently tried to encourage her to look. Nope. Not happening.

But in her last job she took to spreadsheets and created an elaborate rota, colour-coded by department, with drop-down menus for staff to use easily and quickly to show when they were In, WFH, Training, On Leave, having a Non-Working Day, or off Sick. The cells automatically changed colour depending on whether people were in the building or not and among other things it checked that there were enough staff in the building on any one day.

I haven't said this here before, but my lovely new employer is her lovely ex-employer (she found the job ad for me) and it turns out that I am now in charge of maintaining her spreadsheet. Her abilities have leapfrogged mine, so this evening she came round to show me how it all works. Together we mended the template that has got corrupted since she left. I will be protecting some of the cells so that doesn't happen again, and will be adding a formula or two to provide a bit more information.

She was thrilled to bits that her baby would be looked after and I was thrilled to bits to learn some things about Excel that I didn't know.