4 thoughts on “Millennials’ Tech Savviness”

  1. I’ve found that any time an older generation generalizes on the younger one they are completely wrong. It’s one gigantic Rorschach test. Now tell me why were Millennials considered tech savvy in the first place? What evidence was there? Because they text in their cars?

    It reminds me of how Gary Trudeau was shocked and angry over the X-ers being conservative. They decided we were slackers. At age 20.

    The one fact of Millennials of which I am certain, is that they like beards. The rest? We’ll find out in another ten years.

    And except for leftist boomers, most generations shift their priorities over time, so don’t count on the Millennials being this or that forever.

  2. That article reminds me, I still want to go to our HR department to take their “advanced” tests on Word, Excel, etc. Apparently, the “intermediate” level test that we use doesn’t test for the ability to create a MailMerge document, or at least that doesn’t cause one to fail the test. I’ve always been curious to see just how “advanced” different groups judge skill level in Excel.

    As an example other than MailMerge, I still have this knack of rendering people speechless and in awe when I perform simple tasks in excel such as auto-filling functions through multiple rows, creating sub-string formulas, or even performing a task as seemingly benign (to me) as conditional formatting. My skin still crawls a little when I think back to watching someone go line-by-line through an excel spreadsheet manually highlighting dollar values over $600 in a year-end report; I followed behind them with conditional formatting and located 20% more cells than they originally identified. I would have even given them the benefit of the doubt if they had just sorted the list and highlighted that way, but they insisted on going through line-by-line.

    Thus the SNL sketch with the Desktop IT guys who sit and watch a user for all of 10 seconds before screaming “MOVE!” and doing something themselves…

    1. “I’ve always been curious to see just how “advanced” different groups judge skill level in Excel.”

      There are so many things that can be done in Excel that even an expert has things to learn. It is such an amazing program.

      1. “There are so many things that can be done in Excel that even an expert has things to learn. It is such an amazing program.”

        No doubt. Most of my personal growth in Excel lately has been through expanded use of VBA scripting, and I’m a little surprised looking back to see what new and fun things I’ve learned even in the past two years in terms of efficient scripting, and even in terms of elegant text manipulation in standard formulas.

        I’m also a little bit awed by people who are able to understand PivotTables, as that is one aspect of Excel that still escapes me, much to my chagrin. I tend to default to creating RDBs to get the job done instead of fighting with PivotTables in Excel.

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