At work on Fridays, we have a weekly production meeting for the department. It’s a “Who’s working on what” sort of meeting, as the managing editor of each publication goes over what topics and\/or articles their publications are covering in the next week or two, or updates are given as to the status in the production cycle on each. For the most part, the meeting is geared toward the online publications.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the meeting lasts fifteen minutes. Sometimes it lasts an hour and a half. It just depends on what’s going on.<\/p>\n
This week’s meeting was a forty-five minute meeting.<\/p>\n
And, strangely, I contributed.<\/p>\n
An idea was being kicked around for some new online content. Valid points were being made, but the thinking was that the content wouldn’t really work.<\/p>\n
So I said, “Wait. What if we did this<\/i> instead? I’m already producing this data, and we do absolutely nothing<\/i> with it.”<\/p>\n
Suddenly, this seemed like a very wise idea, and just as suddenly I had a new responsibility on my plate.<\/p>\n
But how to format the information efficiently?<\/p>\n
A table!<\/p>\n
And it’s in Excel.<\/p>\n
So I put my mad Excel coding skillz to use.<\/p>\n
I wrote a macro to take the standard spreadsheet that I generate every month (because it’s in my list of things-to-do once a month) that I do nothing with, and I concatenate a few columns, delete out the extraneous columns, rename the column headers, and then…<\/p>\n
The macro puts in HTML table tags.<\/p>\n
I save the spreadsheet as plain text, load it in Word, change the tabs to hard returns, and then, bam! I have an HTML table ready to go.<\/p>\n
I cracked open a Sam Adams Black Lager, put some jazz in the stereo, and started coding. Oh, I wrote in a nasty bug, and I didn’t even catch it, but it’s fixed now. There’s just something relaxing about Sam Adams, jazz, and Visual Basic.<\/p>\n
I don’t really even like the Black Lager, by the way.<\/p>\n
But the marco? It’s kinda sick, actually, how well this works.<\/p>\n
It’s… sick<\/i>. I mean, really. Just sick.<\/p>\n
Sorry, sometimes I surprise even myself. This is one of those times. \ud83d\ude06<\/p>\n
I still have to document it. But that can wait.<\/p>\n
What the bloody grife am I listening<\/i> to? Oh, oh. “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” done in a jazz style. It sorta works. Sorta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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