Over the last couple of weeks, I've learned more about how to mine data from our bug tracking system at work through the use of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets than I would ever have imagined I'd care to!
One of the "ah ha!" moments came this week when I realized that I really could use the IF statement in Excel to exactly describe whatever scenario it was that I was trying to calculate, even as applied to an entire set of results. Anyone who uses Excel for anything more interesting than personal budgets is probably saying, "No duh, Sherlock!" right about now, but I honestly had never expected to be back "programming" in as unlikely a setting as a freaking spreadsheet... and yet there I was!
This has, quite naturally, lead me to start thinking about new types of things I can measure with this newfound tool of mine. Those poor Feature Teams at work won't even know what hit them... (KIDDING!!)
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3 comments:
i need to school you in the use of pivot tables in excel... conditional statements will only get you so far before they become overly complex.
Sounds good, Mike, although some of us "old school" coders have absolutely no problem reading and maintaining nested IF statements that go 15, 20 levels deep! It's sort of like reading the machine code in The Matrix... ;-)
Seriously, I'd be happy to learn about pivot tables to see if they'd help me in my efforts.
Old dog + new trick == the scary reality we find ourselves in
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