Defaults and Exceptions

I'm currently working on a system for a performing arts company, and they wanted to set up next years 260+ courses in a spreadsheet and import them. The client has a huge issue with course setup because each year they spend several days playing around in a spreadsheet then another couple of days battling to import the data into the database. Any half-decent database is relational and importing data from spreadsheets is not a trivial process.

If the interface and data structure are well designed, entering the information directly into the database is faster and easier than entering it into a spreadsheet. This will then save the time wasted with data imports.

Working directly in the database also offers other opportunities for efficiencies that spreadsheets cannot. For instance, I discovered that next years courses will, to within experimental error, be the same as this years courses. The solution was to set up a process whereby the client finds the current courses, omits those they want to exclude, then clicks a button to duplicate them and assign them next year's start dates. The exceptions are handled by either adding or deleting a couple of courses manually. Using this new solution the 264 courses were created in less than 1 minute. The scripting took less than an hour.

The general principle is to create a set of defaults that meets the majority of needs, then manually handle the exceptions. In this case the defaults were the current courses.