I've been on Gather for about 16 months now, and for the first 8 months I posted pretty much every day. Ever since the beginning I kept an Excel spreadsheet showing who commented on which of my articles. It was very useful in telling who my most active connections were, what resonated with who, and so on. It had grown to be a list of 1500 or so lines. I'd look up the exact count, but I can't.
I'm an Excel list freak, so this is not unusual. My entire record collection is loaded into Excel - one line for each cut, and for each album the genre, label and number of the record. I have a small business wholesaling antique bottlles, and I've inventoried a good 2,000 bottles (so I can generate full-page descriptions of each bottle - customers love that). At work I have lists built to support my customers and research processes that run into the tens of thousands of lines.
Since the comment spreadsheet had been so instructive, I decided to work on indexing who belonged to each of my 10 or so groups, and that list has also grown to be pretty huge. I've thought about doing a post on how I accomplish this.
In analyzing my group membership, I needed to do a little trick called V-lookup where you create a second sheet (or "tab" in Excel talk), compare the it with the original tab and then delete that second tab. To my horror, I was working on this "who's in my Groups" tab today, and wanted to go over to my comment count tab, which I couldn't find. I had deleted it!
Now, reverse-engineering a group member listing into an Excel spreadsheet, while not exactly straightforward, is at least doable. The comment count, on the other hand, really needed to be done manually. I'm working on a way to do it, switching back and forth from text to Word to Excel, but it's pretty much gone.
Wail!!!!!
Gather does weird things to people. My name is Ron, and I'm a Gatherholic. I have not entered recovery yet. I gather, I eat, I gather, I fall asleep, I update or play with my gather groups analysis, I gather. No problem.
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Comments: 26
Take it one day at a time, Ron... one day at a time. Gatherholism, as you know, is cunning, baffling, and powerful.
Still, many have gone on to lead productive lives without such a document. Best of luck.
And yes, I do need help : ) Do you know how to do a macro in Word? I used to have macros down in an IBM-based word processing system "MASS 11" we used before going to Microsoft products, but Microsoft macros seem to lack the ability to repeat themselves . . .
My sympathy on your loss, but now you have a new project!
Whoop! Stay tuned.
Merry Kay