VLOOKUP
Life and Excel in one spreadsheet.
I am 28 years old. I have a PGDM from an IIM with over 2 years of experience in Sales and Marketing. No, this is not the cover letter to my resume. I am only trying to set the precedent of how and why MS Excel is an integral part of my life (and explicitly at that!). I spend over 9 to 10 hours on my laptop every working day out of which almost 70% goes into crunching numbers. These numbers maybe analysis of past or present or future data amounting to little to no consequential changes in the business of the company. Yet, I work on them day in and out. And my one and only savior is the L-O-O-K-U-P Function. Be it VLOOKUP (for vertical mapping), HLOOKUP (for horizontal mapping) or even XLOOKUP() now. The lookup function almost always comes to my rescue.
If only, our lives had the option of pulling out a LOOKUP() function every time we felt lost. If, in a conundrum, I were to simply apply this formula and find an approximate or exact solution to my dilemma. If only I could feed in the range of anger of my manager, the possible range of replies and life would throw me the appropriate match in that situation. If only I had an appropriate response for every time I had an argument with my partner. Perhaps, VLOOKUP() would return a response that would defuse the situation and also make me win the argument.
God, that would be such a relief!
Or whenever I feel miserable I could use the COUNTIF() to simply count my blessings, my privileges or better even my true friends. That would cheer me up for sure, to know precisely how many friends I could ‘count’ on. If Excel formulae worked in real life, we could possibly know the length of time this lockdown would last for. Thanks to the LEN() function, I would know exactly by when will this dark time culminate. If only there were a ready reference for the trials and tribulations of everyday life. A go-to formula for every-time I felt stuck in a quagmire of right and wrong, of action and passivity.
What a blissful world would that be to live in!
I believe we live in a spreadsheet where SUMPRODUCT() rules the game. Our lives are the summation and product of our actions and attitudes. Our behavior is a consequence of the very same SUMPRODUCT() calculated over years of life experiences. So even though, life is not governed by the formula of my liking but our existence is very much a spreadsheet. It is replete with formulae and a series of forecasts, but just like in Excel, a few outliers can make any predictive analysis fail.
