Part of data analysis is putting together reports with correct spelling under tight deadlines.
This is the trick that I use to remember how to spell ‘Caribbean’:
The sea of beans of Carib
or just
bean of Carib
It’s cheesy, but it works
I am stuyding the JavaScript Bible by Danny Goodman with Michael Morrison
In the first chapter, there is a quote that I really liked. To put it in context, Goodman is talking about his dismay in 1995 that Java was to derived from C and C++ and meant for experienced programmers.
“I would have preferred a language that casual programmers and scripters who were comfortable with authoring tools, such as Apple’s once-formidable HyperCard and Microsoft’s Visual Basic, could adopt quickly. As these accessible development platforms have shown, nonprofessional authors can dream up many creative applications, often for very specific tasks that no professional programmer would have the inclination to work on. Personal needs often drive development in the classroom, office, den, or garage.” (emphasis mine)
I am also reading right now to the authorized Steve Jobs biography, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
“My view is that people are creative animals and will figure out clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never imagined. (page 241)”
I think that thess two quotes provide a valuable lesson about computers and information technology. Even though you might not have the formal training, that does not mean that you cannot make meaningful contributions to yourself, your employer, your clients, and the programming world at large. I am not sure that I would have come up with my idea about using areas of VBA classes to store and manipulate data if I had been more formally trained.
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Use the CONCAT function. It can be a bit confusing because joining strings, or concatenating (hence the abbreviation CONCAT), is usually done with a symbol like ‘&’ or ‘+’ in other systems and languages.
The syntax is pretty straight forward.
CONCAT(string1, string2, ...)
Let’s say you you had three string fields, address, city, and state from table contact_info
that you wanted to join (concatenate) together with commas and spaces inbetween. You would use the following code:
SELECT CONCAT(address,', ',city,', ',state)
FROM
contact_info
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Assuming the zip codes are in column E, place the following code in column F:
=IF(LEN(E2)<5,REPT("0",5-LEN(E2))&TEXT(E2,"#"),TEXT(E2,"#"))
Drag the formula down the column.
If you want to know why this works, click here.
If you want to know why this problem exists, click here.
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