Secure Email Project

I completed a procedure of sending and receiving digitally signed and encrypted emails. The end result of the process is shown below:

Encrypting emails is one way to set up a barrier between a business and potential hackers. Emails are just plain text that anyone can intercept at any given time so it is important to put in a system that guards their contents.. In the article listed here: Hackers Reveal Offers to Spy on Corporate Rivals, it discusses the attack of hackers on the security company HBGary Federal. Some of the emails that were intercepted described ways of undermining competitors/adversaries of other large institutions such as Bank of America and the US Chamber of Commerce for millions of dollars. One email that was intercepted even suggested a way in which WikiLeaks could be discredited. Now, Bank of America and the US Chamber of Commerce are under attack and under ridicule for the emails that HBGary had on their server. If they had used encryption to guard the attacks of hackers, the emails would never have been jeopardized and the reputations of both institutions would have been protected.

Picture is user created content by Richard Ecker, April 10, 2011.
Article is provided by New York Times Online February 11,2011.

Database Project

Today, I completed a database project where I had to convert a raw text file into a database table and then perform a few different operations with the imported data. The first thing I learned how to do was the import step. This was achieved simply by just clicking on the home tab, selecting external data, and then clicking on the text file. Since the data was stored in a comma separated file (csv), I selected delimited and continued on with the wizard. The wizard does a great job at making it very intuitive, and even if you are unsure of a few things, there is a help button that will answer all of your questions. I then proceeded to query the data to only show the pieces of data that we are interested in, and this type of query is known as a select statement. Once again, we just click create on the tab, and then select query wizard. It too is very intuitive, so just follow along with the wizard to pick what data you want to see. If further additions need to be made, you can always click the query design button, and here you can add/delete/sort/filter on any number of fields. The query is a great tool to analyze the data, but what if you want to print it out? This is where the report comes in hand because it can take the existing query that you set up, and then provide a printable version of that data. Just click the query you created, and select Report from the create menu. Now the report has been created, you can still add grouping options, delete fields you do not want, or just change the entire look of the page layout. Most of these options are accessible by clicking the view option and selecting design. Now we have a way to look at and report existing data, but what about if we want to enter in new data? There are two ways of doing this: manually entering it into the database table or creating a form. The form is the best way to do it since you only have to select the few fields necessary that need to be inputted. Calculated fields such as create time/auto generated ID’s do not need to be entered or sometimes seen so the form only presents what is necessary to create a new record. As with all of the other operations, just click create and click form wizard. In general, I learned how to take a basic text file and do some basic analysis on it by importing it into Access. I see this being very prevalent in the business world when two companies need to share data.

There are a couple ways that this database could have been improved on, but I am just going to talk about one today. There are a couple fields that have only 2 or 3 different options such as gender and membership type. The problem with the existing database is that it currently allows anything into those fields. For instance, I could put in “alien” where it says gender, and the database would allow that. What needs to happen is we need to put in constraints for these data types and this is accomplished by using the validation rule that is in the table design view. I am going to quickly go over how to put in a constraint on gender to only allow male or female.

First of all: Select the table that needs the constraint and select design view. You should see this:

 

Select the field that needs to be change and select the ellipsis next to where it says validation rule. You should now see this: 

This is where we type in our expression. If you are unsure how to use this click the help button, and it will go over all the different functions and ways to use this. For our analysis, type in: In ('female', 'male'). Hit ok and now save the table. Now when you go to the form and try to enter in a value other than that, it will provide an error saying that the constraint has not been met. This type of constraint should be used to ensure accuracy and better reporting capability.

**Pictures are user provided content by Richard Ecker, 2011. They were taken by using screenshots of   Microsoft Access.

Presentation Project

Self Critique of Presentation Project : RIchard's Crepe Company

After reviewing the presentation, I saw that there was a general flow that went from profile, to opportunity, to strategy, to risk, and then finally ended with a conclusion. I think the presentation could have been a little bit more outlined in the beginning, but it did follow a logical flow. The presenter asked questions such as, “How am I going to accomplish this,” or “How will I do things differently?” which preempted the audience from asking those questions. I felt that the presenter’s attention grabber could be stronger. In the first 30-60 seconds, he mentioned, “How would you like to make a few million dollars in the next couple years?”

The presenter usually asked questions and then answered them, but only a few of them sparked curiosity. The presenter did an excellent job at providing an introduction of what he was going to talk about. Within the first few minutes, the audience knew exactly what the presentation was about. The presenter validated a claim by providing a bar graph of survey results to help substantiate his claim. The presenter also seemed to avoid most clutter and errors limiting most slides to only a couple bullet points and/or pictures. The presenter used large bold fonts for the titles of every header, and he also made the bodies of the slides large enough to ensure readability. The presenter would sometimes show a slide and then talk about it, and other times he summarized the slides. There were a few slides that he read, but these were quotes. In summary, the presenter did an overall good job of presenting his ideas.

Reflection on critiquing other presentation
After reviewing another presentation, I definitely picked up some ideas that would have helped mine. While mine was still a business themed presentation, I probably could have inserted a few more colorful elements into the presentation to make it more lively. I also realized that the reader wants a general outline of how the presentation is going to go. They want to be alerted when its the beginning, middle, and end so they can easily follow along.

What I learned:
From this project, I learned how to effectively create a powerpoint presentation, and then turn it into a screencast with an audio commentary. I searched the internet for an effective tool to create a screencast, and stumbled upon ScreenCast-O-Matic . This tool allow me to record everything I do on my computer instead of having to use a video camcorder. To see how to use screencast-o-matic, go ahead and click here: http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/c6lIFqX3H. This tool combined with powerpoint can be used in business to perform presentations when you are not available to be in person. I already plan on using this to draft a proposal to my new job to demand that we switch over to Reporting Services from Excel for their reporting needs.

Excel Project

Today, I completed an excel analysis project that addressed the effectiveness of a particular workout. The data was broken out by age and gender, and the goal was to see if the heart rate of these people ever hit the target heart rate. To do this type of analysis, I needed some data such as max heart rate, target heart rate, target achieved, and the percentage increase. The problem was, I only had the raw data so I had to calculate the data. To get the max heart rate, all I had to do was enter in the cell =max(startingcell: endingcell) and I copied that formula for all rows. To get target heart rate, I just had to enter the target percentage on the worksheet and then come up with a formula that addressed that cell absolutely. So under the target heart column I entered in my calculation as = $E$1*D3. Also, I learned to make a cell reference absolute instead of relative, all you have to do is hit the F4 in the formula right before the cell. This inserts the $ signs automatically. I copied this cell for the rest of the entries to get the target heart rate of each individual. All that was left was to come up with a check to see if the max heart rate was greater than or equal to the target heart rate. I learned that this statement (=IF(F3>=E3,"Yes","No")). This was copied to the rest of the cells. To get average increase, I just made the formula =(F3-I3)/I3 where F3 is the max column, and I3 is the starting column, and then I just copied that formula for the rest of the entries.

Now we have the data that we want such as target heart rate, max heart rate, and whether or not the workout was effective. However, it was only for each person and there was no aggregations being done with the data. I learned that a pivot table will provide all of the different aggregations for this type of data. It was as simple as clicking on the Insert tab and selecting Pivot table. It defaulted to the correct range of data, and I hit ok. It now was in a new worksheet, and all I had to do was drag and drop the fields I wanted to either columns, rows, or aggregation. Since we wanted it broken down by gender, that can be inserted into the rows, the target achieved field could be dragged into the column portion, and the id column can be dragged to the aggregate block since we want a count of people. The end result of the pivot table options should look like the following:

Please note that you have to click on the aggregate field in the pivot table options and click value field settings. This needs to be changed to a count instead of a sum. Once this is performed, we now get a table that shows the number of people broken down by gender of whether or not they achieved their target heart rate.

The final result of the analysis is displayed here:

The last piece of analysis was to create another pivot table which was done the same way as before. Only, the pivot table options should look like this instead:

 Now, on the pivot table itself, we want the data grouped by age by decade, so just right click the age column, click group, and put in the number 10 to break it down into decades. I also learned to get rid of the grand total column, you just have to right click the pivot table, click on pivot table options, select the totals and filters options, and then just uncheck the grand totals boxes.

The end result looks like this:











Overall, I now feel a lot more comfortable working with pivot tables, and I learned that in some cases it does not matter if you put the fields you want to group by in either the columns tab or the row tab. I also learned that in the page layout options, you can put in a header or footer there instead of having to put the header on the actual worksheet and specifying that particular row to repeat every page. This project has definitely boosted my business analysis capabilities.

Sources for pictures:

Richard Ecker via Snipping tool