How to Speed Up Bulk Data Editing

I went home late yesterday night. My team and I had to finish up a few important documents based on the system that our developers have been working on for the past couple of months. The problem arises when things needed to be done or change in the last minutes. That's when everybody started to jump off from their comfort zone and disregard their working hours to finish off their main objective for that time in order not to have a pay cut. Of course that would include me as well.

I realized one thing, after indulging my own work for quite a while, it is so easy to forget that not everyone knows what you know. I've been keeping a lot of stuff that might be beneficial for someone else to know and utilize. I also realize that when you are used to digest a lot of stuff related to a specific task, you will know every single short cut that would enable you to finish off something a lot faster than the rest of the people. It's time to give back what I know for the benefit of others.

Being in a web developer shoes, I know that bulk data might overwhelm a lot of developers or data entry personnel. This normally would lead to a lost interest of the work you have thus decreases your productivity. It's a tedious job but someone has to do it. There is however a few tricks to overcome this challenge and one of the tricks when you are constantly online is to use the search engine to find a solution. Still you need to know what are the stuff you are looking for in order to acquire those tricks. I'll cut the chase for you. One of my system developer needed to resized a batch of images to the same size in order for the system to display it properly. There wasn't much time left so I helped her out in finding a way for this. I soon discovered a free software called Picture Resizer 2.0:



Picture Resizer 2.0 

It took me a few minutes to familiarize with this new tool. After that, a resizing job that would take a batch of 50 images maybe an hour or so to get it done is now can be completed in just under a minute. How cool is that? Then comes another challenge, in order not to replace the origninal files, the software created an extension name to differentiate. After moving all the new resized files into a new folder it's now time to rename all the files back to what it was before to avoid another job for script editing inside the developed system. If it would be done manually, it will take the same amount of time just as resizing the images manually. I found another software tool for that called Bulk Rename Utility:



Bulk Rename Utility 

Now this software may seems complicated at first because you see a lot of buttons and fields to fill up. Our objective is just to removed 4 characters extension and we'll be done with it. Check out the screenshot above on how to do it or try it out for yourself.

Now here's an interesting point of view. From a management stand point, I've already saved a few valuable hourly pay for my employer for not hiring data entry personnels if they have to do it manually. Secondly, these softwares are free so the company saved some money from buying commercial softwares. Since all this can be done faster and automated, a lot of the existing data entry personnel/system developers would like it since it makes their lives a lot easier. However, it might be a threat to their job position if that's the only thing they are doing.

That's my friend is how the management think! Be Productive Everyone!