Alaknár

More stable

Wellllll, I wouldn’t go that far.

I just had to reboot because clicking anything in the browser randomly started sending the CPU utilisation to higher 70s, which was triggering the fans to spin at full power.

Then I ran a game on Steam and Steam said it’s running, but it was nowhere to be found. Had to reboot again.

Both of these happened completely randomly after I changed nothing, just browsing the web.

How do you usually deal with that aspect? What I do is to make the documentation easily skimmable (for advanced readers) and just accept the need for rework.

Confluence’s “Expand” element. Make everything into an easy to read task-list, but if more details are necessary, just expand a step and get an “idiot proof” description. Bookstack allows that as well, even better, because you can nest them (Confluence had that up until they “updated” the editor and killed half the features).

EDIT: “Include Page” in Confluence also works wonders here. For example, I have an article describing how to RDP to our AD server. In all articles that describe a process that needs to be done on the AD server, I just include that page. If any connection details change, I just edit the original article and the changes immediately propagate to all the other instances.

I write mine with a simple mindset: “imagine we go outside with a net, catch a random person off the street, sit them at the PC and tell them to do X. Will they manage, following this documentation?”

I also number every step (even if they’re stupidly simple and could technically be jumbled into a single sentence), so that when a user calls me asking for help with something documented, all I need to do is ask them “at which step of the instructions are you encountering the problem”, and then they hang up because they never read the instructions in the first place. Saves a lot of hassle!

A lot of stuff now happens automagically

Nothing happens automagically. You need to specifically ask Copilot to do something.

makes it harder to see the reasons and structures and language of how it is meant to work

This I also don’t fully agree with. Like I mentioned, Copilot won’t automatically place formulas everywhere - it just designs them but you need to copy-paste them into the appropriate spots.

So, yeah, you’re not writing the formulas, but it’s not like the whole thing just magically appears.

You’ll become better at spreadsheets

Great! Thing is: a day only has 24 hours and right now I need to get better at managing IT infrastructure and business processes, not spreadshets.

If you have the time to research Excel - go for it! Absolutely nobody is forcing you to use Copilot.

Some useless nonsense, like generative AI.

This is a very ignorant and prejudiced take.

AI in Excel is an amazing feature that will help TONNES of people do what they never could It can design tables and write (but not insert) advanced formulas for the user.

Sure, you could say “just be an Excel expert”, but - for example - my daily work is nowhere near Excel. Learning its advanced features would be a 100% waste of time, just to be able to prep a fancy chart every couple of years. So, instead, I can just ask Copilot to do that fancy thing for me, instead of wasting hours online, trying to figure out XLOOKUP, or some such.

Copilot can design a table, and even fill out some data, but it won’t input any formulas. It will write them for you and tell you where to put them, but you have to copy-paste them on your own.

Also, with versioning, even if it did and caused a problem, you could always just roll back to a previous version of the file. Not really an issue.

I can just imaging an AI tool going in the messing one little thing up, and it being near impossible to find the error.

It doesn’t put formulas into the cells. It will write the formula for you, but you have to put it in yourself.

Also, there’s versioning in Office, so your spreadsheet blowing up for whatever reason isn’t a problem at all - just roll back to the previous version of the file.