Re: Any Excel Experts

On Thu, 5 May 2011, David E. Wheeler wrote:

> We're looking for someone who lives and breathes Microsoft Excel to
> detangle a large collection of worksheets and work it into a more
> generalizable format for publication as part of an environmental open data
> project. We're talking 5-6 years of data collected willy-nilly into 120
> worksheets and held together with links, formulas, and duct tape. The
> ideal candidate will be:

Hey, David!

I suspect you'll not find anyone with those qualifications. My limited
experience with environmental data in spreadsheets is that those who use a
spreadsheet rather than a database have no clues what they're doing. I spent
several weeks extracting permit compliance monitoring data for one year, and
didn't get all of it yet. There are about 30 more years to go. Yuck!

What you ought to consider is someone who knows grep, sed, and awk and can
apply those to data exported from Excel as .csv, one per tab/spreadsheet.
Then you can concatenate the data in a uniform format and put them in a
spreadsheet or database for the project. Perhaps someone in India for either
direct Excel tweaking or exported data tweaking?

I won't do it because you'd not have the budget for the hours required and
I have other project priorities that are more fun and satisfying.

Good luck in your search,

Rich