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E-Book Editing

 

SCENARIO

An ebook editor-in-chief is working on a foreign language masterpiece with 120 long chapters. In the .xhtml files he received from a content vendor, his editorial staff has identified 3,000+ distinguished global errors ranging from single corrupted characters and incorrect formatting codes to incorrect text of all sorts and all lengths. The editorial staff has worked out a correction for each error, and has listed these 3,000+ error-correction text pairs in a spreadsheet. The task now is to implement these corrections globally, which means performing a global find-replace action for each of the 3,000+ errors in all 120 chapters, or to repeat the find-replace operation a total of 360,000+ times. Assuming a speed of 30 seconds per action using the text editor’s built-in find and replace-all feature, it will take 3,000+ work hours, or more than a year and four months for one person, to implement all corrections by manual operation.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to complete the global find-replace operations for all 3,000+ errors, in all 120 .xhtml files, in less than an hour.

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UI Localization QA

 

SCENARIO

A localization producer has a master key-value sheet containing the source English text and 35 target languages’ text of some 1,000+ keys. She knows that some white spaces have been introduced at the ends of the translated text for some languages and some keys due to translator mistakes. Because these white spaces can cause bugs, she needs to check all the keys for all the languages and remove any found trailing spaces. To do that she will need to click through each of the 35,000+ cells because white spaces are invisible on the spreadsheet. She estimates that by manual operation at an average speed of 1 cell per second, it will take her at least 1.5 days to complete, with the understanding that it can be hard to avoid errors due to the tediousness of the work.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to process the spreadsheet: all trailing spaces will be removed in a few minutes.

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UI Key Isolation

 

SCENARIO

A web application UI producer has a spreadsheet of 20,000+ keys and values. He needs to update the values of the keys with a name containing a specific string. Using the search feature of the spreadsheet application to find each of these keys and update them one by one in their original place in the spreadsheet is obviously too time consuming; besides, keys with different names may have identical values, and updating these keys separately may result in inconsistency. The best way, therefore, will be to isolate the object keys from the rest, then sort them so that keys with identical values are clustered together. However, the spreadsheet application doesn’t have a convenient feature for this purpose, and doing it manually will take many hours.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to work on a copy of the file to remove all keys with names that do not contain the tag string, then sort the keys as desired, in a total of one minute.

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File Slicing/Conversion

 

SCENARIO

A localization producer has a master spreadsheet of 20,000+ UI keys and values in 35 languages that she needs to import into a database. The problem is, the database takes only CSV files containing no more than 100 keys. She therefore needs to slice the master spreadsheet into 200+ small files each containing 100 keys or less. To do this manually she will need to repeat the following operations 200+ times: create a new spreadsheet file, copy a different block of 100 keys from the master spreadsheet, paste it into the new spreadsheet, and export the content of the new file to a CRV file. This repetitive operation won’t be smooth because of its large volume of memory use. She estimates that it will take her 4 hours or longer to complete.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to chop the master spreadsheet into 200+ small files, each containing 100 different keys, and export each of them into a CSV file, in a total of less than 10 minutes.

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Data Visualization

 

SCENARIO

An operation director receives the sales volume data for 25 products on 6 markets for the past quarter, on a spreadsheet. She needs to report these business performances to upper management in a meeting, in 5 minutes.  She wants to report with visualized data, rather than with the plain numbers in the spreadsheet.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to create a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation that contains bar charts for all 25 products in the six markets, in about 15 seconds.

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Data Summary

 

SCENARIO

The owner of a new wine store has an Excel spreadsheet that lists the wine origin, varietal, and sales volume of each transaction of the store in its first month in business. There are total of 9 origins, 9 varietals, and 200+ transactions. He wants to know the sales volume of each of the 81 combinations of the origins and the varietals, as well as the total volumes for each origin and each varietal. He figures that it’s too complicated for him or any of his employees to do the job manually using the available Excel features.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to generate the pivot table for the exact data summaries he wants, in 50 seconds.

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Data Analysis

 

SCENARIO

A marketing director at a mobile business startup has a user data spreadsheet. There are a total of 10,000+ records in it, and one column of it holds the users’ country information. She wants to know what countries these users represent, what the top 5 countries are among them, the percentages of each of the top 5, and the percentage of the top 5 together among all represented countries.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to process the spreadsheet and generate a pivot table in less than a minute. The pivot table will list all represented countries and the user count, percentage, and rank for each country. The table will be sorted by rank and will also provide the combined percentage of the top 5 countries.