#Fresenius#Excel I have more rants and observations about the use of spreadsheets where Tracey works. Far too many people can enter, alter, or delete data and there seems to be little control over the format of how they do so. Many, if not most, of these users are almost clueless about how spreadsheets manipulate data.
For instance, let’s say you were to add information in a column for the clinic in East Peoria. In a controlled format a dropdown list would be provided to choose from, and if “East Peoria” wasn’t a choice, you would have to add it to the list of choices. This prevents multiple spellings (or misspelling) of the same name. Otherwise, you could search, sort or filter on “East Peoria” but the results wouldn’t include “E.P.”, “EP”, “E. Peoria”, etc.
AND —— some people have a proclivity to “correct” names in the dropdown list, thus creating multiple errors. Changing the listed entry only changes future use and the original entry will remain on the multitude of previous entries.
Her employee spreadsheets are littered with various spellings and variations for multiple places, names and events making it impossible to trust most of the data. We have wasted so much time sifting through this to create a more accurate spreadsheet for her use and there is no way to correct the corporate source for the benefit of others.
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