Secure Email Project

In today's technological age, keeping data secure has become an important aspect for many companies.  Hackers have become more advanced than ever, employing new techniques with devastating affects.  After completing this project, I have realized how important it is to send secure emails.  Emails with precious data should be digitally signed and encrypted.  Email clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird allow users to send secure emails with ease.  The company, HBGary Federal, learned that sending secure emails can't be looked over after recent attacks.

Hackers Reveal Offers to Spy on Corporate Rivals 

This article is about how hackers penetrated the HBGary Federal system.  HBGary is a company that does investigations on a company's competitor to find damaging information about them.  When internal emails were breached, this highly classified information was spread throughout the Internet.  Many of these emails contained information about different companies that HBGary was doing investigations on.  HBGary proposed that many of these leaked emails were falsified.  Whether they were falsified or not, this cyberattack has been very damaging to the company.  This article shows how important it is to secure your emails before you send them.  With such highly classified information, I'm surprised the emails weren't secured in the first place.

Database Project

I have gained vast amounts of knowledge of the powers of Microsoft Access.  Access provides an intuitive platform that allows you to create a database, forms, reports, and queries.  This project thought me the basics of those aspects.  I can now use Access with confidence.  I have become familiar with the different tools and views that allow you to motivate data.  From there, I will be able to expand my knowledge of Access.  This knowledge will be greatly important when entering the business world.  Effectively assessing data is the key to the success of a business.

There are a few things that would help create a more effective database.  The database is missing important contact information such as phone numbers.  Creating "drop down menus" would make inputting data into the form quicker and easier.  For instance, there is no reason why you should have to type in "individual" or "family" under the type of member.  If someone were to misspell "individual," that data would not be sorted in the "Recently Departed Individual Members Report."  Creating selection menus would make this much easier to use and error-resistant.   

Excel Project

The Excel Project was a great experience.  The project made understanding Excel easy with the real-world situation.  The project entailed analyzing data for the owner of a large fitness center.  The study included 500 participants that had their heart rates measured while they exercised for 15 minutes and had a 5 minute cool down.  There are 21 heart rate measurements for each participant taken over a 20 minute period.

The project required the use of many Excel skills.  A variety of formulas had to be created to find the necessary data needed.  Some of the data needed was: the maximum heart rate, target heart rate, highest heart rate, increase in heart rate, and whether the target heart rate was achieved.  The raw data had to be properly formatted and sorted.  During the project, I learned how to correctly produce formulas.  I soon found at that absolute and relative cell addressing were extremely important to get correct.  I found that the Excel help function was very useful when I came across troubled tasks.

Pivot tables were also created to help make data analysis more visual.  Pivot tables were made for the amount of participants that reached their target heart rate and the average percentage of increase of heart rates.  The pivot tables were very intuitive and interactive.  It made setting up the pivot table easy.  A screen capture of the average increase of heart rates is bellow.  This Excel Project has expanded my knowledge of the program.  I now feel confident creating reports for my manager.