On Excel...
Apr. 27th, 2007 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpPermit me to vent.
If I previously thought that Excel was the world's worst choice for creating a document for translation, then now I am so convinced of this as to make the convictions of the truest of true believers pale by comparison.
I do believe this is the first time I've blown a deadline because of... let me be brutally frank... my collossal and inexcusable ignorance of just how limited a product Excel actually is.
It turns out, you see, that if you paste the contents of a Word table cell into an Excel worksheet, the contents may or may not end up one worksheet cell. I found this out when I tried pasting a table column from Word into Excel, with very disappointing results: every hard and soft carriage return caused a cell partition in Excel, and there is no convenient way of merging the contents of cells in Excel (of course, that's understandable, as spreadsheet tables are not text tables).
Getting rid of the hard/soft carriage returns in Word helps, but Excel still insists on splitting cell contents at unpredictable points.
Paste options do not help (for a minute, I thought my problems had been solved, but that was an illusion).
And lo, when I tried to record an Excel macro, it turns out that instead of using what I would call the Word model ("Move into a cell, enter edit mode, select the text, copy the text, exit edit mode, move up one cell, enter edit mode, go to the end of the text in the cell, type Alt-Enter, paste the previously copied text, exit edit mode"), Excel is much more literal ("Select cell A108, paste the string 'xxxxxxxx', where 'xxxxxxxx' is the string resulting from all that cutting and pasting), resulting in what would appear to be a use-once macro.
I'm probably just not "literate" enough in Excel to do what needs to be done, but it just seems to me that so little of Excel is intuitive at all.
In short, at worst, I'm looking at completely retranslating about 6000 words and doing it by hand, because the client wants the English to appear under the original Russian text. I can (and did) get the job done in Word, after a whole lot of heaving and grunting. However, now, it turns out I can't move the result back into Excel, short of actually retyping the entire farblegargling thing.
I am so angry, it's not funny.
Cheers...
If I previously thought that Excel was the world's worst choice for creating a document for translation, then now I am so convinced of this as to make the convictions of the truest of true believers pale by comparison.
I do believe this is the first time I've blown a deadline because of... let me be brutally frank... my collossal and inexcusable ignorance of just how limited a product Excel actually is.
It turns out, you see, that if you paste the contents of a Word table cell into an Excel worksheet, the contents may or may not end up one worksheet cell. I found this out when I tried pasting a table column from Word into Excel, with very disappointing results: every hard and soft carriage return caused a cell partition in Excel, and there is no convenient way of merging the contents of cells in Excel (of course, that's understandable, as spreadsheet tables are not text tables).
Getting rid of the hard/soft carriage returns in Word helps, but Excel still insists on splitting cell contents at unpredictable points.
Paste options do not help (for a minute, I thought my problems had been solved, but that was an illusion).
And lo, when I tried to record an Excel macro, it turns out that instead of using what I would call the Word model ("Move into a cell, enter edit mode, select the text, copy the text, exit edit mode, move up one cell, enter edit mode, go to the end of the text in the cell, type Alt-Enter, paste the previously copied text, exit edit mode"), Excel is much more literal ("Select cell A108, paste the string 'xxxxxxxx', where 'xxxxxxxx' is the string resulting from all that cutting and pasting), resulting in what would appear to be a use-once macro.
I'm probably just not "literate" enough in Excel to do what needs to be done, but it just seems to me that so little of Excel is intuitive at all.
In short, at worst, I'm looking at completely retranslating about 6000 words and doing it by hand, because the client wants the English to appear under the original Russian text. I can (and did) get the job done in Word, after a whole lot of heaving and grunting. However, now, it turns out I can't move the result back into Excel, short of actually retyping the entire farblegargling thing.
I am so angry, it's not funny.
Cheers...
