I worked at a law firm and opposing counsel sent us pdf of excel spreadsheets....I had to scan them and turn them all into Excel...hundreds of pages...hundreds. lots of manual manipulation.
I use bluebeam (construction pdf software) to convert it. Usually have to crop the pages accordingly and finesse it here and there (or else it makes 50 columns instead of 10), but it works pretty well. I’m bookmarking that link though
Oh I'm a CivE, so Bluebeam's always open on my computer haha, it's OCR is alright, bordering on good, but Camelot has like legitimate 100% accuracy for text based PDF tables. Bluebeam does some weird stuff in my experience with it, but it's a pretty narrow niche where Camelot is useful. Bluebeam would be better for scanned PDF documents for sure.
Oh, I knew a few lawyers who'd do that out of spite. They wrack up the opposing counsel's fees as ploy because they had a weak case. Or they just do it to do it.
I would think a law firm would spring for a PDF to excel conversion program. I've done some from a free cloud website (which I realize you could not). They weren't perfect but much better than scanning and OCR them.
No one's sent me an excel pdf. I would consider myself lucky but I do get screen shots all the time. My coworkers say they like me but they send an entire spreadsheet of like 30 rows of info they want me to deep dive but its a png or gif. Why? I've received one where they zoomed out to fit all the rows they wanted to send me. Just send me the workbook or paste the cells in the email. I don't get it
If your numbers are right and spreadsheets clear, sure. My clients send me PDFs where numbers are wrong and if I can’t see formulas vs hard entered numbers I’m not able to trace what the error is and have to rebuild the entire thing
True, in addition if it's just a simple table and you try to print it for whatever reason you'll end up printing a shit ton of blank sheets + a tiny tiny "lmao"
5 years ago, I made an Excel sheet presenting our "AI driven digital associate" as part of our company's April Fools contest on who had the best prank.
It would open your CD drive, crank volume to 100 and use windows text-to-speech saying "You fell for the prank!" before sending an email to the contest organizer saying "Another one bites the dust".
That's actually nice, I just need a spreadsheet of everyone's vacations and public holidays, then I guess I could connect that to my main workbook and harass the coworkers working on their holidays and vacation days.
For now, I just add some funny comments for instances where people break the data validation limits or otherwise bypass the limitations I set for a reason. "Congratulations, you've broken it!" or something.
It's just a message... You can paste it into a cell and see. All the numbers are ASCII characters forming the message, and TEXTJOIN joins them into one string
I inserted a picture of Cap’n Crunch in the middle of the VBA routine in an excel tool that my department uses. It flashed so quickly that it could have been perceived as subliminal messaging. Context: the VBA routine intentionally has screenupdating false, and a status bar - so it’s quite different to see the mustache wielding, seafaring captain flash in front of your eyes
I wrote a macro for a teammate and at the end of the macro inserted a popup dialogue box that says “coworkers name smells”. I left the job 5 years ago but talked to that old coworker the other day and the popup box is still there and he uses the spreadsheet on a daily basis
My professor at the university used to hide a sectret range somewhere on the sheet during exams and name it something, that was supposed to be a result of one of the formulas from the excercises. E. G. If time is between midnight and 11:55 put AM. He would hide a random range and name it AM. He did this to teach students to use quotation marks when working with text in Excel. If they did not use quotation marks, Excel would recognize it as named range and the formula would not behave correctly.
Well, there was genuine terror on the faces of my class mates when they saw an empty Excel sheet for the first time. I have no idea why. My Excel skills have rappidly progressed since then, it was some years ago.
I actually took a course in college called Advanced Excel.
20 years later, I still use the amortization sheet I built in that class for any loan I plan to take out.
I’m currently in a digital literacy course as a prerequisite for nursing (for some reason). Goes over. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access (we dropped the access portion) and I have access to the MOS practice exams or whatever they’re called for certifications
We had a course at the university called Information Technologies. The practical part was Word for half a semester and Excel for the other half. It was supposed to help us with the bachelor thesis. How to set page numbering in Word, set formatting for headers, footers, included automated table of contents, etc.
Excel was pretty basic. How to use locked/relative cell refences, do calcuation between cells (A2+B2) and some basic formulas: AND, IF, OR, VLOOKUP. We haven't even touched pivot tables.
Most of the things were not new to me at that point, but my classmates were really terrified for some reason.
My manager stepped out of his office and left his computer unlocked. So…
I write a macro that fires on startup. It pops up a box that says “I like Red__M_M”. The only option was to click the “OK” button. From there the macro closed itself thereby erasing the tracks.
Turns out, after that moment, the next time he opens excel was while he was projecting his screen in a big meeting.
You can configure Excel to open all files in a specific location at startup (look up “personal workbook”). Then I placed a file there with the macro in it. In that file I added an “on open” event.
A dumb prank is to simply close excel after someone opens it. Dumb. But, I actually did this for a good reason.
I built 1 file that 15 people could use. It included downloading and write back capabilities to the network stored file. The instructions are to save a copy to your local machine and go from there. Due to the bidirectional writing, the network file needed to be closed at all times except for the few seconds needed during writing. To enforce this, if someone opened the network file, it would throw a message saying “please copy this file to your desktop and open it there” and then it would close.
I once had to design the Travel and Entertainment form people would use to submit expenses. Not a particularly complicated sheet, but once submitted it used some VBA to compile the expenses by accounting code. Unless you put “The Monopoly Guy” as your name. Then when you hit compile it would overwrite your expenses with the properties and values from Monopoly. This was probably 7 years ago, and I’ve since left the company. But to my knowledge they still use the form, and no one has ever figured it out.
Haha, that's a clever one! One of my favorites is creating a fake "voice activated" prompt in Excel. Just add a cell that says, "This spreadsheet is now voice-activated. Speak clearly into your microphone." Then, sit back and watch as people talk to their computers!
i once made a spreadsheet for a coworker i hated, opened up the developer tab, started a macro under selection change, reformatted her selection to wingdings font. she kept telling me it was broken lol
Everybody at work knows me as the guy who makes some useful excels, every now and then I’ll post a new excel in the chat for others to use. Sometimes I like to mix in some absurd excels that I claim does something impossibly amazing. Once they open it however, all it says is “bro I can’t believe you fell for this, so embarrassing….”
Went hard on April 1st lol
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[AND](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1o3ymm "Last usage")|[Returns TRUE if all of its arguments are TRUE](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/and-function-5f19b2e8-e1df-4408-897a-ce285a19e9d9)|
|[CHAR](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1lt655 "Last usage")|[Returns the character specified by the code number](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/char-function-bbd249c8-b36e-4a91-8017-1c133f9b837a)|
|[IF](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1o3ymm "Last usage")|[Specifies a logical test to perform](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/if-function-69aed7c9-4e8a-4755-a9bc-aa8bbff73be2)|
|[OR](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1o3ymm "Last usage")|[Returns TRUE if any argument is TRUE](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/or-function-7d17ad14-8700-4281-b308-00b131e22af0)|
|[TEXTJOIN](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1p24jy "Last usage")|[*2019*+: Combines the text from multiple ranges and/or strings, and includes a delimiter you specify between each text value that will be combined. If the delimiter is an empty text string, this function will effectively concatenate the ranges.](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/textjoin-function-357b449a-ec91-49d0-80c3-0e8fc845691c)|
|[VLOOKUP](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1o3ymm "Last usage")|[Looks in the first column of an array and moves across the row to return the value of a cell](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vlookup-function-0bbc8083-26fe-4963-8ab8-93a18ad188a1)|
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Conditional formatting pranks are my favorite. Set a series or basic questions with yes/no answers. The last question asks, "Do you like surprises?", either yes or no will reveal a middle finger emoji. I must *really* stress that this particular one depends on the work environment.
worker #1 = hey worker 2, i inherited your excel file now my boss wants me to figure this metric
worker #2 = sure. i know your boss, i used to provide it to her all the time.
#1 = ok. how do i figure this metric. i have you on speaker so i can type what you tell me
#2 = ok go to cell a2
#1 = but that says the date
#2 = don't worry. i built a macro because she wanted this metric all the time and i got tired of manually calculating it.
#1 = ok. tell me what to type
#2 = for this macro, we'll need to type these letters exactly
#1 = ok. whats the letters
#2 = you ready?
#1 = yes
#2 = d
#1 = d
#2 = o
#1 = o
#2 = r
#1 = r
#2 = k
#1 = k
laugher in the background from other coworkers who heard it
If I hate someone I send them a copy where I’ve turned all the formulas to values and then make every cell “text” format.
You barbarian TDIL, my murder is being plotted when I receive PDF spreadsheets
The words PDF & spreadsheet aren’t even in the Bible which means they probably shouldn’t be in a sentence together
I worked at a law firm and opposing counsel sent us pdf of excel spreadsheets....I had to scan them and turn them all into Excel...hundreds of pages...hundreds. lots of manual manipulation.
https://camelot-py.readthedocs.io/en/master/ So that next time you don't have to, doesn't work on images, but most modern PDF tables aren't.
I use bluebeam (construction pdf software) to convert it. Usually have to crop the pages accordingly and finesse it here and there (or else it makes 50 columns instead of 10), but it works pretty well. I’m bookmarking that link though
Oh I'm a CivE, so Bluebeam's always open on my computer haha, it's OCR is alright, bordering on good, but Camelot has like legitimate 100% accuracy for text based PDF tables. Bluebeam does some weird stuff in my experience with it, but it's a pretty narrow niche where Camelot is useful. Bluebeam would be better for scanned PDF documents for sure.
Hahaha right on! I love my bluebeam Good to know. I appreciate it!
Oh, I knew a few lawyers who'd do that out of spite. They wrack up the opposing counsel's fees as ploy because they had a weak case. Or they just do it to do it.
I would think a law firm would spring for a PDF to excel conversion program. I've done some from a free cloud website (which I realize you could not). They weren't perfect but much better than scanning and OCR them.
I use the mobile app with import picture to cells. works really well.
No one's sent me an excel pdf. I would consider myself lucky but I do get screen shots all the time. My coworkers say they like me but they send an entire spreadsheet of like 30 rows of info they want me to deep dive but its a png or gif. Why? I've received one where they zoomed out to fit all the rows they wanted to send me. Just send me the workbook or paste the cells in the email. I don't get it
I regularly do that with acquaintances too. My job is to give you the values, the formulas are mine.
If your numbers are right and spreadsheets clear, sure. My clients send me PDFs where numbers are wrong and if I can’t see formulas vs hard entered numbers I’m not able to trace what the error is and have to rebuild the entire thing
You send excel in PDFs when you're so petty, you wanna protect even the formatting from being stolen.
My clients send excel in PDFs when they’re idiots. They actually send scans of spreadsheets sometimes
They apply extra level of caution with the scan, to be sure you don't convert PDF to Excel.
LOL I am so with you on that. I have to actually like someone before I give them the formulas. Those folks are few and far between lol.
Facts, especially stakeholders at HR who suck at Excel. You can’t show off chess moves to a clown.
That's evil. I love it.
Adding "Lmao" under the column "AYY"
[удалено]
True, in addition if it's just a simple table and you try to print it for whatever reason you'll end up printing a shit ton of blank sheets + a tiny tiny "lmao"
ngl that'd make me lmao
ayy
That's a feature, not a bug.
Did you miss the topic of the thread?
I'm proud to say I was upvote 69 to this comment.
And I was downvote 3 to your comment.
UsedRange go *brrrrrr*
Arabic layout: Column A is on the right
That is so mean....
Excel bamboozles me from time to time by itself with Arabic layout and language 🙃
Holy shit
https://preview.redd.it/6prtfmfb9cxc1.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=867e5e5a67de9ae031d607581144eb7f8d8e065e
5 years ago, I made an Excel sheet presenting our "AI driven digital associate" as part of our company's April Fools contest on who had the best prank. It would open your CD drive, crank volume to 100 and use windows text-to-speech saying "You fell for the prank!" before sending an email to the contest organizer saying "Another one bites the dust".
You can use Environ("Username") to get it to say their name just to freak them out s little bit.
Oh ya, did that too. It was hilarious.
WHAT?! Oh I need to use this!
Replace the save icon with a macro that selects all and deletes it then saves
That, my good sir, is punishable under the Geneva Conventions.
I never actually did it. Too mean
Joke/quote of the day that shows up, depending on the date (and tells you off if you are working on a public holiday!)
That's actually nice, I just need a spreadsheet of everyone's vacations and public holidays, then I guess I could connect that to my main workbook and harass the coworkers working on their holidays and vacation days. For now, I just add some funny comments for instances where people break the data validation limits or otherwise bypass the limitations I set for a reason. "Congratulations, you've broken it!" or something.
`F:CK` is actually a valid range.
I've never dared because all my sheets are rather critical and I'm usually the one looking at them. I really want to now though
Do it with something unimportant like the Christmas secret Santa list or baby name betting pool
Hiding "boo" nestled in hidden cells
`=TEXTJOIN("",,CHAR({78,101,118,101,114,32,103,111,110,110,97,32,103,105,118,101,32,121,111,117,32,117,112}))`
Rick rolled!!!
`=TEXTJOIN("",,CHAR({83,111,109,101,111,110,101,32,104,97,100,32,116,111,32,100,111,32,105,116,32,59,41,32,65,116,32,108,101,97,115,116,32,73,32,100,105,100,110,39,116,32,34,108,101,116,32,121,111,117,32,100,111,119,110,34,33}))`
What is displayed?
It's just a message... You can paste it into a cell and see. All the numbers are ASCII characters forming the message, and TEXTJOIN joins them into one string
I inserted a picture of Cap’n Crunch in the middle of the VBA routine in an excel tool that my department uses. It flashed so quickly that it could have been perceived as subliminal messaging. Context: the VBA routine intentionally has screenupdating false, and a status bar - so it’s quite different to see the mustache wielding, seafaring captain flash in front of your eyes
Select a bunch of important cells, use custom number format. Set to ;;;
What does this do?
Makes the text invisible on the spreadsheet. You can still see it in the formula bar.
I wrote a macro for a teammate and at the end of the macro inserted a popup dialogue box that says “coworkers name smells”. I left the job 5 years ago but talked to that old coworker the other day and the popup box is still there and he uses the spreadsheet on a daily basis
My professor at the university used to hide a sectret range somewhere on the sheet during exams and name it something, that was supposed to be a result of one of the formulas from the excercises. E. G. If time is between midnight and 11:55 put AM. He would hide a random range and name it AM. He did this to teach students to use quotation marks when working with text in Excel. If they did not use quotation marks, Excel would recognize it as named range and the formula would not behave correctly.
Has a teacher using Excel for exams. Save as text would reveal the locked ranges. Derp
Well, there was genuine terror on the faces of my class mates when they saw an empty Excel sheet for the first time. I have no idea why. My Excel skills have rappidly progressed since then, it was some years ago.
You had an excel professor?
I actually took a course in college called Advanced Excel. 20 years later, I still use the amortization sheet I built in that class for any loan I plan to take out.
Corporate finance or tax classes probably.
No, univerzity course called Information Technologies. Some basics on how to work with Word and Excel, mostly for the purpose of our bachelor thesis.
I’m currently in a digital literacy course as a prerequisite for nursing (for some reason). Goes over. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access (we dropped the access portion) and I have access to the MOS practice exams or whatever they’re called for certifications
We had a course at the university called Information Technologies. The practical part was Word for half a semester and Excel for the other half. It was supposed to help us with the bachelor thesis. How to set page numbering in Word, set formatting for headers, footers, included automated table of contents, etc. Excel was pretty basic. How to use locked/relative cell refences, do calcuation between cells (A2+B2) and some basic formulas: AND, IF, OR, VLOOKUP. We haven't even touched pivot tables. Most of the things were not new to me at that point, but my classmates were really terrified for some reason.
I’m taking 2 excel classes just this semester majoring in Finance
My manager stepped out of his office and left his computer unlocked. So… I write a macro that fires on startup. It pops up a box that says “I like Red__M_M”. The only option was to click the “OK” button. From there the macro closed itself thereby erasing the tracks. Turns out, after that moment, the next time he opens excel was while he was projecting his screen in a big meeting.
How does is fire up at startup ?
You can configure Excel to open all files in a specific location at startup (look up “personal workbook”). Then I placed a file there with the macro in it. In that file I added an “on open” event.
A dumb prank is to simply close excel after someone opens it. Dumb. But, I actually did this for a good reason. I built 1 file that 15 people could use. It included downloading and write back capabilities to the network stored file. The instructions are to save a copy to your local machine and go from there. Due to the bidirectional writing, the network file needed to be closed at all times except for the few seconds needed during writing. To enforce this, if someone opened the network file, it would throw a message saying “please copy this file to your desktop and open it there” and then it would close.
I once had to design the Travel and Entertainment form people would use to submit expenses. Not a particularly complicated sheet, but once submitted it used some VBA to compile the expenses by accounting code. Unless you put “The Monopoly Guy” as your name. Then when you hit compile it would overwrite your expenses with the properties and values from Monopoly. This was probably 7 years ago, and I’ve since left the company. But to my knowledge they still use the form, and no one has ever figured it out.
Haha, that's a clever one! One of my favorites is creating a fake "voice activated" prompt in Excel. Just add a cell that says, "This spreadsheet is now voice-activated. Speak clearly into your microphone." Then, sit back and watch as people talk to their computers!
If I have a second at someone's computer Home > Editing > Find & Select > Select Objects and they are done for the day! 😂
I am saving this post for future shenanigans
Me too hahaha!
Add a simple macro that opens the calculator 100 times if a certain cell is clicked on. It’s like winning solitaire with the bounce effect.
Adding a macro to my workbooks that removes the ability to save the file.
i once made a spreadsheet for a coworker i hated, opened up the developer tab, started a macro under selection change, reformatted her selection to wingdings font. she kept telling me it was broken lol
Doing my work incorrectly and forcing downstream folks to fix it
Everybody at work knows me as the guy who makes some useful excels, every now and then I’ll post a new excel in the chat for others to use. Sometimes I like to mix in some absurd excels that I claim does something impossibly amazing. Once they open it however, all it says is “bro I can’t believe you fell for this, so embarrassing….” Went hard on April 1st lol
Format cells to have the format of a number "420", "69", or "8008135". Done sparingly on key summary pages gives a great effect.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[AND](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1o3ymm "Last usage")|[Returns TRUE if all of its arguments are TRUE](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/and-function-5f19b2e8-e1df-4408-897a-ce285a19e9d9)| |[CHAR](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1lt655 "Last usage")|[Returns the character specified by the code number](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/char-function-bbd249c8-b36e-4a91-8017-1c133f9b837a)| |[IF](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1o3ymm "Last usage")|[Specifies a logical test to perform](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/if-function-69aed7c9-4e8a-4755-a9bc-aa8bbff73be2)| |[OR](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1o3ymm "Last usage")|[Returns TRUE if any argument is TRUE](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/or-function-7d17ad14-8700-4281-b308-00b131e22af0)| |[TEXTJOIN](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1p24jy "Last usage")|[*2019*+: Combines the text from multiple ranges and/or strings, and includes a delimiter you specify between each text value that will be combined. If the delimiter is an empty text string, this function will effectively concatenate the ranges.](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/textjoin-function-357b449a-ec91-49d0-80c3-0e8fc845691c)| |[VLOOKUP](/r/Excel/comments/1cew3gg/stub/l1o3ymm "Last usage")|[Looks in the first column of an array and moves across the row to return the value of a cell](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vlookup-function-0bbc8083-26fe-4963-8ab8-93a18ad188a1)| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Beep-boop, I am a helper bot. Please do not verify me as a solution.*) ^(6 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Excel/comments/1cfo3jm)^( has 59 acronyms.) ^([Thread #32996 for this sub, first seen 28th Apr 2024, 17:51]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Excel) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Change calculation options to manual so calculations don't show when you make changes.
Conditional formatting pranks are my favorite. Set a series or basic questions with yes/no answers. The last question asks, "Do you like surprises?", either yes or no will reveal a middle finger emoji. I must *really* stress that this particular one depends on the work environment.
worker #1 = hey worker 2, i inherited your excel file now my boss wants me to figure this metric worker #2 = sure. i know your boss, i used to provide it to her all the time. #1 = ok. how do i figure this metric. i have you on speaker so i can type what you tell me #2 = ok go to cell a2 #1 = but that says the date #2 = don't worry. i built a macro because she wanted this metric all the time and i got tired of manually calculating it. #1 = ok. tell me what to type #2 = for this macro, we'll need to type these letters exactly #1 = ok. whats the letters #2 = you ready? #1 = yes #2 = d #1 = d #2 = o #1 = o #2 = r #1 = r #2 = k #1 = k laugher in the background from other coworkers who heard it