I love how in the year of our lord 2024, the idea of entering these as uppercase would present its own downstream issues. Cathy! You did it right! Don’t stress about it now.
I used to do freelance IT support. Databases were the worst. I would have clients who wanted to convert from Excel spreadsheets to Access databases.
In theory, it’s an almost trivial exercise in reading the manual. In practice, the client has invariably put text in a field that should be numeric-only or numbers in a date field or long comments in a phone number field that should only have 11 characters. Cleaning up the formatting violations was 90% of the work.
Our company develops and sells an electronic health records + scheduling + billing system. Part of our install includes a conversion from our clients’ existing systems to our database. It is amazing how many software packages are written that, as mistercatworks said, allow for incorrectly formatted data to be entered into a field. A good part of our support team’s time is taken up cleaning up our clients’ old data. We even did one system where the balance owing field did not match the total of unpaid invoices. Seems that system allowed users to change the balance field directly with no transaction recorded. We have even had to spend time cleaning up data on our own system where users tried to do things that our system was not designed to do. I have often said that developing software would be a whole lot easier if we did not have users – but then without users it would be difficult to pay our bills.
SnowBunny12 6 months ago
Luckily I don’t have a lot of people in my address book so if I had to start over it wouldn’t take very long.
Shani Jean 6 months ago
I love how in the year of our lord 2024, the idea of entering these as uppercase would present its own downstream issues. Cathy! You did it right! Don’t stress about it now.
mistercatworks 6 months ago
I used to do freelance IT support. Databases were the worst. I would have clients who wanted to convert from Excel spreadsheets to Access databases.
In theory, it’s an almost trivial exercise in reading the manual. In practice, the client has invariably put text in a field that should be numeric-only or numbers in a date field or long comments in a phone number field that should only have 11 characters. Cleaning up the formatting violations was 90% of the work.
hendelca Premium Member 6 months ago
Our company develops and sells an electronic health records + scheduling + billing system. Part of our install includes a conversion from our clients’ existing systems to our database. It is amazing how many software packages are written that, as mistercatworks said, allow for incorrectly formatted data to be entered into a field. A good part of our support team’s time is taken up cleaning up our clients’ old data. We even did one system where the balance owing field did not match the total of unpaid invoices. Seems that system allowed users to change the balance field directly with no transaction recorded. We have even had to spend time cleaning up data on our own system where users tried to do things that our system was not designed to do. I have often said that developing software would be a whole lot easier if we did not have users – but then without users it would be difficult to pay our bills.
I hope everyone had a great day today.
rgcviper 6 months ago
Coulda, shoulda, woulda, huh?
I feel them with technology. Learning the new procedures can be … an adventure.
HI, MOM. Hello, “Cathy” Clan.