By the time I finished processing the CONCATENATE’s, Saito and Inoue had also finished processing the IMPORTXML’s.
“O-Oh, good job. There weren’t any problems, right?”
Saito asked as he covered his nose. Yes, CONCATENATE stank. There was residue from zombie blood and flesh on me and I wasn’t sure if I could remove the smell even after taking a shower. No one would ever guess that the people inside Google Spreadsheets were being made to do such a stinky, dirty job.
################
The next sheet was much wider and showed no signs of any functions.
“It’s extremely spacious.”
“Takahashi, do you delete rows and columns that aren’t being used in your sheets?”
“Yes, of course.”
A newly created spreadsheet had rows from 1-1000 and columns from A-Z, a total of 26,000 cells. However, a laptop screen could only display 20-30 rows at a time and a little over 10 columns, about 200-300 cells. That meant that humans could only see about 1% of all total cells in a default sheet at a time. What this mean was that most formulas in sheets exchanged for work were only within those cells. Most cells in the default sheet were useless.
With such wasted cells, unexpected data might end up being included that could potentially disrupt functions or calculations. You might accidentally note something down like a doodle or a complaint that you forgot about and the client might see it, causing a problem. Most of all, it also made the file size bigger. That was why Excel experts had the habit of deleting cells they didn’t use.
On a related note, in Excel, three sheets would be created by default when creating a new file: Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3. Deleting sheets you’re not using is a piece of etiquette that is taught to new employees at work, but to be honest, it’s a pain, so I really wished there was only one sheet like with Google Spreadsheets.
“What does that have to do with this quest?”
“Use your brain. The large sheet means that the number of rows has been increased. If so, what is this sheet for then?”
“I see, it’s a sheet for raw data which will be aggregated.”
It was a source data sheet where the source data would be inputted or pasted in so that the aggregated results could be displayed on another sheet. This kind of sheet wasn’t intended for people to look at in the first place. As a result, a huge amount of data that exceeded the range of human visibility, easily exceeding the default 1000 rows, would be placed here. That was what this sheet was for.
“That’s the case. Oh? It’s coming.”
Sensing something, Saito turned around and saw a faint mist like substance begin to drift out of cell A1. The mist swirled around, gradually converging to a single point and becoming thicker. By the time it was a black ball the size of a golf ball, it emitted a strong light. My eyes grew dizzy and my vision went completely white.