Had a similar experience. Previous dude took days to come up with a report. I spent a week or two on it, and any monkey can copy paste values and generate the same report in under a hour.

Oh god. This just reminded me of an old boss. He was a general contractor (very large, and very expensive custom homes ground up builds), and I still don’t know how he was still in business, and more importantly, hadn’t been sued into oblivions. Anyhow, he would use and excel spreadsheet to do his estimates. Ok, not ideal, but could work.

At some point I realized what he was doing, and asked why he wasn’t using any formulas or macros to make it all automatic (he was doing the math with a calculator then entering the info). He didn’t know it was possible. He would manually write down, then transfer info from one sheet to another and of course there were tons of errors. I spent a little time making him a whole new one (his idea not mine) with all the bells and whistles. He never fucking used it.

In a 200 person company, I made friends with some peeps in the marketing department.

Yep, their workflows have tons of automation potential. They are definitely doing hours of work that can be done in minutes. Companies really should have rotations where a dev just sits and watches sales and marketing do any data input work.

He didn't even print it, take a photo, and then scan it back in? What an absolute nerd.