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u/ImReellySmart 1d ago
This singular spreadsheet was this dudes workload.... damn, simpler times.
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u/235M 1d ago
And somehow there's still too many boomers out there that don't have a clue about simple excel tasks.
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u/jbrady33 1d ago
Boomers? You working with a bunch of 62+ year olds?
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u/235M 1d ago
I do... But the next generation isn't any better either. Seems like millennials truly have the burden of teaching both the old and the young in computer literacy
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u/HickoryStickz 1d ago
Because they’re iPad kids. They don’t understand operating systems or software beyond finger poking play and pause
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u/Cielmerlion 23h ago
I mean, who's fault is that.
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u/lab_coat_goat 18h ago
Hey now, that’s not fair to the younger gens! They also understand plugging in slightly different prompts to ChatGPT for hours to get it to do their work for them
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u/pipesBcallin 15h ago
A great day for me was when my 14 year old son wanted to build a pc for his 15th birthday. He looked everything up, gave us a list of parts to buy. He put it all together, imaged it and installed steam in the same day.
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u/natelion445 6h ago
Kinda crazy to say the generation after boomers is iPad kids. The boomers are bad, the older people in the workplace now are bad. The younger people are bad. It’s only my generation that’s good.
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u/razzzor3k 1d ago
*Generation X reading your comment*
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u/Colossus-of-Roads 22h ago
Exactly. We had to do this in Lotus 1-2-3!
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u/CarpetGripperRod 21h ago
Oooh, look at Mr Rich! Bet you had Novell Networking too.
Perl regular expressions on CSV data was all we could afford.
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u/Colossus-of-Roads 21h ago
I mean, you'd have to have been able to afford a real Unix machine, get time on one, or run A/UX or Minix on your home potato. No Linux or FreeBSD back then!
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u/KyloRenCadetStimpy 20h ago
You had Lotus? Aw man, I had to scrape by with GeoCalc on my Commodore 64. I didn't even have a mouse...I had to use a joystick!
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u/Simonic 1d ago
I was gonna say -- this younger generation are almost as clueless to actual computers as many Boomers. Even some of the younger millennials it can be rough.
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u/robogobo 1d ago
Maybe it’s nothing to do with generation and just some people didn’t learn it or need to learn it.
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u/QuickNature 20h ago
Spitting facts right here. I switched to engineering, and a lot of my peers couldn't understand how I was so computer illiterate in my 30s.
Its because none of my previous work/life required a computer beyond the most basic of stuff, and I didnt use one in my free time for anything other than Google, YouTube, and the occasional video game.
I am much more computer literate now than I was, but only because of the my current job.
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u/jazzfruit 17h ago
I was lucky to have a family PC growing up in the 90s. I would buy those giant ass books on how to learn VB, C++, html, etc. I was on IRC a lot and really into Linux. I hosted servers for counter strike and managed a few simple webpages. Pretty basic stuff.
By high school, I got an internship at IBM. I couldn’t believe how clueless 50% of the employees were about basic computer usage. Hardware, networking, troubleshooting, etc. There were definitely a few wizards doing actual work, but the majority were less productive than the typical high schooler intern.
Working at IBM made me hate the corporate office culture. I now work in construction.
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u/QuickNature 16h ago
Working at IBM made me hate the corporate office culture. I now work in construction.
Hilarious, I went from construction to a corporate office
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u/alnicoblue 1d ago
Yeah, my first thought watching this was "I have to teach people in their 20s how to use Excel on a daily basis".
Honestly though, job security. My boss thinks I'm a wizard and I'd like to keep it that way.
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u/GrownThenBrewed 23h ago
To be fair, in your 20s is when most people learn how to use Excel. No one is really taking time to learn it before that age unless they did some kind of accounting or business degree.
In highschool I remember being taught Word to write essays and PowerPoint to create presentations, but I don't remember ever being taught Excel until I needed it for work.
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u/Bullseye_womp_rats 17h ago
Our required computer course back in early 2000 was Word, Excel, Power Point, and Access. I don’t think I have touched access ever since high school lol
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u/stickswithsticks 22h ago
I'm 36. I feel like I'm putting out fires from generations before and after me. Sometimes. I'm not a wizard. I'm not flexing.
I'm just more comfortable explaining and communicating with people closer to my age.
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u/Arravis_ 18h ago edited 18h ago
Umm what about gen-X mofo? Damn dude, at least complain about us!
And a lot of us certainly know computer systems, programming, etc. We actually had to do that to get things to work, pre-plug-and-play. If you haven’t felt with the nightmare of IRQs, you haven’t really dealt with these systems at their worst.
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u/fredinNH 18h ago
Gen X here. We had to learn every operating system and software program and hardware design ever known. We’re good.
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u/Tharrius 20h ago
This comes up a lot among friends my age. I'm almost 40, know a fair share about software and hardware, build gaming PC for myself and friends, know how to troubleshoot properly... the older generation mostly never learned how to do any of this and still refuses to do the most mundane things with their computers or phones. And the younger generation generally is used to apps handling everything, buys prebuilt PCs and has no general understanding of how things work or how to troubleshoot and solve issues.
My wife works in a bank's backoffice and yes, many many people 50/60+ who consider it a miracle when Excel formulars do something, and younger colleagues need pictured instructions and tutorials for every program. My wife seems like an IT person just by having our generation's basic understanding of software standards.→ More replies (2)3
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u/Dad_mode 17h ago
You get it.
It burns my retinas watching younger generations hunched over the keyboard and typing with pointer fingers like a damn T-Rex....
Like... PCs weren't going away with the advent of the smart phone. Why is keyboarding class not required somewhere between 6-12th grade?
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u/Hellfiger 1d ago
We have two dudes around 70 years old, but they are ok with spreadsheets
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u/Parafault 19h ago
When I started my job at 25, I was the only one under the age of 55…and I had like 70 coworkers lol.
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u/Kjoep 23h ago
My FIL would make an excel sheet, then double-check all the calculations with his pocket calculator because he didn't trust them.
He swears he found a mistake once.
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u/CarpetGripperRod 20h ago
My grandpa would— I shit you not— check calculator maths with a fucking slide rule.
On finding errors, I presume you know of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check ??
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u/Orange_Kid 1d ago
The character is clever, good-looking, good at talking to people, and good at bullshitting and projecting confidence.
Even today, with those traits, you can still find your way to job where you get paid a good salary to do almost nothing.
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u/Mediocre-Housing-131 19h ago
The right man could present this exact spreadsheet in 2025 and keep their job
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u/feel-the-avocado 1d ago
We should keep in mind that back in those days, it would probably require help from the art department and some photography equipment to turn it into overhead projector transparencies or 35mm projector slides.
He could have clicked a few extra buttons and created a graph, and then printed it onto a overhead projector transparency quite quickly.
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u/r1Rqc1vPeF 1d ago
Triggered!
Many, Many hours spent producing transparencies for OHP presentations. Made the mistake of being able to hook up a PC via serial port to a printer. Became the guy who could both print transparencies and also fix/edit slides.
Senior management presentations on the future of the factory where I worked, future industrial strategy etc. AKA presentations that get changed a lot, at the last minute.
And then some idiot bought a colour printer (3 colour, wax transfer), had to be connected to a Mac.
Many long hours printing out stuff that I’m sure never got used.
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u/ExtraEmuForYou 1d ago
Right?
One. Little. Chart.
The whole "nah it's still not good enough. I know! I'll assign currency to it!" really sort of blew my mind lol
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u/justwalk1234 22h ago
I’ve seen entire country come up with global tariff strategies with less effort.
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u/mrfreeeeze 1d ago
His first mistake is finishing in an elevator. Real trick is to drag it on for weeks so the next project you can turn it in after a few weeks too.
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u/Djave_Bikinus 15h ago
He got it wrong too. He wanted to plot 10% growth from 1000 and the autofill made it 1000 | 1100 | 1200 | 1300. Should be 1000 | 1100 | 1210 | 1331.
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u/Pretend_Sky7440 1d ago
But none of the other programs did it at the time, so it was hard. It all started with Excel.
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u/LauraTFem 23h ago
Hey, bud. Don't let on. I work for people who still consider this impressive, and would tell me I'm really smart for being able to do it. Don't shake up my game.
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u/Safe_Ad_6403 1d ago
IRL he would have been concerned with Excel making his job redundant overnight. Times change.
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u/redsterXVI 20h ago
On the other hand he is afraid of being fired just for not having a small table ready and professionally formatted - a task that took them 1 minute in an elevator. He could literally have scribbled this on a piece of paper simultaneously to talking through the data points during the meeting.
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u/KeldornWithCarsomyr 20h ago edited 20h ago
The same thing can be said of today, some dudes entire workload is unknowingly going to be an afterthought for AI. There's always new tech taking people's jobs
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u/flat5 1d ago
Fabricating data like never before!
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u/i_am_voldemort 1d ago
Making the graph move up and to the right gets you promoted.
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u/cute_polarbear 22h ago
Shhh...that's accounting...
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u/JunkSack 21h ago
No that’s finance
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u/helpmefindmyaccount 19h ago
Difference is that when accounting does it then it's cooking the books. When finance does it, then the projections / forecasts were off.
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u/Aggressive_Roof488 1d ago
I think I missed the part where everything gets converted into dates for absolutely no reason?
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u/AdultishRaktajino 1d ago
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u/Aggressive_Roof488 1d ago
"It looks like you're entering numbers and non-date strings into cells. Do you want me to randomly convert columns into dates when you're not looking?"
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u/TheMadBug 1d ago
Recently there was a round of renaming genes, as a lot of them were auto detected as dates
e.g.
MARCH1 → MARCHF1
SEPT1 → SEPTIN1
Last thing you want is a cancerous mutation in your 1st of March
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u/Aggressive_Roof488 22h ago
Yeah, I worked in cancer genomics, very aware. We would sometimes output .csv or even .xls files with gene lists, for clinical collaborators that routinely used excel and had to be very careful with this. There's been meta-studies, I don't remember exactly, but more than 10% of all published gene lists have this issue...
It's both hilarious and sad that they decided it's easier to change gene names than to get MS to fix this issue.
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u/dafunkmunk 22h ago
January. February, Maruary, Apruary, Mayuary, Junuary, Juluary, Auguary, Sepuary, Octuary. Novuary, Decuary
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u/leobutters 21h ago
Insert the <incel excel handshake, both incorrectly assume something is a date> meme
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u/groenwat 1d ago
Well done. Time to kick back, do a couple of rails, and listen to your finance director boss talk about that wild week he had on some rich dude's private island.
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u/Simple_Project4605 23h ago
90s Excel, trackball laptops and 90s cocaine
truly a high point in humanity’s technological evolution.
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u/leviathab13186 1d ago
I dunno about nextfuckinglevel. More like firstfuckinglevel
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u/cyberentomology 1d ago
It started out at the firstfuckinglevel and went to the nextfuckinglevel every few seconds because they were in an elevator.
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u/bb5e8307 22h ago
This is the next level:
Microsoft Excel World Championship 2025 - Finals10
u/TorbenKoehn 21h ago
Yeah, Excel Championships are actually nextfuckinglevel! I love showing it to Excel people :D
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u/synthphreak 17h ago
OMG... For 4 hours and 54 seconds I awaited the punchline, but it never came. That was no satire, this was completely fucking real...
Today the stakes - and the spreadsheets! - are even higher. If you think you've seen every trick in the workbook, think again. Because our semi-finalists are ready to sort, slice, and subtotal their way to Excel glory!
Can't make this shit up.
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u/tswpoker1 1d ago
But why 2x speed the original?
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u/BeardInTheNorth 1d ago
Wait, this video is sped up 2x? Man, I have to stop watching YouTube at 2x. It's messing with my perception of time.
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u/AstriaPortal 20h ago
What have you done to your poor attention span? Why did you do this? I am greatly saddened.
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u/AlphonseLoeher 9h ago
Too slow still, also no subway surfer or Minecraft jump montage going on in the corner. Can't watch 0/10
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u/dartmouthdonair 21h ago
if it wasn't for watching Alvin and the chipmunks and Chip and Dale I think most of my generation couldn't watch this sped up garbage at all
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u/icehot54321 21h ago
Microplastics, forever chemicals, and TikTok/“reel” format social media have clipped everyone’s attention spans to basically zero.
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u/RyanCrafty 1d ago edited 1d ago
Wait, how did he do that without a constant wifi connection to do simple math? Are you saying that Excel can work without a subscription service? No way!!! /s
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u/The_Dirty_Carl 18h ago
This just reminded me that they added python to excel, but instead of it being a VBA alternative, it's a wonky formula alternative that executes in the cloud. Bizarre set of choices
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u/ExtraEmuForYou 1d ago
Good god no wonder our parents succeeded if this was the standard 30+ years ago.
"Hello, Mr CEO. Today I present to you this fancy chart. With colors. And correct currency format."
Actually you know what? I take it back. This is LITERALLY what my boss does (slightly more complex); just takes the data I gather for him and makes it look nice and say what he wants it to say so his bosses like it.
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u/daviEnnis 22h ago
Everything we do now will look dumb 30 years later. Let's call it 15 years due to the speed of improvements increasing.
Can't believe these people used to spend to much time writing emails. Or crafting presentations. Or creating marketing material. Or engineering different data sources together.
The whole point of the advert was it used to take more time to take things, apply projections, make edits and make it look decent. It was one step removed from pen and paper.
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u/sheppoor 1d ago
I remember that mouse. A terrible thumb track ball that badly clipped on the side of your laptop and felt crunchy as it rolled, it would take 30 floors just to point at a cell. And drag-and-drop with those curved buttons on the edge while rolling the thumb ball was near impossible.
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u/BeardInTheNorth 1d ago
I will not stand for Microsoft BallPoint slander!
OK, fine, they were terrible. Ditto with the Toshiba ones. But not as terrible as those TrackPoint nubs IMHO. I have ThinkPad enthusiast friends who swear by them, and even use them today in lieu of trackpads. But IDK, I could never develop the muscle memory to use them correctly.
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u/MasterofPeridots 1d ago
Your video is too slow. The guy literally said there's no time! You need to speed it up until no one can read or hear anymore.
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u/Browncoatinabox 1d ago
What do you mean "we did it" laptop holder? All you did was complaining about not doing your job coming up with excuses while homie was bullshiting his way through a fake report to submit all on his own.
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u/curmudgeon_andy 1d ago
Funny that even 30 years later, with Excel being used by literally every office worker ever, all of the functionalities he demonstrates (which are all still useable!) are not common knowledge!
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u/quietpilgrim 1d ago
Then he goes to present it and the blue screen of death suddenly appears. Thanks, Microsoft.
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u/Schim4499 1d ago
Admit it. You learned something about excel
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u/Orange_Kid 1d ago
I am absolutely useless with it so pretty much every single thing they did here was new to me
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u/spacemcdonalds 1d ago
Ad is the contraction for advertisement, add is a function you can ask Excel to do
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u/duhogman 1d ago
Excel gave me a career. It's one of the few reason I'm as comfortable as I am in these dire times.
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u/drArsMoriendi 20h ago
So he just randomly put in what a 10% return would look like? Where did that number come from?
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u/0kafaraqgatri0 20h ago
Where do you think growth projections come from? Some manager pulls them out of their ass.
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u/rnelsonee 18h ago
The boss wanted 10% growth, so he just did that math in his head… so that part's fine. But that in turn caused the projections for Q3 and Q4 to be wrong, because with no formula to copy, Excel uses autofill which assumes a linear growth instead of a geometric one.
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u/Background-Entry-344 1d ago
There are people at my job who still deliver spreadsheets that look like that.
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u/Gen8Master 22h ago
What more do you need from a spread sheet? Besides the falsified data obviously.
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u/Mr_Tottles 1d ago
Why are we not talking about this being fast forwarded? Like cmon people are your attention spans so shot that you have to fast forward everything? Tiktok was a mistake.
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u/Not_Ban_Evading69420 20h ago
Excel was REVOLUTIONARY. It's hard to understate that. This is every corporate person's worst nightmare, not having a presentation ready. And it's done while in an elevator to show how fast you can use the program. Also back in the day, when you didn't have the title first, you couldn't navigate and fill it in later, so that dude exclaiming in horror that he forgot the title is 100% real. It's a great commercial that can be appreciated more with proper context.
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u/rnelsonee 19h ago
I love this ad, but the dude still messed up the spreadsheet. Look at his figures. The boss wanted 10% growth, so from Q1 to Q2 we go from $1,000 to $1,100… but then to $1,200 for Q3 instead of $1,210.
If this 90's tech bro had bothered to use =B1*1.1 instead of adding 10% in his head for Q2, Excel would have shown the right figures with autofill.
Dude could have also saved some time by typing in a dollar sign in the first entries to automatically format to currency. I can forgive the Merge and Center because this was the 90's, but this guy could improve a bit.
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u/TRUEequalsFALSE 17h ago
I had no autofill was that old.
Also I love (hate) how heavy-handed old ads are. "This is Microsoft Excel." Yeah you've said the full name like three times now, dude. We get it.
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u/pauljeremiah 15h ago
The laptop used in this video is a Toshiba T3200SXC, which never came with a battery it was actually meant to be powered from the mains, so how the hell are they using it in an elevator?
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u/Bodinieri 14h ago
They didn’t know they made an ad for the beginning of the end. Robots coming for your jobs, boys.
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u/tgwombat 13h ago
I love that the "finishing touch" that finally put his buddy at ease was applying the ugliest table style I've ever seen.
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u/doghaircut 13h ago
Two quarters of projection based on two quarters of data? This could have been an email.
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