How Did You First Learn to Use a Computer and Why?

Thank God it's Friday! I do hope we are all having a great day.

How did you learn to use a PC?

Was it due to pressure or getting a better job, or as a directive from your employers or you just wanted to improve your skills? Please share with me in the comments.

Well, today I want to go back down memory lane and talk about how I learned how to use a PC. In my case. I just wanted to be able to do my job much better and with much more ease, and a computer presented that opportunity so I grabbed it!

So what happened? It was back in the day when I was still in audit, my firm did some joint venture jobs with one of the big 8. So my colleagues in the partner firm had a small old generation Mac in the client's office and only one of their staff at that time was able to actually use it. It was pretty much like the one in the picture above.

Back then we would do all our account analysis on physical spreadsheets. So to give you an idea, imagine exactly what an excel sheet looks like, but it was a physical paper one. Then imagine filling the columns and rows manually with figures using a pencil, Then imagine adding extra sheets - together, sometimes the extra sheets could be as long as 8 feet! Now here comes the interesting part - imagine manually casting (i e adding up) the vertical and horizontal rows on this 8-foot long spreadsheet manually with a calculator!

Get the picture? Well, that was what we did and it was horrendous! You could literally spend a week looking for a difference between the vertical summation and the horizontal. I remember one instance we had spent days looking for a difference only to discover that a piece of an eraser had stuck to the sheet and we thought it was the figure (1), changing the number it was attached to! We had been looking for a non-exisitent difference!

Anyway, all that made me determined to learn how to use excel. I realized that I could wake up from this nightmare if I could learn excel. So I got permission from my professional colleagues in the other firm to use their system early in the morning before work. I would arrive before everyone else and practice. I did this and eventually mastered excel. I went on to start writing my final reports on word and link the figures from excel onto the report. I would save my work on a floppy disk, (remember those?) and send it to our firm's secretary for final editing and printing for the client.

I did this for quite a while and the secretary was very happy because he had far less work to do. But we eventually finished this client's work and had to leave that location which meant no system for me to use. I remember telling the secretary. He said Shayo don't worry, he then went in, said something to the partner, and the next thing he brought out the partner's laptop and handed it over to me!

That was how I got to use a laptop while I was just a senior, long before my managers got one!

So share your story. how did your ability to use a PC help you?