i'm assuming you hate it just b/c it's ugly and therefore sucks.
i just left a job that loved spreadsheets of all kinds, and i hated them, but it was mostly because they duplicated information held elsewhere, and were used as the system of record for production configuration - with umpteen rows and sheets, and required prolonged and tedious and ongoing manual updates from me, and of course nobody kept them up to date - and i felt like such a back-asswards company deserved a much worse employee than me (if that's possible).
so i get the hate.
but can't say i like jira or any of the others.
i think some business analyst-types - your scrum master - just come from the spreadsheet world so that's where they're comfortable. probably they've never used a bug tracking tool. maybe find a youtube demo and point them to it.
some PMs will copy all the issues out of jira every day or every other day or every week, manually update everything, update things as the meeting progresses, etc. that's just how they roll.
if it's not actually painful for you, i'd say just roll with it.
if it actually requires significant pain, then just talk to them about it. see what the other PMs are using. ask your PM why they are using The Sheets and not specific-use software.
maybe there's a middle ground -- you could use some other monstrosity like notion or smartsheet or airtable.
;-D
just kidding. excel/sheets is not a monstrosity - it's legit useful for some things.
Ugly has very little to do with my pain points. My issue is that he uses it mainly as an info dump for his personal tracking and it's not very well set up for use from a development perspective. It's essentially just a multi-column checklist. I'm starting to think I may be better off tracking issues assigned to me using whatever system I choose and then just updating the "complete" column on his end when appropriate.
Comments
Do you have to use it at all?
Or just look at it on occasion?
Do you work in 1983?
Yes, I have to use it to track tasks assigned to me.
i'm assuming you hate it just b/c it's ugly and therefore sucks.
i just left a job that loved spreadsheets of all kinds, and i hated them, but it was mostly because they duplicated information held elsewhere, and were used as the system of record for production configuration - with umpteen rows and sheets, and required prolonged and tedious and ongoing manual updates from me, and of course nobody kept them up to date - and i felt like such a back-asswards company deserved a much worse employee than me (if that's possible).
so i get the hate.
but can't say i like jira or any of the others.
i think some business analyst-types - your scrum master - just come from the spreadsheet world so that's where they're comfortable. probably they've never used a bug tracking tool. maybe find a youtube demo and point them to it.
some PMs will copy all the issues out of jira every day or every other day or every week, manually update everything, update things as the meeting progresses, etc. that's just how they roll.
if it's not actually painful for you, i'd say just roll with it.
if it actually requires significant pain, then just talk to them about it. see what the other PMs are using. ask your PM why they are using The Sheets and not specific-use software.
maybe there's a middle ground -- you could use some other monstrosity like notion or smartsheet or airtable.
;-D
just kidding. excel/sheets is not a monstrosity - it's legit useful for some things.
Ugly has very little to do with my pain points. My issue is that he uses it mainly as an info dump for his personal tracking and it's not very well set up for use from a development perspective. It's essentially just a multi-column checklist. I'm starting to think I may be better off tracking issues assigned to me using whatever system I choose and then just updating the "complete" column on his end when appropriate.