What Your Favorite Excel Function Says About You

It is a fate universal that most folks in this Internet inundated world must use Microsoft Excel (or one of its competitors) some time or another. Those users who are advanced enough to start using functions may begin to feel a sense of megalomaniacal achievement, like they've really got a hang on this whole "life" thing. But be forewarned! Excessive use of certain functions may belie certain prejudices of character that one might want to suppress. Fortunately, I've laid out some functions and the translation of their cultural dog-whistle here:

Otherness...

INDEX() and MATCH()

You are old enough to remember when spreadsheets were literal sheets of paper used to organize financial data. The televisions of your youth were in black and white. You take pride in understanding the literal steps necessary to walk through first before you tell your mashup of functions what to do. People who use VLOOKUP() are dangerous, verging on criminal. Your favorite dance is The Robot and you clap a little too loud when you see it performed well in public.

VLOOKUP()

Look, you're just here to do the job, you know? Like, you don't need to get all involved with work-life or all this corporate culture nonsense. That's just not you. You're a salt-of-the-earth type, somebody who would probably rather be working with their hands, but six generations didn't break their backs under the yoke of capitalism just for you to not take advantage of middle-class wage slavery. Just another forty years and you can retire to dedicate your life to wood-working before you die of a heart attack three years later while selling a rocking chair at the farmer's market.

XLOOKUP()

You are a criminal. Not of any particular crime, rather your mere presence is an offence against society.

The rules don't mean a darn thing to you and you flaunt them proudly. When someone catches you in the act you relish their expression and waggle your devilish tongue at them. Women shield their children from your sight, young girls flee from your presence, fathers reach for concealed revolvers, boys throw rocks at you from a distance. If you had been born in the Puritan days you would most certainly have been burned at the stake.

SUM()

Your modus operandi at work is to convince your coworkers and managers that you do a lot by actually doing a lot. Not that ninety percent of the work is basically unnecessary, but man, does so-and-so really work hard. On long spreadsheets you scroll all the way to the bottom with the mouse wheel instead of using key-commands. Your favorite thing to do on the weekend is running marathons.

SUMIFS()

You figured it out. You've mastered Excel. Now, you could be one of two people: you could be the type who keeps this kind of information silent, you use this knowledge to be basically done with work by three o'clock every day and skip off to the bar with a smile on your face. Or, you might be that miserable soul who feels a sudden impulse to become an evangelist. Telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry about how you cracked the code, you become insufferable and eventually are relegated--no--promoted to a forgotten supply closet in a stuffy and cramped corner of the building where no one has to deal with your talk of "criteria" and "arguments".

IF()

You're basically the Amish of technology users, not in the way of say, the Luddites, in that you generally reject technology, but in the way that you take pride in physically holding and manipulating every element of the work at hand. You like to hand-craft every nail, every Boolean expression, every swipe of the hand-plane, every terminating parenthesis. And at the end of the day, you look on your four-hundred character nested IF() statement and stroke your beard, smiling. "The English could never make something so fine with their machines," you say to yourself before you go out to the parking lot to take your buggy home.

IMPORTRANGE()

You are a war-criminal. Slobodan Milosevic and Pol Pot have nothing on the architecture of pain and suffering that you've strung together over scores of Google Sheets. Your opinion on the matter is that you can't be fired because nobody would know how to fix the web of terror that you've woven over the heads of your coworkers. One of your favorite things to do is to split tables into different tabs in the same Google Sheet. You really are a terror beset upon the world, an eldritch beast that tortures the dreams of the innocent with ... oh god, is that a '/' in your CSV output file name? Oh Lord! Why have you forsaken me?

RIGHT(), LEFT(), MID()

These functions are gateway drugs.

One day you're RIGHT()ing some substring out of a field and loving every minute of it. Life is carefree and everything is good in the world. Then, a friend or even a stranger tells you about SUBSTITUTE() and things get fun. The parties are wild, you're the object of everyone's sexual desire, you wake up every morning fresh and excited for the day to get on. Then a lifetime goes by and you wake up in some gutter of a Google Doc with a rusty needle recently full of REGEXEXTRACT() hanging out of the crook of your arm and your best friend laying in the mud with a copy of O'Reilly Media's Mastering Regular Expressions draped over their face, stone dead. Did you kill them in an intoxicated rage? Did they overdose on some bad syntax? Lots of things to explain to the cops, you better leave...