i've found a migraine trigger

[rone]

Repairing the Contacts Spreadsheet

This should be done every time before publishing

• Copy the new REVSHARE_CONTACTS_<DATE>.xls to a Windows system

• Open the file in Excel

• Save file as a Tab Delimited (*.txt) format (answer "yes" to losing all the formatting- that's the whole point of doing this)

• Close Excel

• Re-open Excel

• Import/open the  REVSHARE_CONTACTS_<DATE>.txt file

• Save the file as an excel 97-2003 workbook.

This will create a file that should always validate and import correctly

Comments

[palecur.livejournal.com]

what the i don't even

[eagle]

I would be so tempted to propose the optimization of always saving the file as a Tab Delimited file each time one changes it, pointing out that this saves several steps, but I'm not sure that I could keep a straight face through the entire conversation as required to pull that off.

[mangosteen]

Also,

- Do Hokey Pokey

- Turn Self Around

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

At my previous job, I worked with a woman who could reliably create un-openable Word and Excel docs, some of which would even make a W2K box bluescreen.

Came to find out that, when the client would ask for a webpage redesign, she'd pull up the webpage in IE, ctrl-A, open Word or Excel, shift-insert. And between IE and Office, they would dutifully OLE-encapsulate every object and every script on that page, all of which would look fine, until you saved the document and sent it to someone else.

This became the genesis of some of Huey's Rules for Life, notably:
- If you use Microsoft Excel as a word-processor, I will kill you with your own LCD panel, and
- Do not cut and paste webpages from Internet Explorer into Microsoft Word unless I am sure you know what you are doing. Note: this group does not currently include you, and is unlikely to include you at any point in the future.

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

Dammit, you've made me write Python code, something which I normally avoid.

Install this (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/xlrd) and this (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/xlwt), and then use this:

#!/usr/bin/python                                                               
                                                                                
from sys import argv # Yes, you actually have to pretend "argv" is defined elsewhere in Python
import xlrd                                                                     
import xlwt                                                                     
                                                                                
inp_filename = argv[1]                                                          
out_filename = argv[2]                                                          
                                                                                
inp_wb = xlrd.open_workbook(inp_filename)                                       
out_wb = xlwt.Workbook(out_filename)                                            
                                                                                
inp_sh = inp_wb.sheet_by_index(0)                                               
out_sh = out_wb.add_sheet(inp_sh.name)                                          
                                                                                
width  = len(inp_sh.row_slice(0))                                               
height = len(inp_sh.col_slice(0))                                               
                                                                                
for row in range(0,height):                                                     
    for col in range(0,width):                                                  
        out_sh.write(row, col, inp_sh.cell(row,col).value)                      
                                                                                
out_wb.save(out_filename)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the poor chump in Metropolis who spent his whole day manually moving the enormous clock hands to point to the lit light bulbs around the edge of the dial.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Oy. And for dagbrown, double oy.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Nggghhh. IT HURTS.

[epileptikitty.livejournal.com]

Open office has laundered unprintable files for me.

My bete noir is subversion. I make its directories fucked up. No-one else believes this: it's my private curse.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I have no trouble believing this.

[tinellaq.livejournal.com]

I had a problem like that. It turned out that when I told my IDE to add a new directory to SVN, the local copy would end up with depth:none, causing no end of random-seeming trouble down the line. Fix was "svn up --set-depth infinity"