I have a mainframe application that is called sunet, here are some records.
I want to extract data in excel using vba macros. I have tried by my own but i have no idea how to make connection between mainframe and excel. Please advise me how to do this.
Thanks.
A bit late, sorry. I expect your data is on the mainframe.
It sounds like you want an ODBC connection to a database. You will need to check with your architects or DBA's for specifics, e.g. does the DBMS product have a "client side" component you can direct this through? Otherwise performance and sociability may be a concern. There are better 3rd party clients, are you committed to VBA?
The name of your application (or the stage of the life cycle is not important).
The size of your data is very important. How many hundred million records?
You could alternatively pull the data all at once. You may be allowed access to a backup.
There are a number of ways data can be pulled from the mainframe. You can format it into csv first, or you may have a language that will build an xls file. Traditionally the MS product was Access back in the days when excel had a restrictive limit on the number of records (50K?), and if you want an ODBC connection
IND$FILE transfer from ISPF Panel 3.6 by means of a TN3270 terminal on your desktop. If your shop is sophisticated, you may have a cli script as well.
sftp transfer, SSH, SCP, Telnet and bear in mind you will need a landing area.
Any managed Queue product, such as MQSeries.
Media, even optical.
You may have a transmission product such as CA-XCOM.
This is bread and butter stuff, even if you have EBCDIC on a Wintel stack you can decode():encode() with Python. I would expect you to be IBM500, but you should confirm this as well.
So yes, colleagues, or even search your source repositories for JCL with these keywords.
Related
I have recently observed an issue regarding my data in a column that I use to perform data validation on my spreadsheet.
So There is nothing wrong with the formula, neither is there anything from with the use of data validation.
It should be looking for duplicate entries, which works quite fine.
The issue is that it no longer recognizes input made from a smartphone using the excel app.
so what i did was to retype cell text field from my PC and it worked perfectly.
Is there a way that I can continue using this technique (Data validation) without having to re-enter data from a PC in order for it to process?
Certainly! Yes, that is possible.
But... with all the possibilities in today's world, is your current strategy the one that is the best for you?
That is something I cannot answer for you.
That is something I cannot enumerate for you.
But... There is something that I can introduce to you.
PowerQuery
PowerQuery was a free add-on for Excel 2010 and 2013 and it has been baked directly into Excel for more than half a decade. So, if you're using the mobile app then you probably have a modern version of Excel with PowerQuery right at your finger tips.
Your first step if to determine how you want to make your data available for Excel to get. Go to the Data Tab on the ribbon and review your options in the "Get Extetnal Data" group.
It doesn't matter if free data is your Creed and your most intimate moments are publicly available through your raw data feed. Or if paranoia is the reason why you constantly drive around the block scraping SSIDs before squirreling them away to SQL server for detailed analysis. Or if you're using a USB cable to transfer photos to your PC because your mom walked in on you without knocking and was so disgusted by what she saw on your desktop that you're banned from the family LAN... For life. None of that matters because Excel can connect to your data in so many ways that one of them will be perfect for you.
There is a sense of familiarity when Importing your data into PowerQuery. It's not unlike following those timeless MS Wizards; but nothing like the uncanny sensation of being dropped into the PowerQuery editor. It is simultaneously the same as Excel and different from Excel and it may be the closest you ever come to visiting a parallel universe. Many of the same tools are available but they behave just slightly differently. And in some cases, like the Text To Columns tool, it is light years ahead of Excel and you will find yourself cursing at MS for not using it as a replacement for the old tool.
When you're done transforming your data, you'll have a tight clean table. But the real prize, is that you have fully automated pipe from source to product .
I figured that the phone user included extra spaces when inputting the data.
So i Used the TRIM() function which takes care of the extra spaces between, before, or after each word, and that did the job.
Therefore the major error was that there were additional spaces that was not recognized in the tested data.
I have a data set of about 1 million employer names. These names are from a free-form text field so they include misspellings and variations in the way they are inputted (e.g. "Amazon" .. "Amzaon" .. "Amazon.com" .. "Amazon Web Services" .. "AWS").
I want to either A) group these 1 million so I have a somewhat accurate sense of how many unique employers are in the data set or B) be able to find all variations of any given employer.
So far, I've been using the data in Tableau, then filtering on "employer name" and searching all variations of the name I can think of. But it's tedious and I'm pretty sure I'm leaving many out.
I've also used the fuzzy add-in for excel but it hasn't worked that well on misspellings, special characters...
Tableau just isn't suited for doing this kind of analysis straight out of the box, and I would highly recommend doing some pre-processing on your data before putting trying to build a workbook around it.
Like another commenter said, you could look into using Tableau Prep Builder for a one-time transformation on your data set, but if you wanted to automate this process it costs extra to add functionality to whatever Tableau Server installation you have.
If you're familiar with Python or R (and the integration between Tableau Server and those services is supported by your organization), you could look into building a script to run the transformation real-time, but it probably won't be too efficient.
Try experimenting with Tableau Prep Builder - the companion tool that comes with your Tableau Creator license. It has a group feature that is designed for just these problems.
In Prep Builder, you’ll just need to connect to your data, add a cleaning step, and then add a group to your cleaning step.
So a bit of a general question. I work as a data analyst for a startup. My primary process involves taking existing customer data a client has and cleansing/normalizing it to fit into our platform once as part of our onboarding process. A member of our team exports their data from their system they are transitioning from or, if they kept track of it in house, we receive their Excel log they used to track it. It is always in a different format and requires extensive cleansing (avg 1 min/record). We take what is usually one large table (.xlxs format), and after cleansing, split it into four .csv files; which we load as four tables on our platform.
I feel I have optimized the process quite well in terms of the process steps and cleansing with excel functions (if, concat, text-to-columns, etc). I have beginner-intermediate skills in VBA and SQL and have just scratched the surface in R; what is frustrating is that I know there is the potential to automate this process but I just don't know where to start. If anyone has experience with something like this, code, a link to an article / another thread, or just some general direction would be much appreciated. Please ask for clarification where you feel it is needed. Thanks.
This will be really hard to do in Excel. If you have the time you can try out Optimus, a Data Cleansing library written in Python and Pyspark (you don't need to know spark). Here is the webpage https://hioptimus.com.
You can create Data Pipelines with it, and I recommend that you do that, try to generalize your processes, and asking the client for more a structure way of passing the data.
The good thing is that you don't need Big Data for running Optimus, bit if you have it some day, the same code will work.
Check out the documentation for more:
http://optimus-ironmussa.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Let me know if you have doubts!
In my company we have all products in an Excel-database. When a customer (shops) wants to place an order, they fax a form with item No etc. The order is entered through a VBA form, returning info about "in stock" etc, and the order is subtracted from the stock and placed in worksheet.
Now I would like to know, if its possible - without too much fuss, to do this from the www, so a customer can access the database and see if the item is in stock (which is not the hard part) - AND place the order so the database is updated in our local workbook.
I'm not asking for actual code, but ideas to a general approach.
Is it possible to run VBA forms from a remote computer?
Will XML, ASP etc be the answer?
Other ideas?
I'll appreciate any help.
This is all fairly easy to do if you have a proper database, there are all kinds of reasons not to use Excel.
Your best approach would likely be to build a web system around a database and move all application logic there.
But in your specific case it might be easier to build it around Sharepoint.
Our customers use 500+ applications and we would like to integrate these applications with our. What is the best way to do that? These applications are time registration applications and common for most of them is that they can export to csv or similar, some of them are actually home-brewed excel sheets where time is registered.
The best idea so far is to create our own excel sheet, which can be used to integrate with all these applications. The integrations could be in the form of cells containing something like ='[c:\export.csv]rawdata'!$A$3 Where export.csv is the csv file exported from the time registration applications. Can you see a better way to integrate against all these applications? It should be mentioned that almost all our customers have Microsoft Office.
Edit: Answers to the excellent questions from Pontus Gagge:
How similar are the data in the different applications?
I assume that since they time registration applications, they will have some similarities, but I assume that some will register the how long time one has worked in total for a whole month, while others will spesify for each day. If Excel is chosen, I believe that many of the differences could be ironed out using basic formulas.
What quality is the data?
The quality of the data can vary so basic validation must be undertaken, a good way is also to make it transparent for the customers, how our application understands their input, so they are responsible.
How large amounts of data are you talking about?
There will be information about the time worked for up to 50 employees.
Is the integration one-way only?
Yes
With what frequency should information be transferred?
Once per month (when they need to pay salaries).
How often do the applications themselves change, and how often does your product change?
If their application is a home-brewed Excel sheet, then I assume it will change once a year (due for example a mistake someone). If it is a standard proper time registration application, then I do not believe they are updated more often than every fifth year or so, as it is a very stabile concept.
Should the integration be fully automatic or can your end users trigger a data transfer?
They can surely trigger data transfer. The users are often dedicated to the process so they can be trained at doing it, which means that they could make up to, say 30, mouse clicks in order to integrate each month.
Will the customers have somebody to monitor the integrations?
As we have many customers, many of them should be able to undertake the integration themselves. We will though be able to assist them over the telephone. We cannot, though undertake the integration ourselves because we would then be responsible for any errors due to user mistakes, etc.
Does the phrase 'integration spaghetti' mean anything to you...?
I am looking for ideas from the best chefs to cook a nice large portion of that.
You need to come up with a common data format, and a way to translate the individual data formats to the common format. There's really no way around this - any solution you come up with will have to do this in one way or the other. It's the essential complexity of what you're doing.
The bigger issue is actually variances within the source data, in terms of how things like dates are stored, missing columns, etc. Doing a generic conversion for CSV to move columns around is comparatively easy.
I would also look at CSV and then use an OLEDB connection against the CSV file for importing.
If you try to make something that can interface to any data structure in the universe (and 500 is plenty close enough), it is guaranteed to be a maintenance nightmare. Instead I would approach this from multiple angles:
Devise an interface into which a human can enter this data already in the proper format. With 500+ clients, I'd make this a small, raw but functional browser based site that users can use to enter this information manally. This is the fall-back. At the end of the day, a human can re-key the information into the site and solve the import issue. Ideally, everyone would use this instead of their own format. Data entry people are cheap.
Similar to above, but expanded, I would develop a standard application or standardize on an off-the-shelf application that can be used to replace their existing format. This might take more time than #1. The goal would be to only do one-time imports of these varying data schemas into the application and be done with them for good.
The nice thing about spreadsheets is that you can do anything anywhere. The bad thing about spreadsheets is that you can do anything anywhere. With CSV or a spreadsheet there is simply no way to enforce data integrity and thus consistency (which is the primary goal) on the data. If the source data is already in a database, then that is obviously simpler.
I would be inclined to use database format into which each of these files need to be converted rather than a spreadsheet (e.g. use something like Jet (MDB)). If you have non-Windows users then that will make it harder and you might have to use a spreadsheet. The problem is that it is too easy for the user to change their source structure, break their upload and come crying to you. If a given end user has a resident expert, they can find a way of importing the data into that database format . If you are that expert, then I would on a case-by-case basis, write something that would import into that database format. XML would be the other choice, but that will likely take more coding than an import/export into a database format.
Standardization of the apps (even having all the sources in a database format instead of a spreadsheet would help) and control over the data schema is the ultimate goal rather than permitting a gazillion formats. There really is no nice answer other than standardization. Otherwise, you are having to write a converter for every Tom-Dick-and-Harry format and again when someone changes the source format.
With a multitude of data sources mapping each one correctly to an intermediate format is not trivial. Regular expressions are good with a finite set of known data formats. Multipass can help when data is ambiguous without context (month,day fields and have several days of data), and also help defeat data entry errors. But it seems as this data is connected to salaries there needs a good reliable transfer.
An import configuring trick
Get the customer to make a set of training data in the application. It should have a "predefined unique date" and each subsequent data field have a number corresponding to the target data field in your application. On importing your application needs to recognise the predefined date, determine the unique translation required and effect the displaying/saving of this "mapping key", and stop the import. eg If you expect "Duration hours" in field two then get the user to enter 2 in the relevant field which might be "Attendance hours".
On subsequent runs, and with the mapping definition key, import becomes a fairly easy process of translation.
Note on terms
"predefined date" - must be historical, say founding date of your company?, might need to be in PC clock settable range.
"mapping key" - could be string of hex digits and nybble based so tractable to workout
The entered code can be extended to signify required conversions ie customer's application has durations in days and your application expects it in hours.
Interfacing with windows programs (in order if increasing fragility)
Ye Olde saving as CSV file
Print to operating system printer that is setup as a text file/pdf, then scavenge the data out of that
Extract data via the application interface control, typically ActiveX for several windows programs ie like Matlab's Spreadsheet Link
Read native file format xls format ie like Matlab's xlsread
Add an additional intermediate spreadsheet sheet that has extended cell references ie ='[filename]rawdata'!$A$3
Have a look at Teiid by JBoss: http://jboss.org/teiid
Also consider using SOA - e.g., if you're on Java, try JBoss SOA platform: http://www.jboss.com/resources/soa/?intcmp=1004
Use a simple XML format. A non-technical person can easily understand a simple XML format (and could even identify basic problems with XML documents that are not well-formed).
Maybe use a DTD (or even better an XML schema) to do very basic validation, and then supplement this with an XSL stylesheet to do more validation with better error reporting. (An XSL stylesheet simply converts from XML to something else and so can be generate readable error messages.)
The advantage of this approach is that web browsers such as Internet Explorer can apply the XSL stylesheets. A customer need only spend at most a day enhancing their applications or writing excel macros to generate the XML data in the format that you specify.
Recent versions of Excel have support for converting spreadsheet data to XML, and can even validate against schemas.
Once the data passes the XSL validation checks, you have validated XML data.
If you have heaps of data and heaps of money, you could look at existing data management and cleansing tools:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/datastage
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/qualitystage
But even then, you'll likely need to follow kyoryu's suggestion assuming you have 500+ data formats. The problem isn't your side. You need them to standardize their output formats if you have no control over their apps. CSV is likely the easiest. You could even send them a excel template to help them along.