Oiye...

Wow. I whole-heartedly agree! I am sitting here reading this post with some small amount of terror... of the pain of experience in dealing with such issues. It seems that every organization has some self appointed Excel evangelist that I spend half my time having to DEBUNK the values s/he contorted into their PIVOT and postulated to management as a whole. I despise having to go and fix their range calls, rounding errors, truncated zeros, and etcetera, merely because "our numbers do not match".

As a standard of practice, anytime someone comes to me with an Excel reporting issue, I lay it aside and go DIRECTLY to the source of the data. They are usually saying, "But that is not what my Excel sheet says...". It takes far less time to get the facts straight than trying to absorb their particular self-inflicted Excel predicament.

And the awful plentitude of those that think Excel is a good format to ship data in... Lesson #1: Zip Codes do NOT play well in Excel without some careful hand-holding, which never seems to happen at the sender end.

--- soap box mode = off ---

Please pardon my rant...