Data Transformations Using Excel

O Boy O Boy,

Today is a wonderful night to be an IT Professional, why you ask? I spent the last 4+ hours doing mindless data transformation tasks. It's amazing what tricks my buddy Mike P taught me with MS Excel. I used to think this tool was for accounting sissies, but it's got great functionality.

For Example:

-- Breaking out Contact Name into First name and last name
-- Breaking out Contact Number into phone1, 2, 3, 4

There's a 'text to column' feature in excel that will break that sh*t out for you based on a delimiter or a space. Wonderful!

The only bad part is then parsing thur the 1,000's of records of data manually and fixing the crap data. This wasn't even too bad using the sort features to group all the bad stuff. Looks like there is more of this ahead!

Yippie!