Almost Like Old Times

I deliberately avoid talking about my work here. That's my professional life and I don't think this is the forum in which to discuss it. But a new project at work that I'm involved in has actually engaged the higher functions in my brain and I'm drawing on "mad skillz" I acquired at my previous place of employment. I won't go too deeply into the nuts and bolts of how it all works but the next paragraph or two could contain stuff that makes people's eyes glaze over if they aren't familiar with IT-related things.

The project calls for auditing data entered into a system and generating a report based on the audit results. Naturally it's all on an MS system so Excel is the weapon of choice, and for that matter I'm limited to 2003 for the time being. So it's finally come to this, I have to figure out an actual MS-based solution for reading a data structure.

Back in the day, I would have piped the data out of Excel into a flat file to populate a MySQL database. Then I'd use a PHP-based front end to access the data. Maybe for some extra flourish I might have even built a Flash animation that played music and gyrated in all different ways based on the results of the data queries, much like the one described in a passage from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency...but that would be showing off.

So now instead of using those tools I'm teaching myself Excel and VBA as the project scope increases, and also to focus on more elegant solutions to existing functions. Even though it's MS I'm back to learning new things for a living again. It feels good to access this part of my brain, the part that likes solving programming puzzles and finding better ways of getting answers out of data structures. I'm glad I had a mentor who gave me the freedom to acquire these skills to start with and I'm grateful for a new opportunity to use them again.