I hate spreadsheets!

Before I realized that I had a MAJOR flaw in my data I thought I would be able to get both studies imported into SPSS from Excel and cleaned up by yesterday. Ha ha ha. What a nice thought.

It all started when I saw some numbers that didn't jive. I scanned the spreadsheet and compared columns and rows for THREE hours and for all of those three hours I thought my data was so completely screwed up that if I submitted a dissertation based on it would be fraud. I thought I was screwed. Seriously screwed. Tears of utter agony were shed.

Then, my Hero came home for lunch and helped me figure out the solution.

It involves manually correcting the mistake over 2000 participants. So, for that afternoon and all of today I have been writing down what the correct number should be for all 2000 participants. Over the next several days, I'll be entering them into SPSS manually.

What fun.

But, at least now I can have confidence in my data. And, by doing this I found some other errors that I have now corrected. I need to keep the study up and running a little while longer. So, really I now need 2 more females and about 33 men to fill out the cells that contained the error.

It all sounds so manageable now, but I have been staring at a spreadsheet for about 6-7 hours a day and I hate them.

What's more? My Hero Who Saved My Bacon and I really enjoy playing Scrabble. I tried to sit down to finish a game we started a few days ago - before the Spreadsheet Disaster Now Averted - and as I scanned the board looking for my best play I could see nothing but little boxes filled with data. And Sudoku is ruined for the time being. I love solving sudokus but they look like spreadsheets too! No wonder that my first choice of break activities was to look at a Victoria's Secret catalogue instead!