SNAFU

[caddyman]

Morning, everybody in LJ land.

I thought that I’d rattle out a quick update before I let my brain leak out of my ears with what I think must be the most tedious piece of work I have had to face in the past 10 years, which is saying something when you work in this place.

The migration from GroupWise to LINK has left holes in just about every area of our work – the hole I am attempting to plug today is our distribution list for local authority finance practitioners. The information is there, but all sandwiched into a single column of an excel spreadsheet. I have to go through around 455 lines and separate out the information in every cell before we can import it into Outlook. I did around 40 on Friday afternoon and nearly died of boredom. I have to try to complete the rest today.

Wish me luck; your taxes are paying for this.

Comments

[snorkel-maiden.livejournal.com]

Do you know about the RIGHT and LEFT formulas in Excel? They can be very useful indeed if there's any sort of structure in your big data-mush.

[pauln.livejournal.com]

You may find Data -> Text to Columns of help here. It works in the same manner as importing a text file.

The data does need to have some sort of structure to it, of course. Either fixed field lengths or delimiters (comma, tab..) are required.

[binidj.livejournal.com]

"Wish me luck; your taxes are paying for this."

Au contraire mon brave, your taxes are paying for me to read about you doing that.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Ah, how green.

Can there be a better example of recycling in the 21st century!