I recently came across this quote from Isaac Asimov — it is so true:
I absolutely love this quote. Breakthroughs hardly happen when you expect them. This requires a level of humility and even playfulness.
On a scaled-down Excel note…
I was trying to type in the word “PAs” (as in “Physician Assistants”) and kept getting the same error:
I tried a lot of things. I tried the old ” ‘ at the beginning of the cell” trick. That didn’t work.
I searched all over the internet to see if there was a custom cell format I could use. Couldn’t find it — most of them are for dates or numbers.
Then I tried something weird that worked. I concatenated “PA” and “s” from different cells and pasted the value of the result.
That’s funny!
So, moral of the story
1. Ugly solutions are still solutions…
I wish I could have come up with a custom cell format. Maybe there is one (see number 2).
But these kind of small discoveries, noticing a quirk or shortcut — these are much more important to innovation than the giant “Eureka!” moments.
2. …but elegant solutions are nice too 🙂
And the nice thing about the “That’s funny” mentality is it keeps you hungry for new information and ways of trying something.
So, in this example, do you have ideas for me?
Thank you for experimenting in Excel with me!