First Blog ever... Spreadsheets!

    One of my least favorite task while at work, is opening emails with large spreadsheets attached with the data representing last day's business performance or transactions.

We can view this from many point of views, but for the sake of the discussion in my first internet blog ever, let's pick three. 1) Review yesterday's transactions/performance, which is the sole purpose of the email and the attachment. 2) Incredible inefficient way of transporting large data from one person/system to many users and 3) Time spent every day filtering, sorting, rearranging and formatting the raw data into a pivot table or something "user friendly".

So let's begin, reviewing yesterday transactions/performance is not the right way to correctly have a good understanding of the direction of the operation or the business. The worst possible outcome for this is to start making decisions based on a very small set of data because the reality is just snapshot in time, a picture. it will be the equivalent of buy stocks based on the value in the last hour, without looking at the trend. 

Moving to number 2, many companies or small business runs their operation using spreadsheets and on those, they aggregate data capturing their transactions. In today's world, there is an app for anything. As small business, you may not have the money to invest in a complicated software or have the time available  to capture your information on it, for sure it's another thing you need to take care of. But data is very powerful and if you can use it, it may give you a hint or point you in the right direction. But really let's talk about those companies that spent thousands of dollars (in some cases millions) setting up systems so everybody in the company can interact with each other under the same umbrella. In my experience, the of-the-shelf or plain vanilla reports are not enough, or does not have the data "we used to have". For the most part, the reporting is something we put in the back burner or is something at the end of the to-do list for the installation. This is one of the main reason why the excel report exist. The usual workaround is to extract the needed data from the system in plain text, so someone can easily run and craft the reports in-the-mean-time. Let's do some quick math, let's pretend the report is 5 megabytes times 40 employees. Those will be 200 megabytes in the email server hard drive or cloud storage; and let's say we run it every day. A normal year has 248 workable days, in one year the email system will have 49,600 megabytes or 49 gigabytes in just one email carrying a snapshot in time. It's fair to say, in 2022 the cost of storage is considerable less expensive than 20 years ago. I believe this is the main reason why the behavior is allowed in today's world.

And finally number 3, the unaccounted hours of repetitive work performed by one or more people that extract the raw data, put it into an spreadsheet, align and tweak the information every time the report needs to be completed. In some cases there is a valid justification for the work like... the main system is no longer maintained, a large effort needed to create interfaces to display the data, unskilled people able to interconnect the data to more modern or user friendly systems... to name a few. The government and large bank institutions in the United States (and for sure other countries) have very robust and complex custom made systems; when the pandemic hit in 2020, the government of the United States wanted to print checks for citizens using a very old system  having the initial constrain of finding the right people to create such modification and be able to accomplish the tasks. It's known that large bank institutions and credit card companies relay on those old but reliable and rock solid solutions. But what happen when the system is modern and you still exact the information using the backdoor, massage the data and presented half way for others to open their email and look at the snapshot of yesterday?.

The ability to create reports full of charts and other good ways of representing data exists in the market, the insatiable need to create your own version of the data is what creates again the need for a new revised version of the report. So, for IT professionals the dump of data into a spreadsheet is the most logical way to enable users to do what ever they want any time they want it. But the reality is different, in many cases, when the team agrees on what is the best way to govern their operations, the reports are created and the process is streamlined, so nobody needs email, or share drive space to store information you can get from the system anytime you want.

Spreadsheets are one of the most useful tools in the world, readily available even in smart phones. But if you are not careful, the data can be misleading and inadequate for decision making. Not to mention the hidden cost of repetitive manipulation of data.