know your tools. i had a colleague who needed to xy plot some data from an instrument dump into excel. problem was, the data and timestamps weren't one-to-one. he was looking at a few thousand rows of timestamps with almost random gaps between instrument readings. he'd psyched himself up to spend the next day right-clicking 'delete row' to get his data set. select-column, goto special, blanks, right click delete rows. seriously, the guy almost had tears in his eyes. i'm with the comment "learn how to automate using scripts" - should be a core skill