Comments on: Finding last names in Excel

By: alex

alex — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 20:06:14 +0000

Carlos: That’s why I included Che as an example up there. It’s really hard to do it in this case, because culturally, you are able to identify where given names end and surnames begin. I don’t think there is a way to do this without resorting to a dictionary of names, which gets to be pretty complex, and not super-reliable.

By: Carlos

Carlos — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 18:48:29 +0000

What happens if, like in many Latin communities, the list includes both surname and mother’s maiden name, in addition to the first name? Or if instead of a middle initial, the full middle name is included? How can we adapt the formula to accomodate this situation? As far as I know, the find function will locate the first occurence only.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 20:24:01 +0000

Sorry, in the Fib sequence example, it should have said to put the formula =(A1+A2) in cell A3.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 20:21:50 +0000

Sorry, didn’t mean to be rude :) The notion of using Excel to start teaching programming is an interesting one. The programmer in me shudders at the notion, but that’s just cultural and it really makes a lot of sense, as it’s relatively readily available (and OpenOffice *is* readily available as an alternative).

Here’s another interesting example: calculating the Fibonacci sequence (a common learning programming exercise) in Excel is pretty straightforward: simply put a 1 in cells A1 and A2, put the formula =(A1+A2) and copy that cell and continue to paste it down the A column, which will transpose the formula effectively.

The only problem is that Excel, unless you get into using Visual Basic (and why not, I guess), is sort of a stateless, declarative programming language, which doesn’t easily translate to something like Python or Java.

I’m not sure how far you could take this, but it would be an interesting way to start an intro to programming gen-ed type class and would leave the students with some useful skills rather than simply being able to write a card shuffling program in Pascal :)

By: alex

alex — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:20:19 +0000

I don’t hate Perl. And like Perl, this can be done in a little bit of Python. Or, given that we are within Excel, in Basic. But the idea here is that most readers don’t know any of those. I’ve suspected for a while that Excel might be an interesting way to teach non-programmers how to program.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 18:02:26 +0000

If only you didn’t hate Perl :)

By: jennimi

jennimi — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 21:37:57 +0000

uhm… is this the most genius bit of bloghumor I’ve seen in eons?????? two meanings to this post, cool excel how-to and cool point about….

….even better if intentional.

By: admin

admin — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:17:29 +0000

Mostly this was an excuse to introduce the idea of functions and of working with something over a number of columns, and the idea of thinking procedurally about a problem. Of course, splitting by space (either Data > Text to Columns) or importing with a column split would work as well as the formula, but wouldn’t give me that chance…

By: Epa

Epa — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:01:43 +0000

You could probably do the same thing by opening the file as text file space delimited. This way you would handle the Middle name easier without formulas.

By: jeremy hunsinger

jeremy hunsinger — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 17:42:21 +0000

why didn’t you just do a column split based on spaces