@davesaddiction said in Excel autocomplete has lost its mind.:
@BicycleBuck
Ah... the world of big data.
Do you often set up attribute rules/constraints/ranges to ensure proper data entry? Or are you the only one ever touching your datasets? Even then, they can be helpful to catch any "fat-finger" mistakes, or just errors when moving really fast trying to get something done on a deadline.
I LOVE setting up data entry constraints (validation, filtering, menus, etc.) so that data entry is as clean, fast, and accurate as possible.
Unfortunately, I don't get to do that very often. The problems I run into are the direct result of how data is captured and recorded by other people. Census data is a great example. A census block GEOID (i.e. 220790121002013)has multiple components:
State: The first two characters are the state code (22)
County: The next three characters are the county code (079)
Census tract: The next six characters are the census tract code (012100)
Block group: The next character is the census block group code (2)
Block: The last three characters are the census block number (013)
Lots of codes with leading zeros that are often recorded as separate fields in the data I work with. Pull that into excel as a csv file and it automatically removes the leading zeros. So, we have to use filters and pre-define field types before importing the csv data.
One does not simply open a census csv data file in Excel and expect good results.
I have a long story about data another professor borrowing my GPS data collectors to capture the location of trees on campus. The short version: I offered to set up the data collectors and he passed. In the end, they (he and his students) collected 3,000 trees and had almost as many "unique" species - LOBLOLLY PINE, loblolly pine, Loblolly Pine, Loblolly pine, Pinus taeda, pinus taeda....