On Excel...

Permit 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...

Serendipity...

I ordereed a couple of books on Amazon the other day, enough for their free shipping to kick in, and the books, which were shipped yesterday, arrived late this morning, which is pretty neat. I looked at the box in passing, and it seemed to me that the package originated in Kansas, which seems right for "one day away" via UPS Ground.

I also noted that Amazon dropped the price of one of the books I ordered literally hours after I ordered it. I inquired about that via email and got a response this morning, basically a price adjustment note.

Amazon-wise, I am a happy camper.

* * *Excel-wise, I have calmed down a bit, but I am bothered by just how hot under the collar I got about the whole thing (of course, it didn't help that Galina had decided to take her first steps in Excel - for other reasons - and was coming by at intervals of what seemed to be 10 seconds for help while I was going nuts trying various ways of putting the text back into Excel).

Still, I should not have gotten that emotional. It didn't help solve the framzoggling problem, nor did it endear me particularly to Galina.

Cheers...

Blyech...

In between exchanges, I've been playing around with various ways of doing what I need to do in Excel. While I am less than thrilled at some of the default behavior in Excel, the fact remains that whoever chose Excel as a vehicle for a basically text document needs his head examined.

On the other hand, the reason Excel appears to have been chosen is the fact that each item in the table is associated with a number that is, ultimately, summed at intervals and at the bottom of the table. Word would have been an ideal vehicle for this document, except for the fact that it has no such capability, at least to the best of my knowledge.

To give you an idea of the scope of the problem I'm facing, I've got a document where one column consists of entries with 8-10 bullet points. These become 16-20 such points when translated. Moving one such cell from Word populates 16-20 rows of an Excel table.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no convenient way to merge these rows, the way one can merge those column rows in a Word table (actually, there is, but you lose the data in all but the top left cell, which defeats the purpose). Given the nature of a spreadsheet, I guess this inability makes sense.

I've tested a sample cell, replacing all carriage returns with the string "qq" to prevent Excel from splitting text among multiple rows, after which I do a search-and-replace, replacing "qq" with Alt-0010, which embeds the equivalent of an Alt-Enter into the text. It should work, and even though it's messy as heck, at least I seem to be avoiding having to do the translation over again from scratch.

Cheers...