Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
If you ask a computer expert to fix the weird thing Outlook just did, or explain why Excel is suddenly writing Gibberish into your tables –
Even if we wanted to explain it to you, we can't. No human being alive on earth knows the reason and how to fix it.
Some of us are really good at poking it till it behaves again.
Others are brave enough to venture into the dark lands of learn.microsoft.com .
But what awaits us there are articles written by Copilot about how it worked before Microsoft changed it again for no reason.
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and AI generated answers.
Seems like everyone's solution there is to reinstall Windows first before troubleshooting.
Reddit.com/r/askreddit
Nice try, but still bunch of losers compared to MS...
First, I do NOT work in IT or anything like that. But I seem to be the most tech savvy of all my coworkers. Occasionally one of them will ask for help and I'll fix something for them. Sometimes one of them will comment that I am good with computers or something. Honestly, I figure things out just by clicking on everything. I think sometimes people are too afraid to click too many things for fear of breaking stuff, but there's not a whole lot that can go catastrophically wrong imo. I tend to just click shit until I figure out what to do.
I do work in IT and make six figures clicking on shit till I figure it out.
Shhh! Don’t give away all the trade secrets!
Speaking of Excel, here’s a fun little experiment into the nature of binary numbers and rounding errors.
Start with some number and add a fraction like =A1+(1/3) to it. In the cell below, add that same fraction to the previous one. Copy this formula downwards and watch the numbers grow. After about 50 rows, you’ll have a number that looks like something specific, such as 71, but it isn’t exactly. There’s a sneaky rounding error hidden in there. The actual number is very close to the one displayed, but not exactly what you think it is.
If you’re using IF statements or XLOOKUP with numbers like this, you’ll run into some perplexing errors. If I recall correctly, you can even test the number with =A50=71, which will return TRUE but the xlookup still fails. It’s been a while since I tested this one, but I remember it being really weird in all sorts of unexpected ways. It’s weekend, so I’m not touching my work computer today.
You just need to know that a long series of fractions causes weird binary rounding errors to happen behind the scenes. Adding a series of whole numbers and neat decimal numbers was perfectly ok though.
Also, trying to explain this to some coworkers won’t be worth the effort.
Tech support is mostly turning things off and on since it fixes a lot of things. And I mean actually turning them off and on, not just turning the screen off and on. Then turning setting off and on. Lots of checking what should or shouldn't be on and trying it the other way.