I don’t claim to know more about Excel than most people. In fact, there are a lot of formulas in that program that I still have no idea how to use and Excel still frustrates me so very much even after so many years of using it.

Last night, I spent two hours helping my mom with her homework or our homework since we are both in the same class but I’ve already finished mine a week ago and she’s just getting started. It is an assignment to create a template for the Statement of Cash Flows using the data from Income Statement and Balance Sheet.

Anyway, her typing was so darn slow and erroneous. It’s like she’s dragging a ton of bricks with her hands while typing. And the way she punches the numbers, it’s like she’s trying to murder the darn thing.

On the other hand, I am never good at explaining things to people. I am always good at hands-on, do it for them or let them follow me while I perform the task myself.

A few times during the night, I asked her. “Maybe I should give you mine and you can study it.” She refused, claiming she will not learn anything if I just gave it to her.

I know she’s right and it’s completely unethical of me. It can even be classified as cheating but I just don’t think I can sit there any longer watching her type the formulas one by one instead of placing the cursor at the bottom right corner of the cell and dragging the formula down. I taught her how to do that but she seems to forget everything once she begins typing again.

At the end of two hours, we are at near completion. We completed the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and the Other Detail for Statement of Cash Flows. Now all we need is the Statement of Cash Flows which we are set to complete on Monday night. I bet I’ll have some real fun teaching her to use the “if” formula in excel, huh?