{"id":165,"date":"2004-10-08T11:41:06","date_gmt":"2004-10-08T15:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=165"},"modified":"2004-10-08T11:41:06","modified_gmt":"2004-10-08T15:41:06","slug":"spreadsheets-gah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=165","title":{"rendered":"Spreadsheets?  Gah!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, this isn&#8217;t the &#8220;State of my life&#8221; post promised on Saturday.  That&#8217;s still drafting.<\/p>\n<p>I will, however, share some thoughts on spreadsheets.<\/p>\n<p>I hate them.<\/p>\n<p>All told I&#8217;ve spent ten hours, spread across three days, building a spreadsheet array.  Right now it&#8217;s 18 sheets deep.  What the array does is take sales information, then calculates statistics&#8211;units per transaction, sales per hour, that sort of thing&#8211;and plugs them into several different sheets&#8211;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&#8217;s insistence upon making the formulae relative made copying from sheet to sheet a minor headache.<\/p>\n<p>The end result, when it&#8217;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&#8217;s automated, I can look at relationships between statistics I hadn&#8217;t considered before.<\/p>\n<p>The work is done now, though.  The <i>hard<\/i> work, that is.  Now I take the weekly reports at work, plug the numbers, and go.  No more calculators!<\/p>\n<p>In the next day or so, a Florida report on our manager conference.<\/p>\n<p>And there&#8217;s a <i>LEGO Star Wars<\/i> video game coming out in the spring.  I don&#8217;t care if the game is good or not&#8211;seeing a Trade Federation battleship explode and Lego blocks go flying off into space, that sold me on the game right there. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, this isn&#8217;t the &#8220;State of my life&#8221; post promised on Saturday. That&#8217;s still drafting. I will, however, share some thoughts on spreadsheets. I hate them. All told I&#8217;ve spent ten hours, spread across three days, building a spreadsheet array. Right now it&#8217;s 18 sheets deep. What the array does is take sales information, then<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=165\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Spreadsheets?  Gah!&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[228,722,529],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","tag-eb-games","tag-lego-star-wars","tag-statistics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}