“I was really shocked. I was sleeping in the camper van when two people came back covered in blood. Takahashi-san was almost unconscious at that point and you fell to the floor immediately.”
Was that so? I don’t remember much after getting stabbed in the leg.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Is Saito-san okay?”
“Eh? Are you curious? About Saito-san?”
“No, I’m not curious. Please don’t bring your hobbies to the hospital.”
“Tch…well, that’s fine. Saito-san seems to be in even worse condition than Takahashi-san, so I think he’s still sleeping. But, he’s fine. It’s quite common for workers and Saito-san is used to injuries.”
“When he wakes up, I have to thank him. It would have been bad if Saito-san hadn’t saved me. I wonder why he’s so strong.”
“I believe that it’s a lie when he said he worked for a construction company, he was probably the general manager of a yakuza group.”
It was possible. The term ‘construction company’ certainly fit. But what did it mean to be an Excel worker in the yakuza? What would you use Excel for? A hidden ledger? A list of targets to kill?
Creak.
“Hey, are you awake?”
“No! I didn’t say anything!!”
Saito came in with bandages covering about 60% of his body and on crutches. It was true that his condition was worse than mine, but he was already walking.
“What are you talking about? Well, never mind. Takahashi, how are you doing?”
“I’m alive thanks to you. Thank you very much.”
“It’s alright, it’s just work. You should thank Inoue as well. She drove back while having barely slept.”
“No, no, I’m used to not being able to sleep so it’s fine!!”
Did Inoue drive us back from there? Even though she had hardly slept, she must have had a hard time. I’m a bit nervous about her driving though, so I’m glad I wasn’t awake. Anway, if we’re back, what happend to the quest?
“Um…so what happened with the user and the quest?”
“Right, I’m sorry for the user’s incompetence. The filed became corrupted. To the user, the browser would have crashed. That’s what happens when we can’t handle all the functions.”
“…Is that so, I feel bad for them.”
“It can’t be helped, there are limits to things. Compared to Excel, our processing power is often inadequate. We just don’t have enough workers.”
There were some times where Excel could no longer handle the processing and had to be force closed. It seemed to be a similar case this time.
“What will the user do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they could reduce the amount of data, separate the files, or go back to Excel. Or maybe they could consider how they write their formulas. I don’t think it would have been impossible to process, but it’s up to the user.”
“That’s right. But I used to write functions like that in Excel. How can we handle it?”
“Good question. Dealing with blank likes using IFERROR and IF/ISBLANK is a common practice, but the problem is that a large number of functions will appear even in rows with now data, making it difficult to process them.”
“But, if you don’t do that, when you change the data or increase it, you might end up missing aggregations.”
The reason why you wrote functions into blank lines was in case the amount of data increased later. If you prepared enough cells with the functions written into them, no aggregation would be missed, even if you never touched the function column again. On the other hand, if you didn’t take that into accoutn, you would have to go back and increase the number of cells with the fucntion each time you updated the data. Forgetting to do that and submitting incorrect reports was a rite of passage for people new to the job.
“You’re also someone who can’t shake off the idea of Excel. It would have been great if they had used ARRAYFORMULA.”
What was that? It was a function I had never heard of before.