Chapter 28 – The Expert’s Work Does Not Progress

“I had so much free time I started doing yoga.”

That was what Inoue said when I took over. It seemed to be true, I had too much free time. I hadn’t seen a single VLOOKUP. I wondered if there was something going on and if I might regret it if I didn’t do what I could right now. Worrying and thinking about it, I came up with several hypotheses.

– The user was slacking off at work.

– The user was having trouble outputting data

– The user was interrupted while working because someone was talking to them.

It could be any one of them, but the last one was the most likely. That was the case when I had been alive.

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“I can’t seem to do anything with the Excel sheet that Takahashi created, I think it’s broken, so I was wondering if you could take a look.”

A co-worker came over looking grumpy. How could it break if you haven’t done anything with it? What do you mean it’s broken? Give me more information.

“It doesn’t look like there are any errors, what’s broken?”

“The numbers don’t match the reports on the management screen.”

Please say that from the beginning. There’s no way I can guess that. With that in mind, I’ll try to find the cause of the problem. It’s true that the numbers shown on the management screen and in Excel are significantly different. Looking at the function, it was summing up a single column, so it’s definitely just a basic math formula. Looking at the pasted data, I could see that there was a report with a data that wasn’t in the report period displayed on the management screen.

“This, isn’t it the wrong data?”

“Huh, that’s strange. That shouldn’t be the case.”

I don’t know if that was true or not, but the data definitely wasn’t right. You’re just wasting my time.

Something like that would happen again.

“I tried to create a report using Takahashi-san’s Excel, but there are some things that aren’t working properly. Could you please take a look at it?”

That’s impressive. At first glance, the structure and data looked neat and clean. However, the total value numbers weren’t showing up.

=SUMIFS(NumberOfDeliveries, Date, $A3)

I thought that the named ranges should be fine, but when I tried looking for them, no such ranges had been defined.

“NumberOfDeliveries and Date are not defined as named ranges, right? You have to define the ranges, or if you don’t, you have to refer to the cells directly.”

“Ehh, do I have to do something so troublesome? When I looked at Takahashi-san’s sheets, it worked fine even if I wrote in Japanese, so I thought Excel would be able to sort it out on its own. It’s not very useful.”

You were born 10 years too early. But what do you mean, calling it not useful? There is no tool more convinient than this. It’s just a user problem.

##############

As I sat alone with nothing happening, I was reminded of all those painful things. Every day was like that. As a result of that disgust and despair, I ended up coming to this world.

If the user was interupted for just 10 minutes, it would mean that no progress on the sheet would be made in my 4 hour shift. 30 minutes would equal half a day, and nothing would happen during the first shifts that I, Saito, and Inoue were on for.

I guess we needed to be prepared for this to be the case with long term quests. There was nothing I could do anyway. It could be said that Inoue’s decision to start practicing yoga was probably the right answer. I spent my shift doing some body weight training while occasionally looking around and checking the other floors to make sure nothing was wrong.

Nothing really happened until the time came for the next shift.

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