Today, my assignment was to take what I had learned yesterday and try to figure out how to make a user-friendly interface for my model. I spent the whole day doing this, as it was a big leap into the unknown.
As stated in yesterday’s post, my goal for today was to figure out how to actually create the interface. No step of today’s building process was user-friendly for me. Every step required me to use data validation tools, advanced functions, and more complicated formulas to build what I wanted.
I spent most of the morning trying to figure out dependent drop-down menus. As discussed yesterday, these drop-down menus allow users to fill in an answer to a question. I had to do some research to find out how to do exactly as I wanted. Eventually, this made sense, and then I began combining these drop-down menus with formulas.
I also went searching for functions that I would need to use in conjunction with these drop-down menus. Although I went through a course on Excel formulas and functions, the online videos weren’t enough, and I had to do some searching on my own. I learned about some logical functions, such as AND, IF, NOT, and OR. I tried to see if any of these would help me in creating the user-friendly features; I eventually included IF and OR in some of my formulas. These functions are very helpful and can give the user different results depending on what information is inputted into the model.
I built the interface with a lot of trial and error. It wasn’t easy trying to jump into something that I didn’t know about (and something that even Mrs. Spurgeon didn’t completely know about). By the end of the day, I had finished a part of the new interface.
Writing the formulas was probably the most difficult part of today’s work. Microsoft Excel requires functions and their arguments to be inputted in only one form. I frequently ran into syntax errors, in which I would have my formula that I had thought through and worked hard on. I would then tell Microsoft Excel to calculate what I had written, but Excel would get nothing. I would then have to go back into the formula and find the one or two hard-to-find mistakes and fix them. But sometimes, I wasn’t able to find an error even though I was told that one existed. All of the time that I spent searching, experimenting, and writing formulas ended up leaving me frustrated by the end of the day. And after that, I realized in the late afternoon that I had made a mistake in one part of the new interface, and that I would need to figure out how to fix it tomorrow.
Since that’s really all I have to talk about for today, I thought I would do a quick reflection on my independent study goals.
In my proposal for my independent study advisor, I indicated that my goals were to do research on business opportunities and create the financial model for the Business Opportunities Task Force. I have done research on business opportunities and potential expansions. I have done this by talking to Mrs. Spurgeon, learning as I went, in addition to having met with business professionals in the Toledo area. I can prove I have done this from the blog posts I have written. My model is also completed, and the only thing that I’m doing now is taking a step further by attempting to create a user interface that is easier to use. Because I’ve already met all the goals as outlined in my proposal, we have decided that the last days of my independent study would be dedicated to cleaning and simplifying the model, and I have already begun to do this yesterday.
Enough for today; off to more work tomorrow…
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