At work yesterday I started working on a large-ish spreadsheet project.<\/p>\n
It’s for an annual catalog. In one department, there’s four thousand lines of items to be arranged. Headers inserted. Item names cleaned up.<\/p>\n
Four thousand lines.<\/p>\n
It’s not tedious. Maybe a little mind-numbing at times.<\/p>\n
It’s mostly<\/i> in order. That’s the worst kind of spreadsheet, actually. The one that’s almost<\/i> right. Because there’s no quick way to fix it, short of cutting-and-inserting the lines out of order.<\/p>\n
As I was working on it, I thought to myself — there has to be some<\/i> macro I could whip up, some macro that would take care of this completely<\/i>. Press a key and it’s done.<\/p>\n
Only, I couldn’t figure out any sort of algorithm. And as I worked my way down the spreadsheet, I saw how there really was<\/i> no easy way of getting through this spreadsheet.<\/p>\n
Just look at a line. Figure out what needed to be done to the line. Do that. Move down to the next line.<\/p>\n
The decision tree would have been beyond a macro entirely.<\/p>\n
Some tasks were easily enough done. A concatenation. If only everything else were that simple… \ud83d\ude06<\/p>\n
Did I complete this four-thousand line monster yesterday?<\/p>\n
Alas… I did not.<\/p>\n
Another project — one of my primary responsibilities — landed on my desk, and that needed whipped into shape.<\/p>\n
The irony? It’s a ten thousand line spreadsheet, and it’s something that I turn around in forty minutes. This four thousand line spreadsheet? No such luck.<\/p>\n
I called it a day somewhere around line 2500.<\/p>\n
I have other things to take care of in the morning, and then hopefully I’ll finish the rest of the spreadsheet by the end of the day. I feel like I’m on the downward trajectory.<\/p>\n
I’d like to think<\/i> so, anyway. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At work yesterday I started working on a large-ish spreadsheet project. It’s for an annual catalog. In one department, there’s four thousand lines of items to be arranged. Headers inserted. Item names cleaned up. Four thousand lines. It’s not tedious. Maybe a little mind-numbing at times. It’s mostly in order. That’s the worst kind ofContinue reading “On Spreadsheet Fun”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[550,551,547],"class_list":["post-1734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","tag-excel","tag-spreadsheets","tag-word","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}