(no subject)

[randomdreams]

When I get home and sit on the couch, if I'm not petting Monty enough she jumps around until she has her front paws on the couch arm and her rear ones on the couch on the other side of me, so she can smash her barn door body sideways into my face while hitting me with her tail.
This is a great location for seeing that she has another big lump forming under one of her nipples, so it might be back to the vet for breast cancer round two.

I have this charming coworker, my closest friend at work, and happily we often get handed two halves of the same project so we work together a lot. He wants a particular area investigated, so I go design a bunch of tests and run them, and write up the results, and send them to him.
When I do this, I send him an excel spreadsheet, that is titled with what we've decided to call the test, and the tabs of the spreadsheet are labeled with what part of the test they contain, including one labelled "results and plots" that has only relevant information on it, graphically presented. In the email I mention the name of the test, what I tested, and where in the spreadsheet it's located.
I send him one of these pretty much every other day for a month and a half.
About once a week he's all "oh hey do you have any data on that one test we did last week?"
So I send him the same spreadsheet, with a paragraph in the email specifically pointing out where it is.
About twenty minutes later he'll stop by my office with his laptop and say "can we go over this, and you can show me where the data is and how to interpret it?"
So I think I am doing something drastically wrong in how I present data, but I'm not yet sure what it is. When I ask him he always says "oh, what you send is great: all the stuff I need is in there." But I'm pretty sure that's not right.

Comments

[rebeccmeister]

Are you sure it isn't just that he knows that it's faster to stop by and ask as compared to carefully reading through e-mails and sorting through old files?

[randomdreams]

That's likely. I hope that's the case.

[amaebi]

I bet that's it.

[rhiannonstone]

This. My closest-but-somewhat-more-senior peer at work is like this, and recently actually said as much when I asked him if he'd had a chance to read [complex data calculation recommendation] and give me a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. No, he said, I had not. I was just going to ask you in person, because it's easier.

I still feel like that means I could present better, but I also know it's sometimes just easier to talk it through in person.

[randomdreams]

Well, to be fair, I am required to make the reports so I will continue, and maybe it's just easier for him this way.

[zyzyly]

Maybe he just likes to come by and talk.

[randomdreams]

Well, that's definitely true, but we talk all the time anyway.

[malterre]

my guess as well

[shalpacafarm]

Food On Other People’s desk syndrome?

[randomdreams]

No food on mine. I'd eat it. Well, except the huge pile of lemons today.

[altamira16]

I think it can be hard to go back and search through tabs later even though it is convenient to have everything in tabs the first time you are dealing with things potentially.

I cannot tell if his inability to find the data is due to his own disorganization or that your organization method is not working for him.

[randomdreams]

Yeah, the my organization method isn't working for him is what I'm worried about.

[sara]

I have a co-worker who's been griping for YEARS about how nobody reads his (admittedly very well-done! and chronically under-read!) documentation.

Last fall I was putting together a training that he was presenting at, and his first question was, "Where is it?"

"That's in the email I sent you. There's a Google Maps link so you can go right there with your phone."

"Oh. And what time does it start?"

"On the agenda PDF I...just attached to the email." By this point I am laughing quite hard.

"Do I need to bring a lunch?"

"That's in paragraph three there. See, that paragraph that starts with 'Bring to Training' in bold?"

"Oh my God."

"Next time you want to complain about how nobody ever reads the documentation I'm just going to laugh at you. Actually, I may laugh at you between now and the next time you complain about how nobody ever reads the documentation."

[randomdreams]

I love this. If someone did this to me it would be deserved.

[sara]

He's gotten a lot better about walking people through the documentation since then.

We are both doing support on an ArcMap toolbox he wrote and it often consists of sitting on the phone and having people screenshare while we read them the help files. To be fair, ArcMap is...not intuitive.

[basefinder]

I send spreadsheets to customers who think filtering and freezing panes is magic.

If I'm out and a coworker sends the spreadsheets that month, I'll get calls when I return. "Oh hai, we got the spreadsheet from your coworker, but can you send us the cool version with the extra features?"

[randomdreams]

I'm definitely the cool spreadsheet guy where I work, if there is such a thing.

[basefinder]

I'm not at that level. I have one coworker who runs circles around the rest of us.

I can't even understand pivot tables, after being shown multiple times.

[sara]

I didn't realize that filtering was a default thing until literally two weeks ago. I was so sad that I didn't know how to do it.

[sistawendy]

it might be back to the vet for breast cancer round two.

Oh no!

[randomdreams]

Still trying to tell. She's lumpy.

[twoeleven]

You could try the radical approach and ask your coworker why he does that. I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work. :)

[randomdreams]

It might, but he's so nice I'm guessing I wouldn't get an answer that had suggestions about how I might improve.

[alton_love]

He likes you more than spreadsheets

[beaq]

Visual clutter.

It's always easier to ask where the bathroom is and to deal with sneering retail drones than to run through the "where the sign for the bathroom might possibly be located IF located within visual field, plus color/font/height/size/style?" routine.

How much even easier is it to go chat briefly with someone you like, than to process all the information in a spreadsheet until you find what you're looking for, PRESUMING what you are looking for exists at all?