XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition)
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A tale of inefficient data entry, found on reddit:
https://reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/6njgz0/
It's supposed to embed here. If it doesn't, it's because the servers are down (which is about 25% of the time).
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@anonymous234 What's worse: it took her four months to think "There must be an easier way", or that no-one gave her training in the first place?
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@raceprouk said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@anonymous234 What's worse: it took her four months to think "There must be an easier way", or that no-one gave her training in the first place?
Yes.
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@raceprouk said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@anonymous234 What's worse: it took her four months to think "There must be an easier way", or that no-one gave her training in the first place?
I'll go for the latter. Too many people have a very weak grasp of technology.
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Kudos for her being an AI deciphering XML, I bet it wasn't even pretty-printed!
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@anonymous234 said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
a check is sent out
Wait, what? You’ve got web services for invoices and things but you can’t just transfer money from your account to the third party’s? Which developing country did this story take place in — America or something?
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@raceprouk said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@anonymous234 What's worse: it took her four months to think "There must be an easier way", or that no-one gave her training in the first place?
We don't know if it took her four months to wonder if there was a better way to do it, or if she spent weeks going back and forth with the L1 support guy before the case got escalated to the Reddit poster.
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@gurth said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@anonymous234 said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
a check is sent out
Wait, what? You’ve got web services for invoices and things but you can’t just transfer money from your account to the third party’s? Which developing country did this story take place in — America or something?
Well, I don't know any other country in the world where checks are used.
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@gąska said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@gurth said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@anonymous234 said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
a check is sent out
Wait, what? You’ve got web services for invoices and things but you can’t just transfer money from your account to the third party’s? Which developing country did this story take place in — America or something?
Well, I don't know any other country in the world where checks are used.
Not even Check o' Slovakia?
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@dreikin said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@gąska said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@gurth said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@anonymous234 said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
a check is sent out
Wait, what? You’ve got web services for invoices and things but you can’t just transfer money from your account to the third party’s? Which developing country did this story take place in — America or something?
Well, I don't know any other country in the world where checks are used.
Not even Check o' Slovakia?
Says
deprecated
right there in the docs. Something about the fall of the USSR, I believe, but CBA to dig up details.Unless you meant Check-ia, then @blek could have more info. ;)
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@kt_ said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
Says
deprecated
right there in the docs. Something about the fall of the USSRMore likely the immediate cause is the fall of the ČSSR.
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@gąska said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@gurth said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@anonymous234 said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
a check is sent out
Wait, what? You’ve got web services for invoices and things but you can’t just transfer money from your account to the third party’s? Which developing country did this story take place in — America or something?
Well, I don't know any other country in the world where checks are used.
http://notesbetweenthelines.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/McBain-Standup-Meme.jpg
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@kt_ said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
Says deprecated right there in the docs. Something about the fall of the USSR, I believe, but CBA to dig up details.
You must be looking at it wrong. Try the Hyphen War.
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@raceprouk said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
no-one gave her training in the first place?
Here's a scary thought: what if the training was to print the file and input the data by hand?
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@gurth said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@anonymous234 said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
a check is sent out
Wait, what? You’ve got web services for invoices and things but you can’t just transfer money from your account to the third party’s? Which developing country did this story take place in — America or something?
An American expat once told me that he had an account with a smallish credit union. When he would do a bank transfer via the online banking, the credit union would print out the cheque, put it in an envelope and mail it to the recipient's bank. Could be completely made up but it totally sounds like the American banking system.
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Willing to be there was a "non-compliance" issue with the import at one point, and thus began the print and enter fiasco.....
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@dreikin said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
Not even Check o' Slovakia?
Aren't they called the Czech Republic now?
A while back, when there was all that controversy in the news about Russian mail-order brides, I heard that that's actually starting to become big in the Czech Republic as well. Apparently they call them Czech Mates.
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When I was still teaching I once had a student come to me with a problem she was hoping there was an easier way to go about. She worked in the university bursar office and every semester she would export all of the students to a CSV file and spend hours manipulating the data in such a way that, IIRC, could get her a list of all of the students that shared a few defining characteristics. Then she would do the same thing for other reports. This took up days of her work per month
"Have you ever heard of a pivot table?"
"No, what's that?"
"Something you are going to wish you had known about a few years ago when you started this job. Do you have one of those CSV files handy?"
"Yeah, one moment."
Then with just a few clicks and a few seconds I did the work that she had been spending hours per month on over the past several years in just a couple of seconds. Not knowing what a pivot table was had cost the university man-months worth of wasted labor over the years.
I am always surprised just how often people do work the least efficient way possible just because "That's the way we have always done it".
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@polygeekery I have to admit, I'm a bit fuzzy on the concept of pivot tables. I just looked up the Wikipedia article, and AFAICT it basically seems to be "doing typical
SELECT
query stuff, but with a spreadsheet." But then at the bottom it mentions that some SQL databases support pivot table functionality, which sounds redundant. So... what is a pivot table, then?
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@masonwheeler said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
So... what is a pivot table, then?
There may be more to it than that, but you spelled out exactly what I have always used them for. Basically SELECT queries on spreadsheet data.
In her case she was taking a list of all students, sorting on a particular data point, copying that data to another spreadsheet (which, might have been hundreds of lines and she would manually scan through the sorted list to find what was within her cutoffs), sorting again, copying. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I showed her how to do all of that in one operation, in a few seconds, via a pivot table.
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@masonwheeler Basically doing that and then having an export table of it where you can use the original spreadsheet as selectably-displayable information for rows/columns.
So, for example, I can export a list of tickets from my ticket system and have one PivotTable use the Categories field as rows and the ticket numbers as a Count By and get a list of tickets per category, or I can use the same thing and add the Created On date field to Columns and suddenly I get a table of categorized issues by day for the month, etc.
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@masonwheeler - Think SQL Selects with compound aggregates, as well as the transformation of data values to columns.
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@deadfast Even large banks like Bank of America will do that if you use their "Bill Pay" feature with a company they haven't seen before. (Like a small local plumber or something.)
Presumably they get someone to contact the company and set up an electronic transfer if the amount of checks they print and mail gets above a certain threshold.
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@masonwheeler said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
I have to admit, I'm a bit fuzzy on the concept of pivot tables.
It's like an OLAP cube, but tiny and stored entirely in memory.
(I learned OLAP before Pivot Tables, I'm a mutant freak. So I always think of Pivot Tables as a tiny OLAP instead of OLAP as a huge Pivot Table.)
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@masonwheeler said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
A while back, when there was all that controversy in the news about Russian mail-order brides, I heard that that's actually starting to become big in the Czech Republic as well. Apparently they call them Czech Mates.
The bad jokes thread is .
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@blakeyrat said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@deadfast Even large banks like Bank of America will do that if you use their "Bill Pay" feature with a company they haven't seen before. (Like a small local plumber or something.)
Presumably they get someone to contact the company and set up an electronic transfer if the amount of checks they print and mail gets above a certain threshold.
My understanding, though this was a few years ago, so it may have changed, was that they'd prefer physical checks for lots of payments because they'd combine them into a single check with paperwork specifying which accounts were covered.
And I'm sure a lot of their love of physical checks has to do with the float.
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@boomzilla I bet there's a big-ass spreadsheet somewhere that they use to decide whether to go for electronic or check-based payments with at least 5 different factors considered.
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@blakeyrat said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@masonwheeler said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
I have to admit, I'm a bit fuzzy on the concept of pivot tables.
It's like an OLAP cube, but tiny and stored entirely in memory.
(I learned OLAP before Pivot Tables, I'm a mutant freak. So I always think of Pivot Tables as a tiny OLAP instead of OLAP as a huge Pivot Table.)
Huh. I've never thought of it that way, though that's likely because while I've dealt with the Excel monstrosity end-results of OLAP cube reporting we do here, I've never really known how the underlying bits worked.
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@blakeyrat said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@boomzilla I bet there's a big-ass spreadsheet somewhere that they use to decide whether to go for electronic or check-based payments with at least 5 different factors considered.
And there's a guy in their office manually copying data there from another window and then writing the result back 8 hours a day.
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@masonwheeler said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@dreikin said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
Not even Check o' Slovakia?
Aren't they called the Czech Republic now?
A while back, when there was all that controversy in the news about Russian mail-order brides, I heard that that's actually starting to become big in the Czech Republic as well. Apparently they call them Czech Mates.
Shortly before the breakup, there was a Czech dwarf who was on the run from the secret police, who he had heard were after him. He had heard them outside his apartment, so he sneaked out the window and took off down the street. He ran a bit, turned a corner, and knocked on the door of the first shop that he passed.
The shopkeeper opened the door and asked what he wanted.
As he was wheezing, the dwarf replied, "I'm sorry *huff* to bother you *huff* at such a late hour, *huff* but would you be able *huff* to cache a small Czech?"
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@gąska said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
Well, I don't know any other country in the world where checks are used.
Canada
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@greybeard said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
Canada
@Gąska said "country", not "region of the United States."
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@boomzilla said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
And I'm sure a lot of their love of physical checks has to do with the float.
Yup, my bank's Bill Pay service will, for an "other payee," immediately deduct the payment amount and mail a check against their own account.
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@deadfast said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
Could be completely made up but it totally sounds like the American banking system.
This is 100% the American banking system.
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@greybeard said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@gąska said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
Well, I don't know any other country in the world where checks are used.
Canada
What are checks? We use cheques in Canada (very rarely), which are similar to checks, but different.
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@quijibo said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
What are checks? We use cheques in Canada (very rarely), which are similar to checks, but different.
Yes, they're just like cheques, but with real dollars.
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@boomzilla said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@quijibo said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
What are checks? We use cheques in Canada (very rarely), which are similar to checks, but different.
Yes, they're just like cheques, but with real dollars.
And real Checkians.
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@tsaukpaetra said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
Kudos for her being an AI deciphering XML, I bet it wasn't even pretty-printed!
yeah, that's the actually funny part, imo. she's got enough capacity to decipher totally alien "text" format and correctly infer/parse out the right information from it, while at the same time not enough capacity to realize "wait, when i click export in my software, it creates a file with the same extension automatically, with the data from the software, i wonder if there is a button in here somewhere that works in the reverse direction, eating this kind of files and making them into data in the software"
utterly fascinating paradox.
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@sh_code said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
a file with the same extension
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@gurth said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@sh_code said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
a file with the same extension
- Submitting bug report: "Option hides even extensions of file types unknown to the user"
- From this:
"$User : "Wait, what? So all this time I could've loaded the file into $Software? I took over this job four months ago and no one ever told me! I've been entering everything by hand into the application! So how do I import this .xml thing?"
I assumed she didn't have it checked.
I might have been wrong.
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@sh_code said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@gurth said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
@sh_code said in XML file confusion (wooden table, advanced edition):
a file with the same extension
- Submitting bug report: "Option hides even extensions of file types unknown to the user"
- From this:
"$User : "Wait, what? So all this time I could've loaded the file into $Software? I took over this job four months ago and no one ever told me! I've been entering everything by hand into the application! So how do I import this .xml thing?"
I assumed she didn't have it checked.
I might have been wrong.It's checked by default, IIRC. It's one of the first ways I remember to set up those options on a new computer.