The spreadsheets of Question Box call logs I've been looking over are sufficient to make my 6-month-old MacBook choke pretty noticeably. I suppose it could benefit from more ram, but even so, I'm a little surprised.
Column with pasted full text of webpages (including wikipedia pages) used for long answers, I'm looking at you. There's nothing else there that could be the culprit.
While I suspect it's the problem, I can't simply get rid of it as it's the only way to tell if questions were answered or not, as some questions that don't appear in the unanswered lists have blanks or "no answer" in that column, so it's necessary to retain. I think I'll have to figure out some way to truncate the contents of those cells or replace them all with a simpler binary answered/unanswered...but I don't really want to do that for 1000+ records by hand. I'm sure there's some way to automate that in Excel, but I'm not sure. Maybe even better would be a set of four (or so) possibilities, also taking into account whether the question was escalated (to an expert) as well as its answered status.
If that proves doable, it would lend itself to consolidating all the records into a single table, which would greatly facilitate the process of generating useful data about it (already greatly facilitated by my exciting discovery of Excel's magic Pivot Table abilities).
At any rate, I think it's time to break out the AppleScript.
And, uh, as far as blog posts go, file this under "self-indulgent descriptions of what I'm working on/thinking about." It doesn't serve much informative purpose, but hey, I've been sitting around an airport for several hours and still have several more to go, and this is a situation where describing what I'm thinking helps me think about it, so for the moment you, dear reader(s) are on the other end of that. Thanks, and my apologies.
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Try this. Say the column with the answers is column A. put in a function in column B that checks if they're null, and then tells you if it's answered or not,
ReplyDeleteIF(A:A, "answered", "unanswered").
it basically checks to see if something was written in that column. I'm not exactly sure how to check for "no answer" though, since I'm not too well versed in excel...
Hope you have a good time there!
Just ask Mark, he's a POSIM/Excel wrangler
ReplyDeleteI know you solved this a while back, but if you ever find yourself wrangling excel again and its built-in functions don't cut it I recommend Python.
ReplyDeleteIt's much easier, much more powerful, and much better documented than AppleScript.
Yeah, so far I've been fine with Excel's own functionality, but Python does seem like a good choice for that sort of thing. Definitely something I want to learn how to do at some point...maybe I'll work on that in my spare time.
ReplyDeleteThat's what they've been using here for getting new resources (including excel sheets) into our answers database as well.