Tuesday, 23 April 2019

Spreadsheets in an orchard?

The Turnditch Orchard is associated with  the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, they help us and we help them, mostly because of our work on the river bank.  Today I had a spreadsheet sent to me, via email, by one of their members for completion. It's being sent to all the Derwent/Ecclesbourne catchment area "partners" to check progress on projects.  Thankfully this is nothing to do with the Turnditch Orchard project, but it brought back horrible memories of my life in a large corporation. There various managers would use Excel spreadsheets for data collection from multiple people.  Excel spreadsheets  are one of the worst ways of collecting data from multiple people, creating enormous duplication of effort and an invitation to provide the wrong version of the wrong data.

I'm so glad my work is now just cutting grass and tending trees.

There are far better methods of collecting data from multiple people!! I always call spreadsheets "instant legacy systems", as they become impossible to maintain when the original author moves on.

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