Thursday, September 28, 2006

Today I am a Data Entry Clerk Idiot

and I hate it and honestly, it's my own damn fault.

I had a spreadsheet with 10,000 lines of addresses. And for reasons too complicated to go into, I was supposed to have 800 rows interspersed throughout with UNKNOWN for street and city. And, well, I had them as UNKNOWN for street but the city wasn't UNKNOWN. If I had caught this when it was still in a spreadsheet, it would have been a minute to correct. But now it's on a mainframe database that's really, really archaic. And honestly, there's probably some really neat way I could program a subroutine in FOCUS to start at the bottommost row of data, count up x spaces and replace the existing text at position 70 with the string "UNKNOWN" and do it again and again until we get to row 1, but to learn how to do this in FOCUS would take longer than it will to just manually go through the dataset and hit CTL-V over and over once my cursor is over the appropriate place. And because our mainframe is so archaic it takes SO long to transfer from the mainframe to your PC, and to re-upload the data requires you to break it into smaller chunks... anyway. And let me tell you, I am at line 2669 of 10024, and boy, am I bored. I hate this junk. though having it done is pretty satisfying. I gotta get back to it.

2 comments:

Abby said...

Is the spreadsheet saved locally? Can you make the corrections on the spreadsheet and then overwrite the one on the mainframe?
Miss you and our chats. Stacey

Abby said...

BTW...I would like to use some of your images. Are they for sale or perhaps available on istock? Please let me know. S.