I've built a mobile airpollution sensor together with a few other parents and their kids at my 8-year old son's primary school in London. Air pollution is a big topic as the school is right next to a busy road, a lot of children are suffering from asthma and Islington has been pretty useless in collecting/publishing data. So we've started taking things in our own hands and built a handful of raspberry pi based monitors in class rooms, the playground and children take it with them on their school run. geo-tagged data is automatically uploaded to little influxdb/grafana based web service wheneve the pi has a wifi connection. Makes it an interesting project for kids to look and interpret charts and stuff as well. Currently we're measuring PM2.5/PM10, temp and humidity only, haven't had the time yet to look into NOx sensors yet...
True. But isn't it a bit too easy to just tell people to stop using Excel (which they won't do anyway) instead of giving them something to help them solve their problems _within_ the Excel/spreadsheet world?
great story. I used to train on a C152 and knew a few guys at the local aerodrome who had done ferry flights from the US to the UK. Which is something I (as a shitty weekend VFR pilot) have the uttermost respect for. But that story about getting it from Oskosh to Gaborone, wow.
Textron still deliver some single-engined 172s and 182s eastbound like that. They've recently started staging through Belfast Aldergrove airport, which is what brought it to my attention. I had assumed they'd go as deck cargo.
Daher send TBM turboprops westbound by the same route but at least they're pressurised. Pilatus stage PC-12s through Prestwick in Scotland.
Occasionally at Belfast we see unusual types being ferried by Southern Cross, who specialise in such work:
I used to train in C152 that had been fitted with extended fuel tanks; before used as a trainer, it had been used to patrol pipelines in remote parts of Texas. With full tanks, it could fly a long time.
It was a tiny plane. And I was a shitty pilot. Ferrying one across open seas would be amazing and terrifying.
In general, yes. However, from my own experience, there is a (small and industry-specific) subset of "Excel developers", especially in investment banks, hedge funds etc that know both.
Commit your Excel workbook to a Git repository.
I know it's a binary file so you can't diff or merge out of the box, but at least you get the commit history.
Does that make more sense?
If you want version control, then sure use that. Or stor in dropbox/drive which have version control...
I am sure many people use many different tools for this. Most large enterprise companies, such as biotechs and legal, use document management platforms for this purpose.
Ok, here's he full story: We have a product (https://www.xltrail.com) that makes git diff and all that work with Excel workbooks. So you get a lot more out of it than dropbox/drive/sharepoint etc as you get to inspect content changes.
90% of our clients/prospects are in financial services (heavy workbooks with VBA, think applications, not spreadsheets) but today I spoke to a prospect from a different industry which made me think that there might be people outside banks, hedge funds going down the same path.
It's an interesting idea (though I'm not sure how much appetite there is out there).
We've built a version-control app on top of Git for workbook files (www.xltrail.com) so I know a thing or two about parsing the cell content of sheets.
There is no Python library that supports reading cell formula content across all workbook files (for instance, xlrd does not support formulae at all).
If you can go beyond Python, have a look at sheetjs.com (open-source JavaScript based) or Aspose (commercial .NET solution).
That aside, "client" integration of such a tool could be a major blocker from our own experience. E.g. if you could build it in such a way that it's "fire and forget" (like uploading it to SharePoint and integrate it there) it is a lot more likely to being used. Or integrate it via Git (drop me a message if you want to chat). Or add it as a feature to something like rubberduckvba.
https://github.com/bstiel/airpollutionpi