Rubber Ducky

[da_lj]

Today was a whole pile of work, and I loved it

Comments

[dr_tectonic]

So what's your first thoughts about how to approach the Excel problem? I'm curious to see if they're at all like what my instinct is.

[da_lj]

I didn't fully describe the inputs: there's a column with a custom-formatted date and time, so I can just reformat that as a proper date/time and do date-compares to get the right rows. That part should be easy; even if there wasn't a column with time-data, it's all going to be at predetermined intervals so we could just step n rows.

Mostly, my thoughts are figuring out what I need to ask: what are they doing with the results; to help determine how would they like their time-intervals separated (dumped to separate excel files, separate worksheets, highlighted piece-by-piece when they click a button, or something else?)

For now I'm assuming they don't need further data-massaging, but I bet that'll be coming along as a later step.

I'm curious what sorts of things this made you think about!

[dr_tectonic]

Oh, mostly just that if I needed to do some transformations on Excel data that were at all complicated, my first instinct would be to dump it to a text file, massage it in perl, and then reload it into Excel. I was imagining things like the timestamps being spread across multiple columns in an unhelpful way, or that you had to combine a time cell with the filename, or that they wanted you to separate the data on different days into different files/sheets or something like that. Hooray for just needing to reformat a column!

[da_lj]

Yah, in that situation, I'd get out the swiss-army chainsaw that is Perl. :)

Spreadsheet::ReadExcel has at times made my life much smoother, when clients have insisted on handing off an excel spreadsheet instead of a .csv file...

[ng_nighthawk]

Of course it won't be; there will be exceptions. There always are.

A lot of this, in my experience, is the natural inclination to realize that you can do more. When you're barely stumbling along, you have very simple goals because that's all you can have. Once you have accomplished that simple goal, you realize there are many other things which could be done.

[da_lj]

To my mind, that's a second, often desirable thing: iterative design can even be a goal (as long as the client understands that it might be a re-design not "just a tweak").

But for now, I'm just whinging that they didn't get to tell me the full spread of what they want initially, just a brief intro, and I can't possibly start writing (or really thinking about design) until the first real meeting on Monday.

[sulle_stelle]

I ditto the recommendation of massaging in perl if the manipulation is too complex, because doing it in Excel can be dog-slow. I ran into this issue in my data mining class. If you must stay inside Excel, I'd recommend the "step n" approach as opposed to the date conversion.