grumble.

[valis2]

I was given a task yesterday at the day job, and I pushed through a third of it. Last night I had an "a-ha" moment--I realized I could use the VLOOKUP function in Excel to cut off about a third of the remaining time involved in the project.

This morning I spent an hour and fifteen minutes fiddling with LOOKUP, VLOOKUP, and even INDEX/MATCH and could not get the bastard to work properly. (I have a feeling that it's because I absolutely have no choice about storing numbers as text in the document, and somehow, when it's trying to match them, it's either a) thinking the numbers for the array aren't "sorted" and therefore it balks, or b) the reference to a cell is making the texty-number all sad and useless.)

So I was thirty pages short of finishing. I volunteered to come in tomorrow, thinking that they wouldn't bother with it, but they want me to. Sigh. (If I had just not spent that time trying to work smarter, lol...)

My two options:

1) Go in and work a half day, which (theoretically) leaves me time to do my errands, like going to the post office, working on Etsy/eBay stuff, packing boxes, buying pads, and going to the grocery store. However, then I have to drive in by myself (my sister is working a full day) and that's a big gasoline draw. And I'm so damned tired and sleepy because I've been writing (er, Riptide stuff) and I'm all full of story thoughts and I can't sleep, and my period started today, so I'm even more tired, and I don't want to get up and go in.

2) Go in and work a full day to save on gasoline and make some $. House, after all. But I'm so tired. And then I wouldn't have time for the errands. Poor Husband would have to do the post office stuff and he's already been running ragged this week. Plus, I'm on my period and I don't want to sit there all day during the worst day of my period. wah.

I've decided on 1. Plus, I can run and drop something off to a friend whose store is very near work, and I think she'd be pretty geeked about it.

*yawn*

Comments

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

One more idea. I am finding that VLOOKUP wants text strings enclosed in quotes or it spits out an error message. So to look up a text 1, you would use the following--

=VLOOKUP("1",X7:Z22,2,FALSE)

Possible that Excel is reading some as numbers and some as text? Maybe reformat entire column as text?

[valis2.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I can't do the quote thing because the thing to lookup is a cell reference. It finds the cell reference just fine and will display it when I use the evaluate formula dialogue box. However, once it starts to try to match the texty number that was in the cell, then it can't.

I've tried reformatting the columns, and that didn't seem to work. Excel is definitely reading some as numbers and some as text, and because what it's finding in the reference cell is a texty number, it won't match it with the array, which is half and half, even though I've tried to reformat all of them to text. :(

It's so awesome to talk to another Excel aficionado! ;)