What is an Engineer’s favorite software tool? It has got to be Excel.  When I worked as a Project Engineer I had spreadsheets for everything!  Reports, graphs, data manipulation, text parsing. I’ve even had a flight simulator.  Excel is a great tool for analyzing and manipulating data, so it’s no surprise that there are OPC based products that help get data into Excel.

What I learned the hard way, is what Excel is not great at… storing data.  It was manageable when I was only producing information for myself. I had a set naming format for the filenames, sheets and columns, so I could keep track of what data was coming from where, and from what time frame.  But once I had to start sharing the data out to other members of the project team, managers or end client reports things went down hill fast. Data getting changed in one version but not the other, ‘multiple versions of the truth’, missing or renamed files, and other fun problems.  

Of course the right answer is to separate the data from the information.  Use Excel as the reporting and analysis tool, and store the data in a correct repository, like a historian.  Which is why the release of the MatrikonOPC Micro Historian is such great news.  Light-weight, simple to use and cheap. No wonder it’s called ‘a historian for the rest of us’ J.  Of course you get data in and out of it using OPC, with full support for both OPC DA and HDA, otherwise I won’t be talking about it.

So for all those engineer’s out there with their data files in an ‘Excel of a Mess’, give the datasheet a look.

And before anyone comments, of course the answer to what is an Engineer’s favorite tool would be duct tape.