WTF? 1

techuser — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:26:37 +0000

Keywords:

Inspired by the daily wtf, I report this:

In my current job, I am working with 'IT Professionals' in other companies. Previously I provided business solutions to business managers - i.e. I was a contracting 'IT Professional' myself.

However there are 'IT pros', and there 'people who work in computers'.

Sometimes this causes me to dispair.

For one particular multi-million dollar solution, we seed a particular database with customer details from a CSV file from another IT system and expect (well, require) the customer to provide that file.

It's really easy; name, account number, email - that sort of thing.

Rarely does anyone get the CSV on spec. For a start, we always, without fail, receive it as an Excel spreadsheet.

One source was a puzzle though. We received the data in comma separated format all right, but this was entirely contained within column A of an Excel spreadsheet, each cell containing a line of CSV data.

The mystery was solved when they sent us a copy containing the source formulas. The IT pro had taken 'comma separated' very seriously. However, instead of 'save as' and selecting CSV, he wrote a formula to take the contents of each column, insert a comma between them and return the result as a string. Something like:

=CONCATENATE(B2,Z1,C2,Z1,C4,Z1,C5)

Ingenious.

Technological Wanderings - wtf

WTF? 1