The Dilemma: Drowning in an ocean of spreadsheets
Have you ever thought these thoughts or ever heard someone say something similar?
“Hey I have a spreadsheet that calculates that, yeah it’s kinda old and janky”
“Who changed the spreadsheet? The formula is ruined! You can’t drag and move cells!”
“I can’t read your spreadsheet, there’s no formatting or any sign of steps to follow. What in the blazes did you do?”
“That was an archived spreadsheet that had an important calculation! Why did you edit it?!”
“What on earth were they thinking?”
“What on earth was I thinking?”
I’ve been on both ends of the spear. There is no doubt Excel can create incredibly powerful tools for our day to day work. In addition, Excel is nearly a universal language for any computer user. Most of everyone knows how to use its basic functionalities and we are surprised when we come upon someone who has never opened the application. Experience varies from those who just type values into cells to power users who can run intense modeling and data crunching within it. In our particular industry, we usually crown whoever knows how to use VLOOKUP as the master of all things in Excel, never mind that they’ve never heard of XLOOKUP.
The universality of Excel cannot be denied by any sane person but like common languages, a shared spreadsheet tends to break up into different dialects. Unlike common languages, these different dialects are not grouped by tribes but by each individual. A spreadsheet made to streamline a workflow, when shared with even a single co-worker, will mutate into something else entirely. Almost always, when great effort is spent to make a fancy spreadsheet, it is done to make work quicker not for the individual but for the whole team. The time behind the effort is lost when the whole team tears the spreadsheet to shreds. I’ve encountered, “I thought I’d add an extra feature over here,” or, “I wanted to color code these values,” or even, “I made some extra hidden tabs and changed them around some, don’t worry, I change these tabs every time I make a new copy.” Walking away from this 8-car pileup, I’d like to try to avoid this going forward.
Introducing Liner Leopard
Liner Leopard is my first take at addressing the logistical issues of Excel tools. This is a very simple tool that takes you a considerable way through Tennessee Department of Transportation’s (TDOT) iterative procedure to determining a type of liner for a ditch. Here’s a workflow graphic straight from TDOT’s Drainage Manual Chapter 5 with some scribblings showing where this tool gets you:
It leaves you to take its computations and decide for yourself what type of liner to select. I had a spreadsheet that completed the entire workflow, but after thinking about what tools are for and are not for, I decided pull back and end the tool at the computational outputs instead. This, I feel, keeps the engineer at the steering wheel but with a turbo charged engine. I’ve become more interested in producing tools like this that can help the engineer make informed decisions quicker than before instead of abdicating and letting a computer decide instead.
Come Open The Hood
I’m sure you would like to know how it works. Feel free to visit my GitHub page that allows you to open the hood and take a look for yourself! The hope for this tool, my postings, and the open access provided is that our industry would work towards a smarter system in tool creation and distribution. Feel free to communicate with me what your experience with Liner Leopard!