Some parts of my job I rarely, if ever, talk about. Working on the monthly, annual, and now decennial sales charts is one of those things.<\/p>\n
There was a lot of math involved for the decennial tables<\/a>, limited as they are, but before I got to the math there was a lot of thinking. Just because I had the data at hand — and the nice thing about doing the monthly sales charts since January 2009 is that I’ve done them consistently, so a spreadsheet from early 2010 is set up exactly the same way as a spreadsheet from last year — didn’t mean that it went together easily. I assembled these monstrous spreadsheets, of 200,000 rows, and there were pivot tables and VLOOKUP functions galore, not to mention a trial run simply as a “proof of concept” that my thinking was sound. It was like taking a pan of scrambled eggs, unscambling the eggs back to create one ginormous egg that would make even Humpty Dumpty feel inadequate, and that<\/i> egg I could scramble into what I needed. It was mad and brilliant and mad, and I didn’t even need a fez.<\/p>\n I’m a writer. It was my understanding there would be no math. My writing here, functional as it is, amounts to an afterthought. It’s the tip of the iceberg that you can see, with the math, days and days of math, lurking massively beneath the waves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some parts of my job I rarely, if ever, talk about. Working on the monthly, annual, and now decennial sales charts is one of those things. There was a lot of math involved for the decennial tables, limited as they are, but before I got to the math there was a lot of thinking. JustContinue reading “I Was Told There Would Be No Math”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32460","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}