Frustrations of a data officer
- Queries are running too slowly in Access
- Having to deal with >12000 records of data
- Having to sought out conflicting data types
- Data that is corrupted
- Ambiguity in the data descriptions
- Hardly anybody knows how to approach the data cleanup.
- To many fields in the dataset (there’s almost 50 of them)
- Each category is represented by a numerical code and there are hundreds of them
- Dealing with old data from over a decade ago and were all categoried based on a different system.
- Computer freezing
- Duplicating data types
- Data assigned to different categories with different codes used at different times in the past and
- After spending hours of cleaning data, someone comes up to me and says. “I’ve made a mistake. I should have told you this.. In other words, this translates to: delete this and start again. Argh!!!
Despite all, I am still gaining experience with dealing lots of data. And I am happy that I can take part in this. It develops my analytical, communication, interpersonal, Access, Excel and AIMS skills. And I can learn, improve and earn money at the same time. If I can suppress my frustration, it will even be better!