Actually, I have experienced qualms about helping some people with
workwork -- people who are the XL 'experts' and need help with very
simple questions, and people who work for corporations that report
multi-billion dollar quarterly profits and want volunteers to develop a
solution from scratch by posting incremental requests.
But, that's a philosophical issue and we are free to disagree on what
is homework, workwork, and freework -- and where one draws the line
between them.
In this case 'disagree' is too strong a term. We reach different conclusions due
to different beliefs. In support of my own (FWLIW), most companies that truly
rely on Excel for anything important either have many people who understand
their Excel models (so if one or another of them ask the occasional question in
ngs, all should be able to figure out the responses) or those companies are
living on borrowed time awaiting the sole knowledgeable user's departure.
If you view Excel as a glorified calculator (which I do - it's a very nice
calculator!), then helping others use their glorified calculators is no big
deal. On the other hand, if you view Excel as a program development platform,
then no one should be allowed to use it until they've mastered binary floating
point and commonly expected software engineering practices such as testing,
revision control, documentation, etc. That'd rule out answering at least half
the questions posed in this ng. So I await half of your responses being nothing
more than textbook recommendations.
As for schoolwork, I'll continue to view it as fundamentally different. I
suppose the distinction is that if I believe the OP could solve the problem with
paper and pencil via brute force, there's no good reason not to show possibly
more efficient ways to solve the problem in Excel. However, if the core of the
post is how to solve the problem and the fact that the OP is trying to solve it
using Excel is secondary, then the question becomes why does the OP need to
figure this out? If the answer is just means to an end such as business reports,
no problem helping them. However, if the answer is the end (which is almost, but
not quite exclusive to coursework), then there's no good reason to give the OP
the answer. ESPECIALLY since the problem has almost certainly been asked AND
answered in one of the Excel ngs before.
You must have been a TA in grad school. There are times you've got to tell
students that they must figure out some problems on their own, and if they just
can't they should reconsider their overall course of study.
