The real question is<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you eating a five star dinner on a table with a broken leg?<\/i><\/strong>\u201d<\/h3>\n

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What does this mean? It means you can put forth a great front end experience but if the building blocks are unstable it will be the only thing that matters when it comes to managing your finished project. Too often people are working harder, rather then smarter with managing their data,\u00a0so right now I ask that you place your right hand on the workbook and repeat after me:<\/p>\n

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MsgBox “I ” & InsertNameHere<\/i> & “do solemnly swear from this day forward to adhere to the laws of fields and records.”, vbOKOnly<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The first step in correcting our problems is in admitting them and being given the tools to a successful workbook recovery.<\/p>\n

What are the laws of fields and records?<\/p>\n

Fields<\/strong>\u00a0– commonly shared values – think of dates, state abbreviations, employee names, movie titles, authors – identifiable items that can be easily pooled together under a shared theme.<\/p>\n

Records<\/strong> – <\/b>individual data entries under each field type<\/p>\n

How do I apply these laws?<\/h4>\n

1. First things first – no matter what it takes – and let me repeat this<\/i><\/strong> – no matter what it takes – for long term management in reporting you must find the commonalities within your data to get them into fields and records. If you can not find the similarities you should be using Microsoft Word because you are doing text editing not data analysis.<\/p>\n

2. From this day forth the sky is blue, grass is green and data moves top to bottom. There are too many valuable functions you are leaving off the table (pun intended<\/i>) if you are managing your data from left to right:<\/p>\n

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• Data Filtering<\/li>\n
• Data Sorting<\/li>\n
• Removing Duplicates<\/li>\n
• Pivot Tables<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

  <\/figure>\n

  No. Just No.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

  3. Getting your data into order is a lot easier than you think –<\/p>\n