5 thoughts on “Wrench vs Screwdriver

  1. Hi Juan Pablo,

    I believe it’s necessary that a conceptual theory and practical recommendations are set up for guindance to handle data in this context.

    With today’s emergency development of central data storage and the needs to regular feed Excel and others softwares with data from these sources it become more important to penetrate it and create some guidances.

    If we put it terms of layers where we use the following layers:

    – Presentation layer
    – Business layer
    – Data layer

    With a target to keep the intersections as thin as possible between the layers for better performance wouldn’t we get a better guidance to handle data, especially larger amount of data?

    Personally I’m moving more and more to situations where data is stored in databases, cubes, xml-files, text-files and only populate workbooks with the data for analyze and make sure it exist connections between the data storage and the workbooks. It also support the basic structure of the above layers. This will also prevent workbooks to grow and become large files, which are complicated to maintain and use.

    One of the major practical issues is that there seems to be a general trend to regular populate workbooks with data from different sources but never drop data from workbooks. This indicate additional issues with data storage in Excel that needs to be discussed more in detail.

    We need to keep in mind that Excel per is intended to analyze data and not store and/or manage data.

    Kind regards,
    Dennis

  2. Yeah I know it depends but I found the info useful for explaining to less capable souls. Definately it depends, if calculation and detailed analysis is required Excel, where as if relational data management is required the access. For less advanced the only way to go is Excel for most of their tasks. It is an age old question though isn’t it?

  3. #3 has a valid point. A lot of people will use Excel just because they can easily make borders, because they are ignorant as to how to use Word effectively. I see lots of stuff end up in both Excel and Access that should definitely be in Word.


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