I’ve got a funny day job. Some days I’m out and about at meetings. That’s where I was for the last three days. Some days I sit at a desk. Today was one of those days.
I spent basically the entire day wrestling with a HUGE spreadsheet made by someone else who just doesn’t understand the concept of elegance. Seriously? A spreadsheet of 400,000 rows to perform one calculation? That’s just insane. In the time it took for me to understand what they had done, I am pretty sure I could have mocked up about 85% of a PHP script to knock the answer right out of the park.
I don’t do these kinds of calculations often. I’d say that on average most people in my industry never do a single calculation like this – leaving to others who are more interested in doing so. 1 There were several false starts with me basically finishing the calculations, doing a write up… and then realizing that I had forgotten something. It’s taken me about two days worth of work to iron this thing out. And, quite frankly, I loved every minute of it. Of the very few people in my industry who actually bother to run these numbers, most just shoot for an approximation. 2 And of those very few people, no one really runs these calculations all that often.
Having just experienced the WORST way to run these calculations, I’m ready to build the best way to run these calculations.