"You only know what you know how to google"

"You only know what you know how to google"
- Martin Childs, 2016

This post was supposed to be about how create a custom Excel VBA function, the origination of the idea was despite my lifelong career of tinkering with excel I'd never come across or had the requirement to have a function cycle through the cell you input as a range to perform a calculalation on them.

Nice, just the sort of Excel work I like, I firstly gave it a bash myself - I usually am able to wing the answer using induction. [Induction, if you didn't know is the actual method Sherlock Holmes uses rather than the often misquoted deductive reasoning.] No luck winging it so I turned to every programmers best friend Google.

There's pretty much nothing in the coding world that is invented or revolutionary these days, everything has been done before, anything new is just an incremental improvement and it is all documented on the internet. So it was off to google to what was what.

In hindsight I don't know whether I was having a bad day or I had lost my mind but for the life of me I couldn't find the simple answer I was looking for - everything solution was so convoluted I couldn't believe it. In fact I battled with it for a time much in excess of what it would usually take me.

I eventually found a solution which was acceptable - through trial and error more than anything. So a while later when I got round to writing the method up I thought I'd give it another google as you know how the saying goes:

You only know what you know

Well, would you believe it, this time around google was almost straight in there with the answer, damn it. Reflecting on the above adage it occurred to me that it is no longer true and have come up with a more up to date phrase:

"You only know what you know how to google"
- Martin Childs, 2016

Hopefully I'm the first one to coin it, but it probably like every app idea I come up with - one search on Google Play and it's already been done 20 times over!