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I prefer not to use built-in reporting tools from applications. While they’re quicker for getting initial results, they often hit limits and can’t cross-reference data from different systems, like a customer management system and an accounting application.

It more powerful to build reports from scratch by extracting data from the source systems and storing it in ‘shadow’ database tables that mirror the source data for easy querying.

This is a first principles approach more effective to build reports from scratch by extracting data from the source systems and storing it in ‘shadow’ database tables that mirror the source data for easy querying.

This is a first principles approach.

Getting data is all about making stories map to codes. Coding stories is difficult because it essentially means getting a team to negotiate and create a shared language to see common trends in the conversations they are having.

The same idea applies whether you are a medical team dealing with patients or company dealing with customers.

Over formalized traditional IT systems often make it difficult for a team to evolve a language to talk about the problems they are seeing.

One clever ‘hack’ is to use the practice of putting #hash_tags into notes. Almost all applications support free form text and thus you put hash tags into this text as a simple fast way to ‘code’ data.

Excel .xlsm files are essentially zipped bundles of XML files. You can unzip them, modify the content programmatically, and zip them back up.

They also include a vbaProject.bin file, which stores VBA code. The adapter uses this approach to add my VBA code for the adaptor.