Fun with Excel Charts

Well, just one chart really.

So we recently upgraded to Lotus Notes 7 internally (IBM, owning Lotus, sort of has to use Notes, so no comments about how much better we’d all be with outlook, or pine, or just throwing rocks with writing on them. Trust me, we know. The rocks would be much more usable, too.) In a doomed effort to discover the improvements in the product that would justify a new version number (job preservation addendum: I’m sure there really are lots of great improvements in all the places I didn’t look) I stumbled on to the (not-new) “all calendar items” view in the calendar. This view lists everything, not just your meetings, but your vacation days, your reminders, and also meta stuff like cancellation notices and room changes and the like. The point being, it’s not necessarily safe to say that if you have 30 entries for July 2005, that you had 30 meetings, but it probably is safe to say that that month was twice as busy as the one with 15 items, at least as far as meetings go.

All of which is great fun to play with in excel, so on with the infoporn:

Two thumbs up to the first person who can spot when it is that I moved from development to usability/design. People ask me how I get any work done now that I have all these meetings. Take another look at this chart: we get our work done IN meetings, or brother, it don’t get done.