J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

What’s Up With Don Reisinger?

I ran across a terrible video by a CNET technology columnist named Don Reisinger. It's called What's up with Microsoft Excel?

It's a 5-minute video, and the first 90 seconds is throwaway material; he tells us about a puppy and his upcoming honeymoon. The entire video seems to be unscripted, so he just rambles on, and even contradicts himself.

His complaint is with Excel charts. Apparently, he hasn't learned how to create charts so he blames Excel for being poorly designed.

He says, "There's no customizability in the charts. It's nothing more than a useless product." Then he changes his mind, and claims that Excel is OK, and it's just the charting features that are useless. Right, Don.

"The problem with Excel is that Excel is so powerful and is so useful compared to all the other spreadsheets that kind of need to use it." I don't understand how anyone can take this guy seriously.

The final 40-seconds of video is more throw-away material. So I wasted 5-minutes on something that I could have read -- and immediately dismissed -- in about 30 seconds.

Suggestions for CNET:

• Have a script for the talking head
• Hire a video editor
• Limit Reisinger's videos to topics that he actually knows about

- Reader Comments -

Following are comments in response to this item.
The most recent comment is at the bottom.

1. By Lance Lachenicht. Comment posted 04 September, 2008 5:48am

   I haven't seen the video - too little bandwidth to download silly videos! Still there is a complaint about Excel on a Newsgroup that seems serious. Perhaps you could comment on that complaint? The url is:
   
   http://groups.google.com/group/sci.stat.math/browse_thread/thread/26fe9a9a0d91139d#
   
   The posting begins:
   
   "The June issue of the journal Computational Statistics and Data
   Anaylsis has published a collection of five articles on Microsoft
   Excel 2007. "
   
   Lance
2. By Jon Peltier. Comment posted 04 September, 2008 7:10am

   John -
   
   I ignored your warning, and watched the video. Then I had to leave a comment under the video, and I added my own blog entry warning others away.
   
   http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/2008/09/04/cnet-expert-on-excel/
3. By Jason. Comment posted 17 September, 2008 9:20pm

   This guy has no idea what he is talking about. If he really knew how to use excel he would have not said those lame comments. I think the video was a waste of time and didn't make any sense.
   
   Jason