Excel Interference

I got the renewal notice for my Microsoft Office subscription through a while back, £85 for the year. Enough to make me pause and think, do I really need this?

Like most of you I use Office365 at work, extensively, and there is a lot of good to be found if you are embedded in a SharePoint / OneDrive / Word / Excel / OutLook / Teams / Powerpoint driven place.

But at home I was mostly using Excel, and mostly for vanity projects that were, largely, just lists —a gigs list, a simple finance tracker, my digital detox tracker— so £85 seems a lot, especially when my platform of choice offers free alternatives.

So I converted my spreadsheets to numbers and for the most part it’s been plain sailing. A few differences here and there for the basic things around formatting, filtering etc, but I’ve gotten past those.

However as I’ve started to try and do things that are a little more complex —think formulas, charts, lookups— so I’ve run afoul of my decades of learned use of Excel. Call it procedural memory, or
negative transfer (or interference) but all those learned workflows that I have in my brain do NOT transfer.

So when you are really just looking to do some simple things that you’ve done many many times before in a different but similar software package, it becomes a little frustrating to realise you have to go and learn an entirely different way.

It’s not that I don’t want to learn, I know will figure this stuff out, it’s just the immediacy that I’ve lost. In Excel I know how to get what I want from the data very easily, in Numbers it’s still opaque to me. I know they are different approaches and that Numbers is more table focussed than data focussed but it’s enough to throw me.

Things I want to quickly do I now need to plan to do later when I have time to sit and figure it out.

P.S. I have used Google Sheets in the past, but I’m trying to de-google my life so that’s a no-go. I’m also aware of the open source alternatives and they may be my next call.