Excel at the DJ

We’ll get back to Summer Street next week. Meanwhile, I’ve been up to my ears in Excel at the DJ. As a general rule, my history in systems remains lost in the Primatene mists, but through a commodius vicus of recirculation I have gotten involved in a music project that has required me to export a very sloppy old db out of Lotus Notes into Excel, which, in non-technical terms, is roughly analogous to translating voice recordings of Prakit into written street slang. Notes is moribund, and those who understand its wiles are all six feet under, at least metaphorically. Excel, on the other hand, can do almost anything, if you’re willing to ignore the various international treaties against torture.

You’ve got this list of 35,000 records out of Notes, once you uncover the fields that had formulas where simple data ought to have been, with a small but annoying number of repeat records with one slight differing field, although all records do have a correct unique identifying number. There’s about 30 fields in each record, including rights information; there’s also attachments. You’ve got this independently generated list of royalties that shows annual income on a daily basis, by id number. You need to figure out how much money can be made by the songs earning income in iTunes that do not have rights restrictions. This means that you have to create a lot of moving targets (i.e., lookups) in a very big sheet that, if you don’t save it every five minutes, will probably crash or at the very least go out of memory on you. As it is, it likes to forget itself on occasion while pretending to be working by turning off the filtering or burying the odd overarching calculation. Cleaning it up means lots of calculating then special pasting as values and then sorting and filtering some more and some more lookups and more pasting. I woke up screaming =IF( a couple of times in the night, thanks to Excel’s tendency, if it doesn’t like the way you’re nesting things (and when it comes to Excel I’m a nesting fool), to switch your formula to =(IF for no apparent reason other than to remind you that some day you will die but Excel is forever.

This has, in other words, kept me busy.

In other news, I updated the Nostrum material on my website. Again. I was looking at it, planning for Series 3, which Jules insists is coming down the pike shortly, and I realized that the layout didn’t make that much sense. The thing is, if you’re going to dive into Nostrum, there’s probably an optimal way to do it, and the way I had it didn’t quite highlight that optimal way. I think it’s better now. I’m not quite sure when the new stuff is coming, so there is maybe a missing piece or two on the site, but assuming that Jules and the Nostrumite are marginally reliable, it’ll be there sooner or later.