Life lesson to be learned here. Look at the source of “correct spelling and proper grammar are so damned important…” and weight it appropriately.
To those teachers, you ARE successful. You hopfully make more than they do!!
You failed to look where the direction they pointed you in was headed.
You can spend your life tring to do everything everyone tells you to do, but then you’ll never find time to find what you really want to do with your life.
I hate when people copy & paste a word or number from a block of text into a spreadsheet and after hours of troubleshooting why your macro doesn’t give the correct result, you find that they’ve been including the trailing blank spaces too. “12345” does not equal "12345 " in a spreadsheet! Thank goodness for TRIM because I guess highlighting correctly must really be difficult for some people.
You probably knew this, but you can get a nice little Add-In to trim spaces on a selected range:
I’m still not finished, BTW. Secondary names, primary addresses, secondary addresses, cities, states, and ZIP codes have been cleaned. I’m still working on the primary business names. It seems that every other record must be looked up (SoS databases or google) and fixed. Or combined names have to be separated into primary and secondary names. For now, I’m sending the monthly file as it has always been sent. I have too much other data that has to be processed, and I have some programs waiting to be written. The cleanup is the lowest priority, and I can only work on it at the end of the month when incoming data has stopped coming in.
We might get another person in the department if things go well. But that’s months (at least) down the road. I’ve been wanting a backup, since I’m the only one who knows how to write the programs. I at least want someone I can teach how to run the programs. What if a meteorite lands on my head? And the boss needs someone to reduce her workload. My coworker is always complaining (at length – often for 20 minutes or more at a time) how she doesn’t have time to do her work.
If only people would enter data nicely! (But then, I might be out of a job!)
Not to let sloppy highlighters off the hook, but Word tends to grab spaces at the beginning and ending of words when you’re trying to highlight just the text. It drives me crazy to go back and re-highlight over and over to try to grab just the text (or have to switch to highlighting with the keyboard), and I can see a lot of people just not bothering.
Could be worse - I work with databases which have information in both English and French. Not only do we potentially have two different sets of spelling and grammar mistakes for each entry (with a whole lot of extra grammar in French), we also have to verify that the English and French actually say the same thing.
You know how google finds what you were thinking of, not just what you typed?
After a while, a database of searchable terms/correctly spelled variant could come in real handy.
My first job in programming was to computerize the Indianapolis real estate records.
After data entry got done with it, I had a stack of records showing addition name and lot number.
and mayby ownership interests - I loved that one.
Well, Indianapolis had a bunch of additions named after the developer - Willliam R Johnson. Except for Wm johnson.
On top of that, this guy bred a bit and named his son after himself, Son got into the game. Johnson II Johnson Jr Jonhson the second.
I could figure out to expand wm Wm Wm. wm. to William and thereby normalize the data, but there were several hundred which made no sense.
I ended up talking to the boss at all 9 district recorders about which abbreviation meant what. One couldn’t believe his data had all that garbage - until he opened the 5x7 index card file and checked a few.
That (ISAM) database ended up with almost as many records as there were titles, but that data was normalized and clean by the time I was done.
I don’t remember if I allowed the user to enter crap or just put a list of the recognized names in the user manual. As cheap as that system, it was probably just a matter of telling then to enter the right name for a change.
No, there was no provision to recognize a new addition. They would have had to add those records via data entry and IEBGENER into the VSAM master.
1979.
My very first job was “document coding,” a terrible role from the formative days of the office technology revolution. Document coders were expected to read through boxes of legal discovery documents and look for key words or phrases and fill out a form that would identify the document by number. The forms were filled out manually in a rote manner using block capitals, then the whole mess was sent overseas to be keyed in by below-minimum-wage people who spoke no English. I call the role terrible because they wanted people with a keen eye for detail, a strong work ethic, the ability to make logical associations about the key phrases, and strong penmanship…and the whole point of the exercise was to pay* as little as possible* in a system that relied on sweatshop labor.
Anyway, the stupid thing was, they decided on arbitrary distinctions between similarly-shaped letters and numbers, so that the non-English speakers doing the keying wouldn’t be confused. Capital Ls and Is, for example. But for some reason, they decided the letter O should have a diagonal slash through it, and the zero should be round and empty – precisely the opposite of conventional practice in computing usage. It took me a long time to get that slash out of my Os.
Hey, at least my garbage was entered by the same department I was in.
With all the garbage on some of those deeds, I was astounded that they DIDN’T instinctively correct the grosser garbage - but I never found an entry on those records that could not be found on a 5x7 card.
Of course, any job that could be identified was kept in-house - this was a government peration, and patronage explained a lot f the screw-ups.