Divide and Conquer - PersisTables

The common fate of a useful spreadsheet is to gain weight and increase complexity. If a spreadsheet is doing something useful it is often the case that it can be made even more useful by utilising the data it creates to do something more. An extra worksheet here, another range of formula there, and before you know it you have a major piece of functionality that is fragile but essential.

One reason that spreadsheets develop is that the product of one transformation performed by the spreadsheet is the input to another process. Daisy chaining the functionality within a single spreadsheet is the obvious solution even though it creates a bloated workbook and centralises a single point of failure.

A series of transformations of input data are implemented

PersisTables provides a mechanism to capture results from an Excel calculation and save them away. These can then be reloaded for the next step of the calculation. This isolates each step in the calculation from other worksheets making it easier to debug and test (and audit).

Each step in the calculation is fed by PersisTables data that was calculated in the previous step

Creating a workflow reduces the overall complexity of Excel based End User Computing by reducing each step to a load->transform->save paradigm. Changes to each particular step can be isolated from changes to the other steps in the workflow.