9 ms·

How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent

72 points by dankohn1 11y ago

onion2k 11y ago
This is a really good example of why you need a 'hacker' in your startup, in the traditional 'one who is good at building ad hoc systems' sense. Having awesome technologists who can write brilliant, well-tested and robust code is certainly useful, but a lot of the time in the early stages of a company you just don't have time. You have a problem and it needs to be solved fast. Most things can be fixed later when the initial traction turns in to cash. Until then, hack all the things. Note: I might be biased because hacking things together is what I'm good at.
- dvdcxn 11y ago
  When you've got a person who can hack a good prototype together and then later use the lessons learned to develop a fantastic quality software system, you're in luck.
- scriptman 11y ago
  This is true. But, it seems a waste for the hacker to spend so much time working on a problem that would already be solved if they used a vendor that specialised in what they wanted to achieve.
- jonknee 11y ago
  ... Or just should a fulfillment provider that is halfway competent. Perhaps one that isn't doing you a favor and actually does similar stuff for other people.
  - onion2k 11y ago
    The point is that you can't really predict what you're going to need. Someone in the business who can pick up a problem and solve it fast, even if the solution is a hack you'll replace later, is useful. Having them around means you don't miss opportunities you'd otherwise have to pass on.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      Sure, but in this instance you can 100% know what you need--a shipping fulfillment provider for B2C sales. There are hundreds to choose from, they didn't choose one. They are happy and proud, but their slow shipping and fulfillment disappointed much of their customer base and surely cost them a lot of sales. I'm not even a customer and I knew that they were a clusterfuck. Their $500 hack probably cost them at least 100x that in revenue. Hackers are great and valuable, but sometimes you don't need a hack you need competence.
scriptman 11y ago
This was really interesting, but it just seems like they chose the wrong fulfilment partner for their warehousing and logistics. I work for a third party warehousing and logistics company in AU, but we specialise in receiving orders from external parties in electronic formats and providing tracking information back to the orderer. People think that warehousing/distribution companies are all the same, but there are a lot of different niches. Some are strong with bulk shipping, some with small and fiddly picking, some with large national campaigns that need simultanous delivery. You need to do your research and look for which suppliers are being used by other companies that have a similar distribution profile to you.
- nols 11y ago
  Yeah, that does raise the question of why they chose a company that doesn't normally do what they were looking for in a fulfillment center. It never really covers why exactly they chose Heritage Paper over a different company that focused on smaller ecommerce orders instead of freight.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  Yep. This is 100% right. I've got warehouses that send me things in EDI. I've got warehouses that have me pull something down over sftp in csv or xml. I've got warehouses with bizarre SOAP apis. I've got warehouses with bloody custom REST APIs [that probably cost them $10,000+] sitting on a mac mini that sits in their office. Your comment really should be at the top since this blog post is little more than a warning of "Pick the right fulfillment house or it'll eat 6 months of your life"
yen223 11y ago
Does anyone know how to get around that Excel CSV issue, where Excel will "helpfully" convert a number-like value into a meaningless value in scientific notation, even if the number was quoted like "1234"? That was a huge pain point in a previous work that I did.
- scriptman 11y ago
  If you put an apostrophe in front of the number it will store it as text but will appear as a number. Just to be clear - you can then save the xls/xlsx to csv and the csv won't contain the leading apostrophe, but will show the whole number.
  - yen223 11y ago
    If you put the apostrophe in front of a number, and save it as csv, that works. But if you reopen that exact same file, Excel will still misinterpret the number. The issue here was that there's no way to let Excel know that this value in this CSV file is not a number. The only way around it that I know of is to stick with xlsx, which has its own pain points.
    - scriptman 11y ago
      Yes, it isn't ideal. What you can do is put 2 apostrophes in front of the number in xls/xlsx and save it to csv. The conversion will drop one apostrophe and when you open the csv it will still have one apostrophe in front of it followed by the whole number. Then you can use a formula like =RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-1) to remove the leading apostrophe. The number generated by the formula appears as a proper number again and is usable in calculations.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      Would it still be an issue with TSV? That's my preferred flat file data format, find it less error prone compared with CSV.
      - scriptman 11y ago
hownottowrite 11y ago
Summary: "Fulfillment of physical goods is hard, especially when you don't know anything about it."
- angdis 11y ago
  I agree, but it makes for a good story. It is amazing how much detail goes on behind the scenes in shipping product. A story like this where "logistics outsiders" re-create this stuff from scratch and then write about it is quite entertaining. Good for them, they figured out something that works and had a fun time doing it.
SQL2219 11y ago
Don't eat soy.
- pavlov 11y ago
  Apparently Soylent doesn't contain much of either soy or lentils. It's a weird way to name a product. Sort of like making a fruit juice called "BeefPork". (I know the name is a movie reference. Still doesn't make sense to me.)
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > I know the name is a movie reference. Still doesn't make sense to me. It should, since you recognize the reference, and the name fits perfectly. For me, Soylent Green pretty much the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about this type of product.
- harkain 11y ago
  Why?
  - virmundi 11y ago
    There are various reasons, some of which will require time to checkout. One is that soy is a phytoestrogen [1]. So the studies show there could be some issues with men eating soy at high levels. Googling provides a lot of arguments founded in reasoning for and against. Another issue is that soy requires heavy agriculture and processing [2]. This can harm the environment in much the same macro ways as beef production. The chemicals used in processing soy into tofu and other products can be bad. Again, processing arguments go both ways (though soy is poisonous in its raw form [3]). So right now many, myself included, advocate minimizing soy. You can't get away from it. Thanks to several US administrations soy is huge business. Just watch it. It might be that its good for you. Right now the soy debate is much like the egg debate of the 80s. I leave you with Lewis Black's commentary on food nutrition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXS5GBuk-GQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXS5GBuk-GQ 1 - http://blog.zocdoc.com/does-soy-feminize-men-fact-vs-myth/ http://blog.zocdoc.com/does-soy-feminize-men-fact-vs-myth/ 2 - http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/soy/impacts/ http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/soy/im... 3 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#Nutrition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#Nutrition
cosmolev 11y ago
So it's not only $500, but $500 + John's salary which I think is far higher than this.
- hullo 11y ago
  Makes a better story like that though. Or even "It cost us 10% of our company to even start shipping out our product, what were we thinking?" (Random guess at equity stake)
moonbug 11y ago
Cool story bro, but it give me hives just reading it. "We didn't know anything about physical order fulfilment so we hacked our way into a local optimum, rather than asking anyone who knew". Or, as we say hereabouts, a month in the lab solves a day in the library. But it only cost $500! Well, I'm sure that'll come as a lovely surprise come payday when John discovers he's working pro bono. Also, that product looks disgusting.
- chrisBob 11y ago
  I love math where $500 in hardware plus 6 months of engineer salary equals $500. I am a grad student making about $30k/yr and my advisor still says to figure labor as costing $1,000/day.
  - angersock 11y ago
    Startup math is a bit different. For example, without that kludge, they wouldn't have been fulfilling orders. So, even if they "wasted" half a man-year, they still made their sales and avoided the cost of, you know, going out of business. You can't really apply operational reasoning to startups the same way you can to larger businesses--you've got to factor in other things. (And yes, that is used frequently as a way of deflecting legitimate operational complaints.)
    - nols 11y ago
      That's not the criticism. They're not cobbling a solution together to prevent bankruptcy, they're cobbling together a solution to an already solved problem. Ecommerce fulfillment companies exist, and they chose a freight company with inadequate technology for their needs. Then they're justifying it by saying they hacked a solution for only $500, when it's really costing $500 + 6 months salary + hurt reputation for an extremely late delivery. They could've incorporated a company that used EDI (or an API) to tie into their database to process orders much more effectively than hacking together a solution with a store bought laptop.
      - 11y ago
nbouscal 11y ago
"a $500 system that successfully managed the first four months of Soylent shipments." Successfully is rather overstating it. The shipment of Soylent was delayed by over a year and went at a snail's pace. My shipment was delayed at a rate of roughly one month per month, with it eventually arriving something like six months after the first shipment had gone out, despite being one of the first backers. I can't think of a single metric on which I would call the Soylent shipping process "successful".
- Rifu 11y ago
  To be fair, you receiving the product is technically a success. But I understand where you're coming from.
  - patcheudor 11y ago
    I actually received my order twice! The second order arrived nearly two months after the first and after subsequent orders had been delivered. Getting a free months worth of Soylent was awesome. I sent a thank-you note to the Soylent team and they were very well humored about the situation.
- TDL 11y ago
  Wasn't that an issue with the overwhelming demand (and not having sourced enough ingredients) as opposed to shipping issues? I don't think your shipment of Soylent was in transit for six months.
  - nbouscal 11y ago
    I'm sure it was a combination of a lot of issues. They did have a lot of demand, and with that demand came full advance payments for all of that product, which they got to use interest-free for the entire time from sale to delivery. I'm not trying to say their job was easy, or that the main difficulty was any particular thing. I am saying that the result was a long way from being something that merits this kind of self-congratulatory blog post.
- eslackey 11y ago
vans 11y ago
Nice article about an awful product. I don't eat to live: I live to eat.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  To each it's own. I like to enjoy a good meal every now and then, but day-to-day eating is mostly an annoying necessity. I have better things to do with my time.
gnoway 11y ago
"As ridiculous and janky as that initial experience was, it wasn’t like it was a failure on our end or on the other end. I wouldn’t really see this as a shortcoming." He can only say this because they are profitable. In reality I think they were lucky to have a product people wanted so badly. In the first 12-18 months, most of the complaints by actual Soylent customers about Soylent had nothing to do with the product itself, only the fulfillment.
insulanian 11y ago
While I enjoy such war stories and love hacking ad-hoc systems myself, I can't help myself not to think how much time they wasted instead of going to someone familiar with shipping industry. There is a saying in my home country: "Not everyone can sing through the vilage!"
replicatorblog 11y ago
Does anyone know why an off-the-shelf solution like Magento or Shopify paired with a label printer wouldn't have worked? It's interesting to see the the mechanics of an early-stage startup, but this feels like a largely solved problem? Also, how did the mess of labels get matched with the specific orders, someone was just matching invoices and stickers?
- double0jimb0 11y ago
  Before reading the article, I was thinking 'have these dudes not heard of ShipStation?!?' But yea, to answer your question, yes, shipstation + shopify works brilliantly. One person can process and ship 60 orders in 30 minutes. 60 orders via a 3rd party warehouse with all their fees, would run you ~$150 - $200.
  - replicatorblog 11y ago
    Thanks! I'm still a little bit confused about the problem they're solving, but I'm glad to know I'm not crazy :)
    - jonknee 11y ago
      Probably because it's not a real problem, they created it entirely themselves. At least they solved it!
protomyth 11y ago
"A UPS tracking number is 15 digits or something like that, but a FedEx tracking number is 24 digits. If you opened it in Excel it would truncate it, because it would be like, “That is a 24-digit-number. We should store this in scientific notation.”" I am stunned that this is actually an issue even when dealing with CSV and Excel. It is quite easy to store numbers in Excel and treat them as simple text.
- katelynsills 11y ago
  Nope, this is a legitimate Excel issue when opening CSVs in Excel. If you know a fix without editing the cell data type and saving back into Excel format, I'm all ears! Edit: I'm referring to the way that most people open CSVs in Excel, by clicking on the file and having Excel be the default CSV program, not by importing it. Is there a way to turn off the scientific notation for good?
  - protomyth 11y ago
    You edit the data type because it isn't a number your importing, its a shipping tag. On import you set the column to text, its right there in the import dialog.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      ID handling 101 - just because it's made only out of digits, doesn't mean it's a number.
      - protomyth 11y ago
        How true that is, dealing with trains, barges, and government issued ids will teach some seriously valuable lessons on that score.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  Excel really is horrible at handling anything that needs to feed into a software system that isn't also built on Microsoft technology. Just yesterday I was trying to get a coworker to manually order some rows in a database that I had exported to CSV by date, the problem was that some of the dates were just month-year, and some were month-year-day. Excel insisted on formatting the columns as dates and the month-year rows would turn into month-year-day columns, turning the year into the day and using 2015 as the year. I told him to just open up the file in a text editor, as I didn't feel like trying to figure out Excel's interface for him or coach him through an LibreOffice install. If the person I'd needed the info from was not in the organization, as this situation had been, I'd have considered the approach unworkable and figured out a different way to get the info I needed, as they did. Figuring out and teaching people how to use Excel is not how I want to spend my time.
Mc_Big_G 11y ago
meh. I saved $10 million with a perl script and an army of zebra printers.

72 points by dankohn1 11y ago

This is a really good example of why you need a 'hacker' in your startup, in the traditional 'one who is good at building ad hoc systems' sense. Having awesome technologists who can write brilliant, well-tested and robust code is certainly useful, but a lot of the time in the early stages of a company you just don't have time. You have a problem and it needs to be solved fast. Most things can be fixed later when the initial traction turns in to cash. Until then, hack all the things. Note: I might be biased because hacking things together is what I'm good at.

dvdcxn 11y ago
When you've got a person who can hack a good prototype together and then later use the lessons learned to develop a fantastic quality software system, you're in luck.
scriptman 11y ago
This is true. But, it seems a waste for the hacker to spend so much time working on a problem that would already be solved if they used a vendor that specialised in what they wanted to achieve.
jonknee 11y ago
... Or just should a fulfillment provider that is halfway competent. Perhaps one that isn't doing you a favor and actually does similar stuff for other people.
- onion2k 11y ago
  The point is that you can't really predict what you're going to need. Someone in the business who can pick up a problem and solve it fast, even if the solution is a hack you'll replace later, is useful. Having them around means you don't miss opportunities you'd otherwise have to pass on.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    Sure, but in this instance you can 100% know what you need--a shipping fulfillment provider for B2C sales. There are hundreds to choose from, they didn't choose one. They are happy and proud, but their slow shipping and fulfillment disappointed much of their customer base and surely cost them a lot of sales. I'm not even a customer and I knew that they were a clusterfuck. Their $500 hack probably cost them at least 100x that in revenue. Hackers are great and valuable, but sometimes you don't need a hack you need competence.

scriptman 11y ago

This was really interesting, but it just seems like they chose the wrong fulfilment partner for their warehousing and logistics. I work for a third party warehousing and logistics company in AU, but we specialise in receiving orders from external parties in electronic formats and providing tracking information back to the orderer. People think that warehousing/distribution companies are all the same, but there are a lot of different niches. Some are strong with bulk shipping, some with small and fiddly picking, some with large national campaigns that need simultanous delivery. You need to do your research and look for which suppliers are being used by other companies that have a similar distribution profile to you.

nols 11y ago
Yeah, that does raise the question of why they chose a company that doesn't normally do what they were looking for in a fulfillment center. It never really covers why exactly they chose Heritage Paper over a different company that focused on smaller ecommerce orders instead of freight.
fweespeech 11y ago
Yep. This is 100% right. I've got warehouses that send me things in EDI. I've got warehouses that have me pull something down over sftp in csv or xml. I've got warehouses with bizarre SOAP apis. I've got warehouses with bloody custom REST APIs [that probably cost them $10,000+] sitting on a mac mini that sits in their office. Your comment really should be at the top since this blog post is little more than a warning of "Pick the right fulfillment house or it'll eat 6 months of your life"

yen223 11y ago

Does anyone know how to get around that Excel CSV issue, where Excel will "helpfully" convert a number-like value into a meaningless value in scientific notation, even if the number was quoted like "1234"? That was a huge pain point in a previous work that I did.

scriptman 11y ago
If you put an apostrophe in front of the number it will store it as text but will appear as a number. Just to be clear - you can then save the xls/xlsx to csv and the csv won't contain the leading apostrophe, but will show the whole number.
- yen223 11y ago
  If you put the apostrophe in front of a number, and save it as csv, that works. But if you reopen that exact same file, Excel will still misinterpret the number. The issue here was that there's no way to let Excel know that this value in this CSV file is not a number. The only way around it that I know of is to stick with xlsx, which has its own pain points.
  - scriptman 11y ago
    Yes, it isn't ideal. What you can do is put 2 apostrophes in front of the number in xls/xlsx and save it to csv. The conversion will drop one apostrophe and when you open the csv it will still have one apostrophe in front of it followed by the whole number. Then you can use a formula like =RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-1) to remove the leading apostrophe. The number generated by the formula appears as a proper number again and is usable in calculations.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    Would it still be an issue with TSV? That's my preferred flat file data format, find it less error prone compared with CSV.
    - scriptman 11y ago

hownottowrite 11y ago

Summary: "Fulfillment of physical goods is hard, especially when you don't know anything about it."

angdis 11y ago
I agree, but it makes for a good story. It is amazing how much detail goes on behind the scenes in shipping product. A story like this where "logistics outsiders" re-create this stuff from scratch and then write about it is quite entertaining. Good for them, they figured out something that works and had a fun time doing it.

SQL2219 11y ago

Don't eat soy.

pavlov 11y ago
Apparently Soylent doesn't contain much of either soy or lentils. It's a weird way to name a product. Sort of like making a fruit juice called "BeefPork". (I know the name is a movie reference. Still doesn't make sense to me.)
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > I know the name is a movie reference. Still doesn't make sense to me. It should, since you recognize the reference, and the name fits perfectly. For me, Soylent Green pretty much the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about this type of product.
harkain 11y ago
Why?
- virmundi 11y ago
  There are various reasons, some of which will require time to checkout. One is that soy is a phytoestrogen [1]. So the studies show there could be some issues with men eating soy at high levels. Googling provides a lot of arguments founded in reasoning for and against. Another issue is that soy requires heavy agriculture and processing [2]. This can harm the environment in much the same macro ways as beef production. The chemicals used in processing soy into tofu and other products can be bad. Again, processing arguments go both ways (though soy is poisonous in its raw form [3]). So right now many, myself included, advocate minimizing soy. You can't get away from it. Thanks to several US administrations soy is huge business. Just watch it. It might be that its good for you. Right now the soy debate is much like the egg debate of the 80s. I leave you with Lewis Black's commentary on food nutrition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXS5GBuk-GQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXS5GBuk-GQ 1 - http://blog.zocdoc.com/does-soy-feminize-men-fact-vs-myth/ http://blog.zocdoc.com/does-soy-feminize-men-fact-vs-myth/ 2 - http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/soy/impacts/ http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/soy/im... 3 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#Nutrition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#Nutrition

cosmolev 11y ago

So it's not only $500, but $500 + John's salary which I think is far higher than this.

hullo 11y ago
Makes a better story like that though. Or even "It cost us 10% of our company to even start shipping out our product, what were we thinking?" (Random guess at equity stake)

moonbug 11y ago

Cool story bro, but it give me hives just reading it. "We didn't know anything about physical order fulfilment so we hacked our way into a local optimum, rather than asking anyone who knew". Or, as we say hereabouts, a month in the lab solves a day in the library. But it only cost $500! Well, I'm sure that'll come as a lovely surprise come payday when John discovers he's working pro bono. Also, that product looks disgusting.

chrisBob 11y ago
I love math where $500 in hardware plus 6 months of engineer salary equals $500. I am a grad student making about $30k/yr and my advisor still says to figure labor as costing $1,000/day.
- angersock 11y ago
  Startup math is a bit different. For example, without that kludge, they wouldn't have been fulfilling orders. So, even if they "wasted" half a man-year, they still made their sales and avoided the cost of, you know, going out of business. You can't really apply operational reasoning to startups the same way you can to larger businesses--you've got to factor in other things. (And yes, that is used frequently as a way of deflecting legitimate operational complaints.)
  - nols 11y ago
    That's not the criticism. They're not cobbling a solution together to prevent bankruptcy, they're cobbling together a solution to an already solved problem. Ecommerce fulfillment companies exist, and they chose a freight company with inadequate technology for their needs. Then they're justifying it by saying they hacked a solution for only $500, when it's really costing $500 + 6 months salary + hurt reputation for an extremely late delivery. They could've incorporated a company that used EDI (or an API) to tie into their database to process orders much more effectively than hacking together a solution with a store bought laptop.
    - 11y ago

nbouscal 11y ago

"a $500 system that successfully managed the first four months of Soylent shipments." Successfully is rather overstating it. The shipment of Soylent was delayed by over a year and went at a snail's pace. My shipment was delayed at a rate of roughly one month per month, with it eventually arriving something like six months after the first shipment had gone out, despite being one of the first backers. I can't think of a single metric on which I would call the Soylent shipping process "successful".

Rifu 11y ago
To be fair, you receiving the product is technically a success. But I understand where you're coming from.
- patcheudor 11y ago
  I actually received my order twice! The second order arrived nearly two months after the first and after subsequent orders had been delivered. Getting a free months worth of Soylent was awesome. I sent a thank-you note to the Soylent team and they were very well humored about the situation.
TDL 11y ago
Wasn't that an issue with the overwhelming demand (and not having sourced enough ingredients) as opposed to shipping issues? I don't think your shipment of Soylent was in transit for six months.
- nbouscal 11y ago
  I'm sure it was a combination of a lot of issues. They did have a lot of demand, and with that demand came full advance payments for all of that product, which they got to use interest-free for the entire time from sale to delivery. I'm not trying to say their job was easy, or that the main difficulty was any particular thing. I am saying that the result was a long way from being something that merits this kind of self-congratulatory blog post.
eslackey 11y ago

vans 11y ago

Nice article about an awful product. I don't eat to live: I live to eat.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
To each it's own. I like to enjoy a good meal every now and then, but day-to-day eating is mostly an annoying necessity. I have better things to do with my time.

gnoway 11y ago

"As ridiculous and janky as that initial experience was, it wasn’t like it was a failure on our end or on the other end. I wouldn’t really see this as a shortcoming." He can only say this because they are profitable. In reality I think they were lucky to have a product people wanted so badly. In the first 12-18 months, most of the complaints by actual Soylent customers about Soylent had nothing to do with the product itself, only the fulfillment.

insulanian 11y ago

While I enjoy such war stories and love hacking ad-hoc systems myself, I can't help myself not to think how much time they wasted instead of going to someone familiar with shipping industry. There is a saying in my home country: "Not everyone can sing through the vilage!"

replicatorblog 11y ago

Does anyone know why an off-the-shelf solution like Magento or Shopify paired with a label printer wouldn't have worked? It's interesting to see the the mechanics of an early-stage startup, but this feels like a largely solved problem? Also, how did the mess of labels get matched with the specific orders, someone was just matching invoices and stickers?

double0jimb0 11y ago
Before reading the article, I was thinking 'have these dudes not heard of ShipStation?!?' But yea, to answer your question, yes, shipstation + shopify works brilliantly. One person can process and ship 60 orders in 30 minutes. 60 orders via a 3rd party warehouse with all their fees, would run you ~$150 - $200.
- replicatorblog 11y ago
  Thanks! I'm still a little bit confused about the problem they're solving, but I'm glad to know I'm not crazy :)
  - jonknee 11y ago
    Probably because it's not a real problem, they created it entirely themselves. At least they solved it!

protomyth 11y ago

"A UPS tracking number is 15 digits or something like that, but a FedEx tracking number is 24 digits. If you opened it in Excel it would truncate it, because it would be like, “That is a 24-digit-number. We should store this in scientific notation.”" I am stunned that this is actually an issue even when dealing with CSV and Excel. It is quite easy to store numbers in Excel and treat them as simple text.

katelynsills 11y ago
Nope, this is a legitimate Excel issue when opening CSVs in Excel. If you know a fix without editing the cell data type and saving back into Excel format, I'm all ears! Edit: I'm referring to the way that most people open CSVs in Excel, by clicking on the file and having Excel be the default CSV program, not by importing it. Is there a way to turn off the scientific notation for good?
- protomyth 11y ago
  You edit the data type because it isn't a number your importing, its a shipping tag. On import you set the column to text, its right there in the import dialog.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    ID handling 101 - just because it's made only out of digits, doesn't mean it's a number.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      How true that is, dealing with trains, barges, and government issued ids will teach some seriously valuable lessons on that score.
vinceguidry 11y ago
Excel really is horrible at handling anything that needs to feed into a software system that isn't also built on Microsoft technology. Just yesterday I was trying to get a coworker to manually order some rows in a database that I had exported to CSV by date, the problem was that some of the dates were just month-year, and some were month-year-day. Excel insisted on formatting the columns as dates and the month-year rows would turn into month-year-day columns, turning the year into the day and using 2015 as the year. I told him to just open up the file in a text editor, as I didn't feel like trying to figure out Excel's interface for him or coach him through an LibreOffice install. If the person I'd needed the info from was not in the organization, as this situation had been, I'd have considered the approach unworkable and figured out a different way to get the info I needed, as they did. Figuring out and teaching people how to use Excel is not how I want to spend my time.

Mc_Big_G 11y ago

meh. I saved $10 million with a perl script and an army of zebra printers.