Alright, folks, let me share a bit about what I was tinkering with recently. I got this idea to really dig into film awards, but man, the data I had was a real piece of work. So, I set out to try and ‘split’ it all up, make it manageable. It wasn’t a walk in the park, I’ll tell you that.
So, picture this: a huge list. Years and years of awards, all sorts of them. But the way it was written down? A total mess. You’d get one cell saying something like “Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor – Drama Film”. All smashed together. How are you supposed to sort that nicely? You just can’t.
My first thought, naturally, was to use that ‘text to columns’ feature you find in spreadsheets. Seemed easy enough. Pick a hyphen, pick a comma, and boom, right? Wrong. That trick worked for maybe the first ten rows. Then you hit entries where they used a colon, or no separator at all, just a long string of words. It quickly became a headache, a real proper one.
I spent a good chunk of time just looking at the screen, scratching my head. I figured I had to break it down.
- First, I went for the low-hanging fruit. Anything with a clear ‘ – ‘ (that’s a dash, for you youngsters) separating the main award part from some extra detail, like a genre. I tackled those first.
- Then came the tricky bits. You know, where they list the film title AND the director in the same spot. Or multiple winners for a single award, all lumped together. That needed more care. I was looking for patterns, like stuff in parentheses, or the word ‘and’ squished between names.
- And don’t get me started on how the year of the award was sometimes just thrown in there randomly.
The most frustrating part, honestly? The sheer inconsistency. You’d think these big award organizations would have a standard way to list their winners. Nope. Every list felt like it was made up on the spot. It was like they were actively trying to make it hard to organize! Made me grumble a fair bit, I won’t lie.
But, you know, I stuck with it. Bit by bit, I started cleaning it up. A lot of ‘find and replace’ commands. Some careful slicing and dicing of text. And yeah, for the really stubborn entries, it was just me, my mouse, and a lot of patience. Going row by row. My eyes were definitely feeling it by the end of some of those sessions.
So, what did I achieve after all that fuss?
Well, after wrestling with that data monster, I finally got things split out. Now, I’ve got these neat columns. One for the Awarding Body, you know, like the ‘Oscars’ or ‘Golden Globes’. Another for the Main Award Category, like ‘Best Picture’ or ‘Best Director’. And then, if there was an extra detail, like ‘Animated Feature’ or ‘Musical/Comedy’, that went into its own Sub-Category column. So much cleaner! Now I can actually sort and filter properly, see who won what without getting a migraine.
It was a grind, no two ways about it. But there’s a certain satisfaction, isn’t there, in taking a complete mess and bringing some order to it. It just goes to show, even tasks that sound simple on the surface can turn into quite the puzzle. Makes you wonder about all the jumbled-up information out there in the world. Anyway, that was my little adventure in the world of splitting film awards. Maybe it’ll give you a heads-up if you ever find yourself facing a similar pile of digital spaghetti. My advice? Get a big cup of coffee ready beforehand. You’ll need it.
