Robert Shaver wrote:
ADVICE .............their mail follows below (I cannot quite figure out
this list's preference for either top posting or bottom posting)
Hi Robert and Peter...
Thank you very much for the insights... I find them extremely useful.
I work at a small private College. We have about 400 students and 70
staff. I am in the men's residence.
My experimentation with the data-management is driven by several needs...
1. I want to learn how to get the most out of programmes like calc,
base, plone... whatever. I find it extremely interesting, so I do not
mind if it is sometimes a slightly more difficult route.
2. My information management has until recently (the day before
yesterday) been a purely paper-based system. I photocopied a
registration form for the students and they filled it in and I placed it
in a file. The problem is I just have no motivation to go and open that
file and find out when the student's birthday is, or what work his
parents does ... unless the student lands in serious trouble. Then it is
sometimes too late ... a month ago I had to take a student to the doctor
and only then did I realise that I had no information on his medical
insurance - he just did not fill it in, and I never checked that I had
received it. Students have to declare their electronic equipment (some
or other health department regulation)... I've never really been able to
control the information that they gave me (I am not sure that having the
information electronically will give me much more control). When a
student leaves the dormitory he fills in a form, which I quickly
misplace, and one day somebody is looking for the student and I have no
idea where he is.... Or what if I want to contact the student in 10
years to donate a laptop or a video projector to the dorm... then I have
nothing. I think I am therefore right to decide to go electronically at
least.
3. From a larger perspective, I have a slightly grandiose dream to begin
developing a system where different departments in the College can share
information in stead of duplicating things. A student who wants to
register in the dormitory currently needs to run around to get
signatures proving that he is accepted academically at the college, then
he needs to prove that his finances are sorted out (another signature),
then he needs to register at the cafetaria (another signature) ... At
the end of it all he brings the form to me and then at the end of the
day the Cafetaria still calls me to find out how many students I have in
my dormitory (They never kept track of the signatures they signed)...
and I am still required to submit a list of students in my dorm to the
finance office, even though they signed for them to be accepted. There
is terrible duplication of data. ------ So somewhere I need to begin
developing skills in datamanagement in order to at least make positive
suggestions.
---------------OK... so I am writing too much now and probably
irrelevant to you.
What are my main needs at the moment:
1. I want to be able to access information about the student easily:
If I want to call/e-mail/visit the student - how will I do that.
In the same vain I want to be able to know what to do in the case of
an emergency. Should he go to a government hospital or private hospital.
Who will foot the bill etc.
(I agree that this is probably best captured in a simple spreadsheet -
very little data gets manipulated. What I did yesterday and today was
to design a registration form in Writer and inserted the spreadsheet
fields. I mailmerged the fields together and printed out individualised
forms for each student to check and correct where necessary - much
better than asking them to write it out all over again each semester)
2. Since I need to provide leadership in the dormitory, and keep the
students happy, and guide/mentor them... I would like to be able to
gather and manipulate other forms of data. Simplest is to print a list
of birthdays for each month. Slightly more complicated is to develop a
"citizenship barometor" in which I try to make regular observations
about certain issues to try to get an objective picture of what is
happening: Here is some of what I have in mind: I want to give myself
(and my assistants) a score on some of the following questions: Do we
know this student (sometimes we can't put a face to the name). Does the
student attend dorm socials? Does the student attend common meetings? If
he attends - how regularly? Does he contribute to the meetings? Do we
see him at religious functions? Have we had any conflicts with him? Are
there issues related to discipline.
By manipulating the figures that I get from this I should be able to
analyse who the key players are in the dormitory. I can then identify
their strengths and focus on building their capacity to make an even
greated contribution to the dorm. I will be able to see those who just
do not fit in and then I can take various approaches to evaluate what
the problem is. Is the student just quiet? Is he unhappy about
something? Does he have a problem. ----------- I am not sure if a
"quantitative" analysis like this will work... perhaps I should use my
intuition. After all, I can find out which students are slippign through
the cracks without a big formal analysis. But who knows ... it might
give me some tools to address an issue ... and to measure progress, that
I don't currently have.
3. There are some control issues: I need to be able to give an account
of who is in my dormitory at a given time. If a student leaves for a
week, I should be able to know, and trace him. When students leave for
the vacation the cafetaria calls almost on an hourly basis to find out
how many students are in the dorm. I have been getting quotes for
smart-card readers to install at the dorm entrance. In this way I can
regulate access to registered dorm students. I will also to an extent be
able to monitor their movements.
If a student withdraws from the dormitory, I would like to at least have
a record of when he left and more or less where he went to.
4. I would like to be able to look at the issue from the perspective of
the physical building. Which rooms have which students in them. If I
check a room during the holiday and I find the furniture missing or
vandalised, I want to be able to trace who lived in that room and for
what period of time.
5. I often need to generate a list (sometimes the chaplain wants to know
which rooms the students are in, othertimes we need students to tick of
if they are going on a college outing, sometimes a sports co-ordinator
wants to set up teams - first year students playing against second years
etc.) A week before the holiday students are sometimes asked to indicate
who will be leaving, and when they will be leaving etc.
It is here that I sometimes find the full table with 60 or 70 fields
very cumbersome to work with.
-------------------------
I don't know if this is of any interest to anybody else... but if you
have some insights to give on how I could best manage the data, I would
be very grateful.
Thanks Weiers
Hi Weiers,
ADVICE
As you have discovered, creating a complex spreadsheet application can
be complex and error prone. Most people don't realize that they are
developing software when they are using formulas in a spreadsheet, but
they are. One of the most important decisions in any software
development project is choosing the right tools for the job. The wrong
tools can make a good outcome unlikely.
The first step in developing a new project is requirements. If your
project is easy then the requirements will be easy to write down. So
write them down. You might be surprised at how much this will help you
clarify what you are trying to do. Once you have written down the
requirements, ask yourself this question about each one; "If the
system didn't have this feature would the project still be worth
doing?" If the answer is yes then leave that feature for later.
Implement only the absolute bare essential features first and get
something that works sooner.
MY OPINION
Unless you can reduce the problem to a single sheet, I don't think
it's the right tool for the job. I have done a few multi-sheet
spreadsheets that interact and they were hard to get working and
harder to keep working.
Now some specific questions about what you are doing
QUESTIONS
1. Why do you need three sheets? Why not just add columns to the first
sheet? If you limit yourself to one sheet then you won't have to worry
about having to update the same values in multiple sheets. (This is
where some development experience can help. You're running into issues
that have been around for a long time and have been solved in many
different ways. Each solution has advantages and disadvantages.)
2. Have you considered a simple manual system? It's quite amazing what
you can do with a graphite text editor; paper, pencil and eraser.
Computers don't always make things easier.
I have created literally dozens of systems just like this using Lotus
Notes. Mostly this is because I have used Notes on a daily basis for
the last eight years, developed large and complex systems with it and
I know that it is ideal for small projects like this as well. The
closes open source systems to Notes is Zope or Plone (which is built
on Plone). I haven't used either one so I can't swear to it, but what
I've read makes them look like good candidates. The setup and learning
curve would be steep, however.
I hope this is helpful. Most of it is just my opinion after about 25
years of software development. YMMV
Peace, Love, Laughter,
Rob:-]
Weiers Coetser wrote:
Hi
Please send me in the right direction if my question is off topic. I
am new to spread-sheets in general and need some advice:
I am in the process of setting up a rather sizeable spreadsheet (that
should probably become a fully fledged database) to manage the
information I have for students who live in my dormitory. (I am the
dormitory dean).
The First Sheet contains all the names of the students, contact
details, parents information, medical insurance information, postal
addresses etc. It has over 40 columns.
The second Sheet contains the names of these students and their room
placements.
The third sheet contains the anmes of the students and some
citizenship records.
At the moment I am just copying the Names and Surnames from Sheet one
and Pasting them into sheet 2 and 3.
The problem is that if a new student comes I have to update all three
sheets by hand. If one name is spelled incorrectly, I have to
physically go and spell all three differently.
Is there a way that I can link the three sheets so that when I add a
new student or when I update information for a student, all the
relevant columns in the other sheets are updated?
I thank you for giving me some advice. (Probably I should learn how
to work MySQL and programme PHP to create queries... but I am not a
developer and it will take months to learn to do that.)
Thanks
Weiers
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