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List Consolidation

 

SCENARIO

A web producer has collected about 100 tag lists from different post pages, which contain a total of 500 to 600 tag phrases. He needs to consolidate all tags’ phrases into one list, with repeated tags removed and the remaining unique tags sorted. The task will certainly be time consuming, tedious, and error-prone if he were to do it manually.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to get all lists consolidated, with repeated tags removed, the remaining tags sorted, and the final list outputted to a text file and the clipboard, in 1 second.

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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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Image Processing

 

SCENARIO

A web producer receives a folder of hundreds of images that come in different orientations and diversified dimensions. Since the website requires that images be uploaded at fixed dimensions, he needs to pick out all the images with both dimensions equal to or larger than the required dimensions, then edit them to the required dimensions in such manner that both cropped image areas and image quality loss are kept to a minimum. He estimates that it will take him several days to complete the task by manual operation using generic tools such as PhotoShop.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to process the folder: images with compatible original dimension sizes will be moved to a separate folder; remaining images will first be cropped to the largest possible dimensions with the dimension ratio matching that of the required dimensions, then scaled down to the desired dimensions. The operation will be complete in a few minutes.

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Text Excerption

 

SCENARIO

A content manager has a folder of 150 text files exported from a content database, one file for each record. He needs to excerpt four particular paragraphs from each file and organize these excerpts into a spreadsheet for further processing. Since these paragraphs are spread all over the file, if he is to do this manually, he will have to copy-paste a total of 600 times, accompanied by scrolling up and down each time. This is estimated to take about two hours, and is expected to be error-prone.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to excerpt the four object paragraphs from all 150 files, and organize them into a new spreadsheet in less than two 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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Email Localization QA

 

SCENARIO

An e-commerce localization QA manager has 40 web email files in plain text format, each in a different language translated from a single English source text which contains four particular parameters, each occurring a particular number of times. She needs to quickly verify that all four parameters are intact and that each occurs the correct number of times in each file. The routine way for her to do this is to send these files out to a localization vendor where each email is verified by a linguist of the local language. Unfortunately, none of their vendors has linguists for all 40 languages available at the time.

 

SOLUTION

Use a WorkWaltz custom automation tool to read all the emails, and a report that lists the number of occurrences of each parameter in each file, with any file that contains incorrect number of any of the parameters highlighted, will be generated in 15 seconds.