Spelling mistakes are a thing of day to day carporate life. Most of the data in spreadsheets is entered by people and hence prone to having spelling mistakes or alternate spellings. For eg. a person named John could have been spelled as Jon. And when John calls you back to confirm his reservation and you use the search / vlookup to find his information the result would empty.
Here is one technique that I use often when the data has spelling mistakes or I need to do fuzzy search to fetch items that sound or spelled similar. Take the 2 texts you want to compare and,
- Remove all the vowels – AEIOU
- Replace PH with F, Z & J with G, CK with K, W with V, LL with L, SS with S
- Remove any Hs
- Finally compare both texts
To simplify the above 4 steps I have written a small VBA UDF (User Defined Function) that takes a text parameter and performs the above 4 steps.
Function SimpleText(thisTxt As String) As String
' this function generates a simple text from input text that
' can be used for fuzzy search
thisTxt = LCase(thisTxt)
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "a", "")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "e", "")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "i", "")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "o", "")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "u", "")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "ph", "f")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "z", "g")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "ck", "k")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "w", "v")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "j", "g")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "ll", "l")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "ss", "s")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "h", "")
SimpleText = thisTxt
End Function
The above code can be used to perform fuzzy text searches or searches on unclean data. Of course, the above substitution rules are what I find good enough. Feel free to define additional rules as per your needs so that your fuzzy searches work even better.
If you are looking for generating SOUNDEX codes for excel strings you can use this excel soundex UDF. Soundex codes are phonetic codes generated for words based on how they sound, thus 2 words sounding similar (for eg. excess, access) would have same soundex code. You can use these codes to perform fuzzy searches.
More on text processing using excel:
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.