Gossip
I remember a game one of my early grade school teachers had the entire class play. She had us all line up and then whispered a sentence into the ear of the first in line who in turn whispered it into the ear of the next and so on until the last in line would walk up to the chalk board and write down what they heard. The results were always hilarious and meant to be a lesson in passing along gossip (I think); but oddly enough, I think it is also an apt metaphor for what happens to data in today’s digital world as it gets passed from one program to another, one platform to another, over the World Wide Web, through security and encryption systems, and finally to your desktop, usually into Microsoft Excel, probably the most ubiquitous data cruncher out there today.
Because of this, using Excel to import data from some other source, like any one of the plethora of databases, Business Intelligence software, the World Wide Web, or Aunt Smoochy’s old DOS recipe file, can lead to some unexpected results and problems. Fractions turn into dates, numbers turn into something that look like numbers but don’t act like numbers. Adding 2 and 2 is supposed to equal 4 most of the time (not withstanding working in Base 3 or 4), and when it doesn’t, using some of the lookup or reference functions is completely worthless. The problem is not always Excel’s, of course. Data from other sources has its own structure, which we may know nothing about, and the movement of data from one program to another, including through the Web, in e-mails, or over separate networks, may involve layers of translation about which the end user has no knowledge or any control. Excel has many tools to deal with fixing problems with data.
We’re not in the fourth grade anymore!
Professor Addenhauer
