No, this isn’t the “State of my life” post promised on Saturday. That’s still drafting.
I will, however, share some thoughts on spreadsheets.
I hate them.
All told I’ve spent ten hours, spread across three days, building a spreadsheet array. Right now it’s 18 sheets deep. What the array does is take sales information, then calculates statistics–units per transaction, sales per hour, that sort of thing–and plugs them into several different sheets–weekly store sales summary, monthly store sales summary, weekly individual sales summary, monthly individual sales summary. Building the sheet, though, was trouble and a half. The concept was simple, but Excel’s insistence upon making the formulae relative made copying from sheet to sheet a minor headache.
The end result, when it’s done, is nice. I can tell at a glance how things fit together, what sales trends exist, where there are areas for development. It may be information overkill, but plugging-and-chugging the numbers in a spreadsheet beats doing the calculations by hand. And because it’s automated, I can look at relationships between statistics I hadn’t considered before.
The work is done now, though. The hard work, that is. Now I take the weekly reports at work, plug the numbers, and go. No more calculators!
In the next day or so, a Florida report on our manager conference.
And there’s a LEGO Star Wars video game coming out in the spring. I don’t care if the game is good or not–seeing a Trade Federation battleship explode and Lego blocks go flying off into space, that sold me on the game right there. 🙂