EDUC 6000 - Week 5

This week's project has been an exercise in frustration.  Sonny has created Excel spreadsheets for each of the agency's eight districts to track safety equipment like pepper spray, armor vests, and batons.  Each of the items on the spreadsheet has columns that include information about the item like issue date and expiration date.  Needless to say, this has turned out to be a huge spreadsheet.  I kind of volunteered to help out with this one because the person responsible for monitoring this equipment (Andrew) is in my office.  When talking with Andrew, I found that he planned to have 2 tracking systems for the equipment, one to be used by field staff and one to be used by someone in Central Office.  This really seemed like a waste of staff since this would require the same information to be entered by different people.  However, the Excel spreadsheet doesn't provide him with the statistical information that he needs to have available, so he thought it would be easier to get that from an Access database.  I tried adding subtotals to the appropriate columns and tying them to a separate worksheet that just listed the totals.  This was doable but very time consuming.  I worked on that for a couple of hours and then determined that the data might be compromised as the spreadsheets were updated.  I then spoke with someone else in Information Systems about the logistics involved.  Of course, his first suggestion was to have I.S. create an application strictly for tracking the equipment.  The problem is that I.S. is so backed up with projects that we knew that wouldn't happen anytime soon.  We then discussed putting it in an Access database but we're not certain that field staff will have Access when their computers are updated.  There's speculation that the new computers will have a cheaper version of Microsoft Office.  We finally settled on importing only the applicable data to Access to create the reports Andrew needs.   We did a test and found that this would work.  Andrew is going to send the spreadsheets to the fiield staff to complete.  Before he can do that, we're going to establish passwords to keep others from making unauthorized changes to the spreadsheets.   I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything works as we hope it does.