Hey all,
Short version: I have a duplicate remover/concatenator script, is it worth making it available on my site and where should I list it?
Gonna be a long post for full info
I work with a database product called the Raiser's Edge, which like many products is happy to export to Excel but can run into problems. In many cases, if you ask it to export a field which may contain multiple values, it exports a row for every option for a record, so you end up with duplicates.
So, as a fictituous sample database, imagine a Flower record which has data entries for colour and stem type.
So the flower "Rose" could have Yellow, Red, or White as colour data, and the stem type entries of Green and Thorny.
Exported, this produces:
...not really what most people want.
I've written a macro which will go through a sheet like this, using the first column as the unique identifier, and produce:
Now, I wrote this because I couldn't find any alternatives. I like to think it works quite well - progress bar and undo, and copes with tens of thousands of rows and tens of columns quite comfortably. We've thrown real situations including thousands of rows with up to 700 duplicated rows for each record, and it's coped fine.
Would anyone else find this kind of script useful? Does it do a job other scripts out there don't do, or was I just not good enough at googling? Is it worth sticking on my site? And if so, are there any listings to submit it to? (ie on the mac, I submit software to macupdate and versiontracker, so users are aware of it).
Thanks for reading, and in advance for any replies
Short version: I have a duplicate remover/concatenator script, is it worth making it available on my site and where should I list it?
Gonna be a long post for full info
I work with a database product called the Raiser's Edge, which like many products is happy to export to Excel but can run into problems. In many cases, if you ask it to export a field which may contain multiple values, it exports a row for every option for a record, so you end up with duplicates.
So, as a fictituous sample database, imagine a Flower record which has data entries for colour and stem type.
So the flower "Rose" could have Yellow, Red, or White as colour data, and the stem type entries of Green and Thorny.
Exported, this produces:
Code:
Flower Colour Stem
--------------------------
Rose Yellow Green
Rose Yellow Thorny
Rose Red Green
Rose Red Thorny
Rose White Green
Rose White Thorny
I've written a macro which will go through a sheet like this, using the first column as the unique identifier, and produce:
Code:
Flower Colour Stem
------------------------------------------
Rose Yellow; Red; White Green; Thorny
Would anyone else find this kind of script useful? Does it do a job other scripts out there don't do, or was I just not good enough at googling? Is it worth sticking on my site? And if so, are there any listings to submit it to? (ie on the mac, I submit software to macupdate and versiontracker, so users are aware of it).
Thanks for reading, and in advance for any replies