Let's try something shorter and simpler this time around. Maybe I can keep up with that a bit better.

So I've spent pretty much the entire week wrestling around in Excel, making the new event grid for 2008 that we use to place all the events. Yup - the magic happens in Excel. You submit your events via the system, we review 'em in the system, export to Excel and to do a ton of visual manipulation of tables and schedules, then manually create another Excel file to export back into the system with location information. It's a prety involved process that involves lots of copying-and-pasting merged cells.

This year I've taken it upon myself to try to improve scheduling and space management by creating an Excel file with some additional functionality, allowing for filtering and making it a bit easier on the eyes, as well as adding in some additional information for reference. I spent Monday and much of Tuesday figuring out how to format and arrange data so Excel would know what to do, then the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday was spent putting all of our space details into the structure - and then double-checking everything to varify contractual confirmation. Still need some tables counts for some rooms, but it's largely done.

I've already put in some of the major events and tested the functionality with chunks of last year's schedule and the more I use this new form, the more I like it. I think it'll make this whole placement and space management process easier, especially when combined with how much earlier we're going through all this - which is especially important because I'm fully confident that we'll need whatever help we can get in dealing with the space crunch this coming year.

I'll prolly spend a fair amount of my weekend reviewing the last batch of events that came in just before the deadline for cycle 1 event submission and then starting to place them. What does that mean? Well, aside from some extra-curricular work for me, it means that we should be able to release event information much, much earlier than we have in the past - and not just what events are happening but also where they are going to be held. Further, we won't be dumping all the events on you at once, but instead will be rolling out approved and placed events as they are confirmed. We'll have more details on that as it gets closer to actually happening, but I figured I'd give everyone a sneak-preview-heads-up-insider-info-hint at what we have planned.

Next week's blog post should be after I've placed the bulk of events, so I'll try to give some insight into how quickly space is going.