It should be pretty obvious that you should use the right tool for the right job. Unfortunately it seems that when I do some home projects, I don’t always have that luxury. Yesterday, however, was an exception. last week I bought a “fiberglass running kit” from Harbor Freight (I love some of the stuff you can get from the store, but I’m pretty careful about what I get as the quality of some of their products isn’t great). I needed to run a new phone line to my entertainment center so that I could try out Oooma.
I’ve run a lot of wire down this particular wall and struggled with many of the runs. A flexible fish tape is a bit cumbersome and not the ideal tool; that’s all I had before, so I used it. Yesterday, I put together 3 pieces of the rod together, pushed it down the wall, went downstairs and was able to easily grab the end of the rod. I attached a Cat 5E cable to it and then was able to pull it up the wall. It was, by far, the easiest pull I’ve done. Why I didn’t get something like this before is probably because I was too cheap, so I spent lots of time doing the work.
Lesson of the day, don’t be too cheap with tools.
On the topic of the right tool for the right job, I was spoiled doing contract work where everyone I dealt with was pretty tech savvy. When we needed a tool to track issues for our projects, we found something and installed it. I’ve used TestTrack, Mantis, and Redmine as bug tracking/project management tools. While none is perfect, they are a huge help. Now that I’m no longer doing contract work, I’m finding that the tool of choice is Microsoft Excel. While Excel is a fine tool for some things, I’m not a fan of it (I haven’t liked it since college when I spent far too much time using it to try to get results). I see Excel used for tasks that databases, bug databases, and project management applications were designed to handle. These systems are multi-user and allow people with access the ability to get up to the minute status on a project; Excel, of course, is static, and you can’t get status of a project when you need it. You rely on one person updating it and sending it out via email or posting it on a Web site (the latter is actually much better than the former).
This is not to say that there isn’t a place for Excel in business applications, but it is not the be all, end all tool (so far I haven’t found one).
Check out Access – sounds like what your looking for.
We use it to track documents in a very large, multi level review process. It’s ran off of a NAS so all users have access to it, even remote via the domain VPN.
Currently tracking over 5,000 documents w/ ease; each file saved in the database so there is no need to misplace them or having to worry about names.
May not be the best solution for all cases but it sure offers more than Excel.
Unfortunately I’m not in control of this project; I’m at the mercy of others. There are tons of systems that can easily be setup to collaborate, including a number of online applications.