You are now entering "The Comeuppance Zone"

As a part of my job, I often get to make charts and graphs and tables in Excel. I rather enjoy creating charts because I like decorating. I get to express myself by exercising some of my "creativity". I mix things up a bit by choosing what type of chart (mostly line graphs), certain colors (always blue & red), where to put the legend (always bottom), whether to have grid lines (never gridlines), and what type of font to use (always Univers). I like making charts that look nice and I take pride in producing visually pleasing (and empirically accurate) work. I often repeat a mental mantra of "ROY G BIV" because I like to use primary rainbow colors. Usually indigo gets left out and I go straight from blue to purple so it's more of a "ROY G BV." I try to pick colors that express the significance of the underlying data they represent (blue is good and red is bad).

Given that I work with Excel and spreadsheets a lot (mine and other people's), I've developed a few pet peeves with regards to spreadsheet formatting. I get irritated with spreadsheets that are overly complicated for the purpose of being complicated. I recently ranted about a spreadsheet that contained hundreds of unnecessary "objects" that had been placed in the spreadsheet. That said, I entered "The Comeuppance Zone" last night when I took forever to make a chart because I thought I had to insert text boxes when all I really had to do was use an existing feature in Excel and click my mouse three times. (I was basically reinventing the wheel except my new and improved wheel was really a misshapen oval.) Boy did I feel dumb when my friend Jessica pointed it out, but fortunately she was very gracious.