No wonder his research is about two years behind schedule

Colleague: "So I have these Word files that contain lists of data, and they are in this format." He shows me some short Word tables. "Do you think it would be possible to put the data into Excel?"

I copy and paste it right out of the table into a spreadsheet. "Like that?"

"Yes!" he says. "Wow. That's great!"

"How many of these files do you have?" I ask. "A few hundred? A thousand?"

"Fifteen."

"So it would only take..." we both say at the same time.

I finish the sentence with "5-10 minutes" as he says, "about a day's work."