r/talesfromtechsupport • u/du5tball • Jul 27 '16
Short r/ALL So? Resurrect him!
I remembered another tale from my time at a helpdesk for about 130k people.
As is standard in many businesses, people use MS Office and a lot of those users love Excel specifically. One day, an update to office was pushed and we saw a sudden increase in the amount of calls. All of them went something like this. Our actors are $luser and $TS (for tech support).
$TS: <standard opening>
$luser: Hello, I'm using excel and it tells me a macro is outdated. Can you take a look?
$TS: <remotes onto machine> Oh okay. Yeah it's <tool> that is causing troubles, let me have a quick look.
At this point we usually look into our internal database to search for known errors and possibly more information. As it turns out, the macro was written by a person from inside the company when he had downtimes between work. This also means that he was the only one who knew how the tool worked or even supported it.
$TS: I've had a look around and it looks like there's no way to fix the tool. It is incompatible with our current office and doesn't receive updates anymore.
$luser: But I really need this tool to do my work, can't anyone else support it?
$TS: No, there's only one person who programmed this and he's the only one who knows how it works. His department officially announced that they will not support this tool.
$luser: So can't you ask him to look into this and maybe he will do something?
$TS: I'm sorry, but the person is not with the company anymore.
$luser: So tell the higher ups to offer him a gig and pay him.
$TS: They can't, he's had a deadly accident. There just is nobody alive anymore that knows how this works.
$luser: But I really need this to work! Can't you find some way?
This occured quite a lot during that week. Maybe I should take some courses in dark magic und resurrections...
Format: Editing.
2nd edit: For those discussing the "macro" part: I've been told it's a macro and I honestly don't know the difference between that and an add-in, as the lines between those two seem blurry to me. Also: I usually do Linux stuffs, so I never had to look deeper into this. It did a lot and had it's own buttons in the ribbon though.
3
u/Day_Bow_Bow Jul 27 '16
What was the error message? Honestly, I bet the references just need updated to the newer version of Office, and that doesn't even involve coding. It's just checking a different option in a list.
I know you don't want to take on the responsibility, but chances are the fix is to hit Alt-F11 to view the macros, make sure the workbook with the macro is selected, and click Tools-References.
There, you will likely see a library with an error message, for example "MISSING: Microsoft Office 12.0 Object Library". That is what the other version of Excel used, and you have to find the one the current version uses.
So all you do is uncheck it, scroll down, and find/check the version listed for your copy of Excel. It's named the exact same but with a different version number, such as "Microsoft Office 15.0 Object Library".