Helpful Hints When Working With The Excel Technician

Here's some tips for getting the most out of your Excel support experience.
by Mark Henri
Back Up Often
First and foremost, back up your spreadsheets often. I take a lot of calls from distraught customers unable to open or find their spreadsheets and they almost never have happy endings. You can save yourself and the support technician a lot of grief by archiving properly on a regular schedule. This means NOT overwriting last night's back up with tonight's. Backing up once a week to a CD non-rewritable is one of the best ways to protect all your data, not just Excel. Other ways to backup if you have an always on Internet connection is to schedule an automated task that copies the spreadsheet to your web account. Search for WCL_FTP; it's a great command line FTP application and you can schedule it to move files to your server. The other thing that works great is using a scheduled job that creates time stamped copies of an ultra critical spreadsheet in a sub-directory. Viruses pose an even more serious threat to spreadsheets than ever before. Some, like KLEZ, target Excel and Word documents and corrupt them beyond repair. You could consider renaming archived spreadsheets on your hard drive with an *.excel extension so it isn't a target if you do get infected.

Avoid Working From Floppy Disks
Next, don't work from a floppy disk. Excel has an ongoing dialog with a temp file created for each spreadsheet on the drive that the spreadsheet resides on as you work. If you eject a floppy and Excel is still writing to the disk, you're file will be corrupted. Most likely, you won't be able to recover anything from it.

Here's some troubleshooting steps to try if you have a corrupted floppy disk--
  1. Run ScanDisk on the floppy, choose the thorough and automatically fix errors options
  2. Next, run ScanDisk on the floppy, this time choose the standard and automatically fix errors options
  3. Copy the file to the desktop.
  4. Open the workbook in Excel 2002. This version has excellent error recovery built in and can succeed when the older versions fail.
  5. Open it with notepad (or WordPad) and extract as much as you can.
If these fail, you're out of luck.

Avoid Opening Workbooks Across a Network
Working across a network is also risky for the same reason as working from a floppy disk because if the connection drops, it's also instant corruption. If multiple clients are doing links to a spreadsheet across a network, then you absolutely need some sort of incremental backup strategy running every night. As far as I'm concerned, this comes under the heading of using a hammer to put in a screw. The preferred way of doing this sort of thing is to use a database. Access will work, MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server are better choices. When your spreadsheet/database corrupts don't whine about it to a first level technician because you're already getting off cheap. If you did this properly, you'd spend some money and hire a programmer/analyst to setup and maintain the database. In other words, if you bolt two motorcycles together and think you have a car, people are going to stop taking you seriously.

Upgrade means Upgrade
When you buy the upgrade version of Excel, read the label on the side and understand what the qualifying products are. Do not call and start complaining that it's too expensive or that Works should be a qualifying product.

Also, whining that Excel should be included with the Operating system will only make you look like an idiot to the technician. This is like going to the car dealership and buying a big truck with a trailer hitch and then picking it up and asking why there isn't a boat attached to it. A boat and a truck are two separate things.

Another complaint I hear during these calls where the upgrade fails is that Microsoft Office is so expensive and why should it cost more than the OS. Well the OS is one product and office is four to six products in one. There are alternatives to using Microsoft Office but you want it all done for you. Office integrates everything so thoroughly that it makes working with spreadsheets, documents and presentations seamless and simple. If you did like I do, you'd never use word and instead create all your presentations using HTML so it could be put on the web. You'd use MySQL (a sophisticated freeware database) as your database instead of Access and only own a stand alone version of Excel. Also, you'd realize that WordPad (the little word processor that comes with Windows is adequate for most word processing tasks and save the files in RTF (rich text format). By the way, RTF files are readable by all the major word processors and are a much more universal and non-proprietary format than the DOC files that Word produces.

Don't Pony Express The Technician
It's hard enough to instruct a user what to do when explaining difficult concepts or entering long formulas but when the end user is calling to his friend at the computer and relaying what I've said, it's excruciating. Don't be surprised if the technician loses his cool. Instead, get a headset or use a speaker phone if you must.

Don't Attack Microsoft
First off, you're not telling anyone anything they haven't already heard a million times before. In actuality, Microsoft has done more positive things for the computer business and has brought the price of computers and software down to unbelievably low levels. This is because of their basic strategy to get a computer in everyone's hands. The issue was never building a Ferrari but more like building the Volkswagen Beetle.

I remember when I was first starting out. I recognized that the Mac was based on a better chip and had a superior operating system so I looked into developing software for it. For starters, it was an elite club and you had to pay them directly for the developer kit/training and it was thousands of dollars back in the 80's. There were no books on how to write programs for it. The PC on the other hand, had gobs of literature on learning its inner workings, adding hardware to it, and writing software for it. To top it off, everyone was happy to share what they knew.

Also, part of the reason that the Microsoft OS's have been less than robust in the past is that they were always backward compatible with existing software. Windows NT will still run 16 bit applications that I wrote years ago. Mac users, on the other hand, had to upgrade software with each OS release or their old stuff simply wouldn't load. As a programmer, I can attest that introducing whole new OS features and making things work with old stuff is a huge challenge. I considered it the height of customer caring (as well as an excellent marketing strategy) that Microsoft did this--they knew how not to alienate their customer base who had already invested millions of dollars into software to run on their PC's with DOS and then Windows.

Not only that but the PC architecture is open and thousands of hardware makers were given an opportunity to jump in and create hard drives, CD ROM drives, motherboards, modems all without buying any license. Tens of thousands of cottage small businesses exist where there was nothing before. A whole industry was born. Conversely, Mac and others wouldn't allow anyone to make components for their machines; consequently, they had a true monopoly on their system and would only let the beautiful people into the party. It's ironic that their ads in the 80's made themselves out to be the bearers of freedom when they were and still are, a totalitarian regime. Next time you see some Mac person blasting off about the superiority of their system, realize that they are the religious right of the computer world.


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