Open letter to the guy who sent the data to me
Dear Guy Who Sent the Data To Me,
I would first like to thank you for sending real data this time and not false data like the set you sent in early summer. I would like to congratulate you on not bringing our collective bosses down upon you once again. I understand that English is not your first language, and that my limited skills as a linguist narrow down our common communications. I am not faulting you for leaving most of the data in Dutch, or even the half translation you tried for some of it. I truely appreciate that. I would like to address the formatting of the data you sent.
I am not sure what data base system you are using, but is it necessary to store all of the numbers as text? I do mean all of the numbers. What good does it do you to code days of the week into numbers if you then code the numbers as text? I understand that you are doing your best, but Guy Who Sent, you are a statistics student. Surely you can do better than text in Excel when storing numerical data. Might I suggest a statistical program? Minitab is my personal favorite, I can work with others, even if you had sent me a plain old text file I would have had fewer issues. Alas, Guy Who Sent, you did not. You sent me an Excel file. It has one page containing 538 rows of data in 22 columns, with a half-assed unlabled graph slapped in the middle. In order to use the data I had to export all of the data to a text file and import it back into Excel. Upon doing this the birth dates that you formatted as day/month/two digit year came back mostly hosed. You see, Excel decided on its own which years were 19xx and which ones were 20xx. Most of them are incorrect. I am pretty sure that the elderly patients do not have Merlin-like aging qualities and were not born in 2024. Just a hunch really.
I understand that sending me data is a task assigned to you by your boss, and that you think the data is not important and that I am not worth the time. I would just like to remind you that it is I that edits those papers you are trying to publish in the English language. It is I who reunites split infinatives for you. It is I who puts the sentences in correct English grammatical format. It would behoove you (look it up Spanky) to treat me with some courtesy.
Until me meet at the conference I am planning (at which you wish to present one of the papers I have edited for your slack ass)I remain,
She Who Understands Mean But Funny.
cross posted to notes_to_asshats and my lj.
I would first like to thank you for sending real data this time and not false data like the set you sent in early summer. I would like to congratulate you on not bringing our collective bosses down upon you once again. I understand that English is not your first language, and that my limited skills as a linguist narrow down our common communications. I am not faulting you for leaving most of the data in Dutch, or even the half translation you tried for some of it. I truely appreciate that. I would like to address the formatting of the data you sent.
I am not sure what data base system you are using, but is it necessary to store all of the numbers as text? I do mean all of the numbers. What good does it do you to code days of the week into numbers if you then code the numbers as text? I understand that you are doing your best, but Guy Who Sent, you are a statistics student. Surely you can do better than text in Excel when storing numerical data. Might I suggest a statistical program? Minitab is my personal favorite, I can work with others, even if you had sent me a plain old text file I would have had fewer issues. Alas, Guy Who Sent, you did not. You sent me an Excel file. It has one page containing 538 rows of data in 22 columns, with a half-assed unlabled graph slapped in the middle. In order to use the data I had to export all of the data to a text file and import it back into Excel. Upon doing this the birth dates that you formatted as day/month/two digit year came back mostly hosed. You see, Excel decided on its own which years were 19xx and which ones were 20xx. Most of them are incorrect. I am pretty sure that the elderly patients do not have Merlin-like aging qualities and were not born in 2024. Just a hunch really.
I understand that sending me data is a task assigned to you by your boss, and that you think the data is not important and that I am not worth the time. I would just like to remind you that it is I that edits those papers you are trying to publish in the English language. It is I who reunites split infinatives for you. It is I who puts the sentences in correct English grammatical format. It would behoove you (look it up Spanky) to treat me with some courtesy.
Until me meet at the conference I am planning (at which you wish to present one of the papers I have edited for your slack ass)I remain,
She Who Understands Mean But Funny.
cross posted to notes_to_asshats and my lj.