Spent 6 hours trying to fix a formatting glitch in Excel that had a one click fix

I was building a spreadsheet for a client report and this one column kept merging cells wrong no matter what I did. After 4 hours of Googling and trying macros, I called a buddy who works in IT and he just said "clear the merge format cache." Took him 10 seconds on a video call and I felt so dumb. Has anyone else spent way too long on something that turned out to be super simple?

3 comments

3 Comments

faith_thomas23d ago

Bet your friend felt like a wizard saving the day with that one.

the_richard23d agoTop Commenter

Huh, I actually see it a bit different. Feels more like they just got lucky with a simple fix than actually being a wizard about it, you know?

taylor1222d ago

Yeah actually I used to be on your side with this. I always thought those quick fixes were just dumb luck, like they threw something at the wall and it stuck. But then my buddy fixed my car with a paperclip and some zip ties once and I realized there's a real skill in knowing exactly what simple thing will work. Like they've seen enough broken stuff to just know where to look first.