My biggest achievement beyond my internship project

Last week, Microsoft Excel held a week-long Fix Hack and Learn(FHL) event. Fix Hack and Learn is Excel’s hackathon where engineers choose different Excel problems they want to fix, hack or learn. Although it was a busy week preparing for my final internship presentations, I joined a team of three full-time employees to fix a problem with Excel’s Formulas.

In Microsoft Excel, when a user types the equal signs in a cell and starts typing a name of an Excel formula or variable, a dropdown list of filtered displaying formulas and variables. It is easy to navigate this list using the keyboard arrows, and yet when a user presses Enter, there is a “#NAME” error that always displays. The Formula fix project aimed to enable the Enter key to select from the dropdown list. After the team leader pitched this idea, I was excited to work on a project solving a challenge I have faced in Excel before and a project that will impact billions of Excel users.

After joining the team, I chose to work in Excel Desktop’s codebase to resolve the challenge. I requested the team lead for an expert to ask questions regarding keyboard shortcuts for Excel Desktop. I spent a day investigating and debugging different Excel’s codebase parts to understand how the formula dropdown list worked. Through this investigation, I noticed that the Tab shortcut worked as we wanted Enter to work. Utilizing Tab’s implementation, I developed a minimum viable product for the Desktop version of Excel.

Contributing to such an impactful project in addition to my main internship project was so fulfilling. When working on the project, my biggest lesson was to adopt a growth mindset where I will learn whatever I do not know.

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