#8 Six Teams, Six Different Forms: My First Real Project

The therapy unit at the hospital I work for had six treatment rooms. Room 1, Room 2, Room 3, and so on, each split by the kind of therapy it handled. And each room kept its own document to record patients. The problem wasn't that the documents existed. The problem was that no two of them looked alike. Same patient. Same information. But every room ordered the columns differently and named things differently. One put the date in the first column. Another put it last. One wrote "treatment time." The room next door wrote "minutes used." On their own, each form worked fine. Looked at one at a time, there was nothing wrong. The trouble showed up the moment anyone tried to combine them. The work that never ended Every so often, a request would come down from above: Can we see the overall numbers? That was when the real work began. I would open all six documents side by side. I would line up columns that didn't match, by eye, and move each value into one master table by hand. Days of this would get me a single sheet of statistics. Then the next quarter, the same request came down again. And I started over. The table I'd built last time was useless if the format had shifted even slightly. So I rebuilt it from scratch. Every time. I couldn't stand it. This was obviously a job you do right once and never touch again. We just weren't doing it right. So instead, we kept feeding people's evenings into it. The obvious answer The fix was simple. Make all six rooms use one form. Same columns. Same names. Same order, everywhere. Then there's nothing to move when you combine them. The statistics become a matter of stacking, not translating. The answer was so obvious I wondered why nobody had done it years ago. So I built a unified form in Excel and sent it around. And that's where I learned Excel has walls of its own. Where Excel broke down Once a file gets passed around, you lose track of which copy is the real one. The versions pile up. "Final." "Actually final." "Final, revised."