How Do They Do That?

The people at Google Docs no doubt have my best interests at heart; they work for a stellar company whose goal of making the internet a better place (which admittedly is just looking out for their own bottom line) has certainly improved my life drastically over the last 5 years. They have some of the smartest people on Earth (Danielle is always dropping thinly veiled brags about how many resumes they get or how hard it is to get the job or succeed...they basically have their pick of the creme of the creme of software developers), and yet I am going to boldly declare that, with some help from Microsoft, they have really screwed the pooch on this one.

My task was simple enough; I was going through my old poker sheets (say, Poker 2010) that live in the cloud, resorting them by game and location (instead of date played) and getting some aggregate stats on how many hours played and dollars won I had managed to rack up in each game. Easy enough, amirite? Just make a copy of the sheet, resort it, and add a few columns on the right and summations and you end up with entries like this every 2 to 50 rows (depending on how many sessions I had of a given game):

20 Commerce 14694 514.5

So I played 514.5 hours in the Commerce 20 in 2010 and win 14694 dollars. Easy game, that commerce 20....anyway, after I generated all those sums (turns out I played 32 different games in 2010) I wanted to copy them into another spreadsheet (Poker All Time Condensed Stats), where they'd be easy to manipulate.

This seemingly simplistic task marked the moment the dog became aroused.

First of all, using the Google docs copy and past menu options simply does not work. I select the entries I want to copy. I click the menu option. I goto my other spreadsheet, click the paste option. And nothing happens. That's just weird, to be honest, and it's not like I'm not using Google's very own Chrome browser to make this whole operation go. And it's not the "You can't copy more than 1000 cells" problem they originally complained about stopping me up; that only slowed me down for a minute, as I had less than 2000 cells to copy and just figured "huh I could do this twice" which is a retarded work around to have to perform but whatever. Even with that in place...nothing happens.

OK so we'll rely on the good old Microsoft control c control v copy and paste option. That shit basically just always works. I don't know why, Microsoft at this point is a vastly inferior software producer when compared to Google, but they did have basically a 20 year head start and maybe copy and paste is just that hard of a problem. I personally have never done anything for even close to 20 years, and if and when I do I hope it's more fun than copy and paste, but whatever. So I select my rows, control c that shit, goto the other sheet and control v and boom:

20 Commerce 0 0

The data for the actual cells is "=sum({})", which obviously does in fact add up to zero. So for some reason we're copying the summation, not the actual number. OK, I can understand that, and that's not really Google's fault. At this point I'm only mad at them because their menu functionality didn't work. It should have worked; it's fucking Google. It should always just work. OK, I've done this before, I can work around this shit. I'll use notepad as in interim, copy the rows there and then copy them out. Surely notepad will just have to have the number, and not the summation formula. So here I go, copy to note pad, it's all good with the correct numbers showing up, then I copy back, and...

20 Commerce 0 0

No money in Commerce 20, everyone solid.

Seriously, that just doesn't make any sense. Somehow notepad is actually storing the information that we're actually doing a summation from cells, doing nothing with it and displaying the numbers I want, then when I freshly copy the info out of notepad (I did have the sense to do that), keeping the information and using it to blow me up and report that I didn't in fact play the Commerce 20 last year. Retarded.

So I use the gmail text editor...same result. Then finally I use the gmail text editor, actually SEND MYSELF THE EMAIL, then copy the numbers off the page where they are being displayed and we have ignition:

20 Commerce 14694 514.5

Lots of money in Commerce 20, Jesse solid.

I'm not really sure if I'm upset with Google, Microsoft, or just intrigued by how on Earth that managed to happen, but will stop ranting about it now so that I can start another blog post involving betting the ponies, me coughing up a lung, and karma letting me win 60 bets in 60 minutes.