Troubleshootus Interruptus

I ruled out hyperthreading and onboard audio as the problems with Deb’s computer, and was tempted to move right to ruling out (or in) the hard drive with certainty.

Sadly, except that money is good, I had to switch to client work.  I had exported 28000-odd contacts from the old case management software.  The manager went through them in Excel, devoting mass quantities of time over the past several days, culling them down to a mere 26000-odd, ditching duplicates and clearly bogus ones, and doing a little massaging.

It got back into my hands today.

The vendor of the new case management software has an import utility, but the data has to be in a specific field order, etc.  My job is to bring it from one format to the other, then save it as CSV and run the import.  Easy enough, on things like last name and first name; just copy and past the whole column sans the first row with the old field name.

However, the old data has four phone fields: phone, altphone, fax, altfax.  The new format is phone and phone2, with corresponding columns for phone type and phone type2.  That will be trickier.  At least the allowed length is sufficient to account for things like “508-555-1234/1235” as shorthand for two alternate numbers.

I passed over the phone fields, figuring I’d get the easy ones first.  Country is next.  Well, most of those are blank, and it’s no big deal.  Right?  Heh.  Most of the ones that are filled in with anything have phone numbers and descriptions thereof, alternate or family member addresses, or other notes.  Since we don’t have a notes field.  Oh wait.. we do!  Then there are the gems like “Brazil, South America,” to avoid confusion with all the identically named countries found on the other continents.  Unlike phone, country is a very short field.  I will need to move all the extraneous stuff to notes before I run the import.

I can only imagine what else I’ll find.  And I’d better get back to it.  It’s going to take long enough as it is…

Posted by on 05/16 at 12:57 PM

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