{"id":59,"date":"2016-08-02T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-02T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/?p=59"},"modified":"2016-08-01T11:04:07","modified_gmt":"2016-08-01T11:04:07","slug":"the-right-tool-for-the-right-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/2016\/08\/02\/the-right-tool-for-the-right-job\/","title":{"rendered":"The Right Tool for the Right Job"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/i0.wp.com\/figartconsulting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Excel2016-e1468757638395.png?w=1312\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"width:418px;max-width:418px;\" title=\"Excel2016\" class=\"alignnone size-full\" alt=\"image\" src=\"http:\/\/i0.wp.com\/figartconsulting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Excel2016-e1468757638395.png?w=1312?w=418\" \/><\/a> <\/p>\n<p>Excel is a powerful program, no doubt.&nbsp; When you need hard-core data analysis it&#8217;s a great tool.&nbsp; Sadly, this is not how I often see Excel used in my professional life.<\/p>\n<p>I see Excel used as a table creation tool for printed schedules &#8212; no calculations being performed at all.&nbsp; I see Excel being used as a database.&nbsp;&nbsp; This is forgiveable.&nbsp; If you know what you&#8217;re doing, you can make a decent flat database with Excel.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>But that is exactly the problem.&nbsp; A well-designed database is one that can be used by someone who does not necessarily know what they&#8217;re doing, but can enter data and pull reports easily.&nbsp; This is where Excel falls down badly.&nbsp; Hand this tool to someone who does not know what they&#8217;re doing, and you&#8217;d better be locking down a lot of functions on the user end, or you&#8217;re going to wind up with destroyed data.<\/p>\n<p>I encourage people who use Excel for data tracking to look carefully at their data before making a decision about what application to use when doing it.&nbsp; The two biggest criteria I see are record count and report complexity.<\/p>\n<p>If your data is going to be involving millions of records, you want a database.&nbsp; Excel will choke.&nbsp; If you want complex data reporting across several data tables and records, you want a database, not Excel.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re dealing with a few thousand records and need to display that data graphically to explain in a presentation, yeah, Excel is your tool and it works great.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Excel is a powerful program, no doubt.&nbsp; When you need hard-core data analysis it&#8217;s a great tool.&nbsp; Sadly, this is not how I often see Excel used in my professional life. I see Excel used as a table creation tool for printed schedules &#8212; no calculations being performed at all.&nbsp; I see Excel being used &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/2016\/08\/02\/the-right-tool-for-the-right-job\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Right Tool for the Right Job&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pLg3p-X","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60,"href":"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions\/60"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/figartconsulting.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}