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At the time we were doing online video distribution, which went from ingesting content from traditional sources (betacam, film, etc), editing, preparing distribution-ready videos, create metadata, upload to various systems... all the way to social media campaigns, etc. Where/how does Excel knowledge factor into this? Well, we managed a lot of data, mostly (but not only) CSV files. It's very useful to learn a few text manipulation functions in Excel when creating CSV files with sequential and or repetitive content (think TV episodes, etc). Or creating several flavors of CSV for each platform. Yes, a database backend with smart exporting functions might work well, but sometimes fast beats perfect, especially for one-off jobs. Uploading thousands of videos into YouTube was much quicker with one or two CSV files. By learning some basic Excel, everyone was able to minimize errors and maximize output. What else could we do with Excel? We could export XML files of our video edits from Premiere/FinalCut Pro, run them through a script into Excel and immediately get a report showing all the editing errors that still needed fixing (we had to edit the videos in a very particular way). This alone saved sooooo much time. Interestingly enough, we were also able to identify individual editors by the mistakes they made (it seems each one had a particular quirk). I also ran the entire digitizing project in an Excel file, complete with burn charts and velocity calculations. Over the years, I've received calls from every one of my employees, now on with their lives in other jobs, and one thing they're always grateful for are the Excel lessons. And once you learn the logic behind building Excel functions and spreadsheets it opens your mind to other uses or more programming skills. It's much easier to teach someone the power of a few choice Excel functions than to teach them Python from scratch. Plus you can see their eyes light up immediately. Fun times. |