Task Order Template: Fill & Download for Free

No.Let me rephrase: HELL NO.Yes, I get it “database” could mean anything. It could be a text document holding key value pairs or a set of json documents that’s indexed by another key-value store. (Honestly, there are lots of use cases where that is far more ideal than Excel).Excel is wonderful at doing particular tasks, in particular, 2 dimensional number tracking, pivot tables, some basic reporting and graphing, and it has a fairly robust formula system.It also looks really nice for accounting purposes and tracking numbers.VBA as a scripting language for Office has it’s issues, but it really does get the job done, as well.So why not a database?Excel does not do well as a back end service. You can actually reference other excel documents or even connect to Excel with other outside services. This is really really slow. If you want your clients sitting around waiting, by all means, go for it. It’s a terrible idea.Excel doesn’t do relational services. You can hack some of that in using look-up cells, but it’s really not the best use case for Excel and can slow things down for you. The more complicated things get, the worse it handles. Never mind referential integrity.Excel doesn’t do garbage clean up or handle white space well. I had a client once whose SharePoint was using up hundreds of GB of data and all the Excel files they were storing in Document Libraries took minutes to load. I glanced at the problem and it turned out that they were using every cell from A1 to XFD:65535, but all but the first 100 cells actually had data. I showed them how to manually delete the empty space and it went from GB to KB and 2 seconds from 10 minutes.Projections aren’t handled well.Filters aren’t perfect and are handled at runtime rather than indexes.No transactional management via the UI. You could build this in through forms and macros, but what’s the point?Weak security capabilities.Not great data locking capabilities (with a shared data source, like a SharePoint document library, you can see other people working at the same time, which is fancy, bit but great for all use cases)Multi user capabilities don't scale.I’ve had a lot of fun hacking excel through the macro engine, but it’s not a proper database engine.Excel also…excels…in direct data manipulation from databases and even small scale forms. I set up an ordering system for one company that used Excel to get inventory and sales data from a system that they then used to plan orders in, which directly interfaced with SharePoint to create the order template and purchase orders while simultaneously sending the order data back to the database.It's definitely a powerful tool. For direct one on one manipulation of data, getting data from different sources and playing with it, for example.It’s a wonderfully powerful tool for accounting management and playing with small to medium sets of numbers, but anything bigger than 1,048,576 items (that's including additional tables and views, etc) is going to need a bigger boat.

Front end development is a great career in 2017, but don’t get hit by the bus.There is all the hype around as to which is the latest cool front end technology to learn as a beginner.You assign yourself a task to learn front end development only to realize that the task is to find the particular framework to learn.Let me give you a few tips that will help you be a better front end developer.1. Learn JavaScriptIt’s great that you have already mentioned that you know some jQuery.That is great, though you should know that jQuery is not JavaScript. In fact, front end developer is another name for a JavaScript developer.JavaScript is the programming language that you will use throughout your front end development. Forget about CoffeeScript for now.2. Build some Boostrap themesIt is quite easy to take a responsive Bootstrap template, paste it on a server and viola! you have a responsive website.Nah! If you want to be a great front end developer, try and recreate the whole template ground up because in most cases you will be required to build a user interface from a Photoshop mock up, not from another bootstrap template.Take for example a WordPress theme that is full of features and create a Bootstrap template that looks similar ground up.This will help you get a good eye for design, how to layout the page, pixelation and matching color codes among other front end stuff.3. Build a jQuery pluginI thought I knew a lot of JavaScript! Not until I set to build a jQuery AutoSuggest plugin here.I had to learn JavaScript itself in order to understand document object manipulation better.The concept of nodes, childnodes, document nodes - it’s all really interesting in native JavaScript. jQuery abstracts much of this such that you never get to know what’s going on under the hood.You can do some front end for my open source jQuery plugin, I will be willing to help you with some JavaScript tips.4. Consider taking a UI/UX courseIf you are very very serious about front end software developer then you want to consider one of these courses that will help you understand user interaction with interfaces.In order to design great interfaces that yield greater users experiences you need to have a better understanding of the UI/UX design and these courses go a bit into more depth about that.I am not a front end dev so I might not say much about them.5. Go get a jobYou asked what employers like - employers like a developer who has a job!You could task yourself reading all this content and trying to build some demo projects but without that job experience, employers will still consider you a risky investment.Learning all these skills is only interesting if you are actually doing something useful with the skills learnt, or you will even forget what you learnt.Because getting a front end developer job might be hard when you don’t have the experience, I suggest you build a project by yourself that you can then show off as part of your portfolio to help you get a job.You might need to team up with a back end developer if you project will need some back end work.Have you considered contributing to open source projects on GitHub?If you are still stuck on how to get started with front end development then please message me if you want to work with me on some of my open source projects as you sharpen your front end skills.Cheers!

If you can define your workflows, you can easily identify opportunities to make improvements using VBA. Improvements can be in quality (once debugged, macros don't make mistakes), time saved (macros work much faster than you do), timeliness (deliverables consistently completed before due date),and job satisfaction (spend your time working on the challenges rather than the boring repetition). Identify the recurring tasks, then identify the inputs and deliverables. Use VBA to avoid entering data more than once. Ideally, the deliverable for task A will provide many of the inputs for task B.You will get a very quick payback on those efforts for any task that you perform once a week, probably within a few months. You can then reinvest the time saved to automate more tasks. Even tasks that recur on a monthly or annual basis can be profitably automated--you just wouldn't start with those.As a mechanical engineer who needed a job, I found himself in an entry-level position after 30 years of more responsible positions. Given the choice of being bored and resentful, or amusing myself by automating the daylights out of the job, I chose the latter. Over the next three years, I built tools to handle more than double the business volume with improved quality of deliverables and still take on additional responsibilities.Among the tools built were:Purchase order template that auto-populated accounting codes, shipping costs, vendor and shipping addresses. Without the tool, close to 100% of purchase orders contained errors--unless you were copying a previous PO and merely updating price & delivery.Instrument list builder that would pull part numbers and descriptions of the 50 to 100 instruments used on a project. Customers could either accept the standard tag numbers or provide their own--and the tool would maintain a cross-reference between the two numbering systems. Prior to the tool, each instrument list contained errors in about 5% of entries; with the tool, errors approached 0%.Datasheet package generator would populate engineering datasheets with the flows, pressures, temperatures, etc. that applied to each instrument on the project, each instrument getting a separate worksheet. Customer could specify any combination of metric or English engineering units, and the text and numeric values would be updated on all datasheets in the package. Tag numbers were updated (if specified by the customer) using the cross-reference list from the instrument list builder.Control value selector that would determine the required opening for each control valve used on a project. If a control valve seemed too small or too big, you could pick a different one from a dropdown list and see how it would function.System performance calculator that would predict the production capacity of a system given the customer's operating conditions (steam pressure, feed & coolant temperature). If capacity wasn't enough, the tool allowed optional features to be included to boost capacity. Prior to the tool, the salesman calculated capacity by interpolating between performance curves on a chart. Without the tool, mistakes got fixed on the test stand. With the tool, the equipment routinely passed performance tests without needing design changes.Project management tool that kept track of commercial and technical issues on a project. Status on each issue was updated weekly until the issue was closed. When you have a couple of hundred issues arise on a multi-year project, you need a good tool to document the status history of each issue.Budget generator that would allocate project costs according to a work breakdown structure on a monthly basis. Each line item on the contract got its own worksheet, and macros would hunt out inconsistencies between the overall budget and the detailed breakdowns. A Summary worksheet would display the project costs however the Government wanted them displayed.You never have the final figures until a day or so before bids are due--and management always wants to rearrange things before sending it out. With the tool, everybody got to go home more or less on time.Among some of the tasks I help automate in response to forum questions were:Budget tool that would break down a master budget into individual departmental budgets, mail them out for department manager input, then reassemble them into a revised master budget.Tax roll tool that would compare two different databases, look for matching records and flag any inconsistencies. The big problem here was typos on names and addresses. Fuzzy logic was used to get as many matches as possible, then both databases were updated with the corrected spellings.Foreign exchange consolidation tool for a major Wall St stockbroker that would match FX trades and determine the firm's positions in each of the currencies being traded. This job used to tie up a new MBA for several days each month. After adding VBA, a secretary could do the consolidation in a couple of minutes.