At one point I considered asking my boss to formally change my job title to “Business Intelligence Application Architect.” Although that’s the contemporary way to refer to the type of work I do, I faced enough blank stares at the sound of it to change my mind.

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Most of my business time is spent with Oracle, SQL Server and Cache databases, but for minor ETL tasks too big for Excel and too small for Informatica, I often break out Microsoft Access. When importing data into Access, I sometimes get its dreaded Import Errors or experience other problems. I commonly run into these kinds of issues when importing one of our hospital’s charge master files because charge codes often contain alpha characters and asterisks mixed in with numbers.

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The high spirits I felt at the election of Barack Obama were tempered upon hearing of the death of Michael Crichton, one of my all-time favorite authors.

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At least once a month I use an INDEX/MATCH formula to match and merge patient data from multiple Excel files. I wrote this post because when I first sought to learn the technique I found the other tutorials on the web either lacking or hard-to-follow.

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