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What a great tool! I think one challenge putting this into production will be all the "extra" stuff people put into spreadsheets: - one or more titles on top (
by pjungwir 12y ago
What a great tool! I think one challenge putting this into production will be all the "extra" stuff people put into spreadsheets:
- one or more titles on top ("Patient Database", "current as of Jan 5, 2014", etc)
- data in a bunch of different sheets.
- multiple types of "stuff" all packed into one sheet, maybe separated by a few blank rows or maybe a summary pivot table pasted in the top-left corner.
It's easy to handle that if you are pre-processing the spreadsheets yourself, but getting to where non-programmers can prep a spreadsheet for uploading seems hard. How are they supposed to know that column headers belong on the first row, that each row of data should have the same "kind" of thing, etc.?
Anyway, good luck and thank you for the great writeup!
- dceddia 12y agoOne of the commenters on the article suggested sending the customer an "import template," with all of the column headers predefined. The customer simply needs to copy-paste their data into your CSV import template, and upload it. Never tried it myself, but it sounds like a decent solution to the problem of wacky formatting.
- DennisP 12y agoI tried it. Customers pretty frequently made their own spreadsheets that looked mostly like the template, but not quite. I was constantly fixing their uploads. I built a system to validate their uploads and let them fix their errors on a website, and all that hassle went away. (I still gave them the template so they'd know what it was supposed to look like, I just didn't rely on that alone.)