Categories: work
Date: 05 October 2006 13:27:06
From coding behind-the-scenes in an Excel worksheet to analysing new payment systems to testing various system changes, I'm feeling a bit over-stretched. Add to this requests for changes to the various in-house program I developed, minor hiccoughs with our network virus protection and the up-coming, major, changes to our company's website [I won't be coding it, I'll be helping the company contracted with its interaction with our database], I'm nothing if not busy.
In a sense I am lucky though: when one thing begins to bore me I can move to another. At least that's what I've been doing. But the Excel job [which ranges from the relatively easy fetching data from a database to the more complicated summation and manipulation of this data via drop-down boxes and buttons the user can manipulate -- at least its complicated for me!] needs to be finished asap, so it will be my life for the next week or so. One good thing is I'm discovering the wealth of functions Excel contains: there are some rather nifty ones. I'm also learning a few tricks to do with Visual Basic for Applications: though I doubt I'm barely scratching the surface as what I need to do is limited to interaction with a database and various files.
For some reason I've been thinking of the wealth of functionality available, and how little I often use of it, particularly in terms of most of my work which is to do with -- Oracle 9i: when I look at all the functions and tools available (I started off way back with Oracle 7.3 in 1998 and there was a lot less available) I often feel overwhelmed. I occasionally, when time permits, look through the New Features section of Oracle 10i (to be prepared when we upgrade) and try and learn a bit that may be useful, but there is so much of it I doubt I can know it all.
I wonder if this is the case for most people and most computer applications. With Excel I'm pretty useless. I only found out last week that you can add Comments to cells. And I only know a handful of functions: I just last week discovered Countif [and am thankful to God I did: it made a job much easier]; and I doubt I'll ever use any of the engineering functions -- let alone understand them.
There truly is a great amount of potential out there: I suppose the key in being successful is knowing how to find it. And perhaps having the basic knowledge to enable you to progress to something more advanced.