Motivation can be a powerful force. Tasks that need to be done in order to perpetuate a system are often begrudgingly done. Tasks that should be done to improve the system rarely make it beyond the statement, “Wouldn’t it be great if…”
There existed an abundance of weekly work with the inventory that was repetitive, laborious, and obligate for the continued operation of the lab. Much of the tasks involved sifting through the inventory for samples and parsing out the garbled entries that would occasionally clutter the final report. These sorting, searching, and reporting tasks were of the brand that makes work an undesirable experience. These are also the sort of tasks that lend themselves to WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, and ORDER BY clauses.
Performing inventory manipulations in a spreadsheet can be especially chaffing when juxtaposed with the knowledge or imagination of any more effective system. No great technical skill or understanding is required to envision any number of better methods of storing and working with the inventory data. The major problem was the gulf of time and effort separating imagination and implementation.
