[Babase] Re: Ooops, census bug

Karl O. Pinc kop at meme.com
Mon Nov 20 15:38:23 EST 2006


On 11/20/2006 01:01:45 PM, kfenn wrote:
> Karl,
> 
> This is real the data from July 2006.  Don't make too much of the  
> fact that I labeled the file "old".  This is the first file I would  
> have tried to upload in the next demography update.  Given this, I'm  
> not sure I understand your comments about loading the "earlier" or  
> files first.

Given this, you're already loading "earlier" files first.  Let me know
if it's too slow and I'll look into why.

> 
> Any errors about individuals not appearing in biograph are probably  
> because from new births or immigrant males.  I wouldn't have gotten  
> the errors because it wasn't loading the individuals who were always  
> present.  I think I added ADR and ZAN to biograph just to test the  
> system, but I'm sure there were others that weren't in biograph that  
> I needed to first add.

Ok.

> 
> I noticed that when I saved the excel as tab-delimited, it looked  
> kind of screwy.  Is there any magic to saving it aside from "Save  
> As" > "Tab Delimited"?  The file looks fine in Excel (attached) so it  
> sounds like a lot of the problems are coming from the conversion out  
> of Excel.  I didn't deliberately end my file with a blank  
> line....again everything looked OK in Excel but apparently it  
> wasn't.   Any advice for me to improve this?

I think we'll just have to work around the screwyness, assuming that
the blank line isn't an artifact of the emailing or any other sort
of manipulation.  Let me know if the program complains about blank
lines.  (I wonder because if excel always ends files with blank lines
I don't see how you could have made it through a test of the program.)

If we are getting blank lines it may be that excel isn't
keeping track of the last line so that it will put out
empty lines if there ever was data even when there
isn't now, or there's a space in one of your
cells in the last row, or that excel always ends files in
blank lines when it exports them, or maybe something else.
Anyway, if it happens a lot we probably want to change
the program instead of fighting with excel.


Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein



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