The tilde, a hero for Everyone

I'm still pretty much the noob at blogging, but I've heard and experienced firsthand that, if one wants to get better at something, them one should just do it. So, you know the drill....

*Warning: not much (nothing, actually) about the database below!

It's early morning on Friday the 7th of December, and it's 44 F and there is a light rain. I got back from the Double-Wide-In-The-Sky (thanks, E-Man, that moniker is a keeper!), where it was a relatively painless night of QC'ing a few jobs.  I was into my last task of the night when Chazbaby and Javvi became moderately animated about the job Javier was working on. At last, Chazbaby went off to do something else, and as I was wrapping up my job, I figured I'd pop over and see what the issue was. Now, in all fairness, the folks I work with are highly trained, experienced and generally really good at solving problems within their baliwicks. The problem is that apart from me, no one has Excel in their baliwick in this shop. Excel exists primarily for two things: to create departmental forms, and to be saved as .csv's, which other software can then utilize.

I asked Javvi who the previous programmer had been. I figured maybe the previous programmer might have some insight as to the issue, but when he told me, Chazbaby and I both laughed, because the scope of this job was pretty much beyond this individual. So I took the next step and asked him exactly what was happening. "It's dropping the final zero when we try to save it as a .csv." to which I replied with the obvious, "It's usually the other way around".

Let's try copying it, I suggested. So, he did, doing a <paste special> in the target worksheet, and  PRESTO! Absolutely nothing happened. At that point I uttered my Great Spreadsheet Truth: Friends who have friends that don't know how to make spreadsheets don't let them make spreadsheets. Undaunted, I suggested we move on to Plan B. "Try <CTRL + ~> I said, and thunder pealed, lightning flashed, a great "POOF" of smoke appeared, and there was the spreadsheet in all of it's raw glory. "WOAH" (think Bill and Ted). My original thought had been to copy the data and paste just the format, then save as a .csv, but when that didn't work quite as expected, I launched Plan B.

And the answer? What he had been looking at was already formatted to always display two significant digits. The zeroes that were missing from the .csv were actually not there. And, since we never touch customer data without their written permission, we called it a night.

I use Excel every day, and I approve of this blog post.