Well, I now have 20 minutes to describe how terrible today went, so let’s keep it simple:

The task:

Read it in here, Andy’s blog post.

The “why did I struggle?”

The data was just too much. At the end of the day, I am not sure if I would not have been faster just clicking through every link and download it manually!… We had 20 different Trust’s per page, 391 in total, and then a list of reports within each trust. Those reports were what we wanted to download but that did not come easy – one of us will write a blog post on it, I am sure, as it was something we had never come across before.
The format of the reports was not all the same (obviously, or that would have been too easy!) and some files were marked as .csv files but when downloaded, we discovered they were in an HTML format…

The “solution”:

Having in mind that I wanted to download all the files, ended up spending (almost) all my time in Alteryx. I created a macro to download all the trust pages and then another one to download all the reports for each trust. The latter was then nested in the first one (finding all the trust pages). Although I have not been successful in completing everything, I am glad for the experience as I hadn’t explored macros much before. Not that I am an expert now, but at least I feel like I’ve learnt.

It was around 3PM when Andy and Carl appeared and saw us all struggling with the data. They then said we could just stick with one of the trusts. Yey!

That was still a challenge because we had so little time and the data was still in need of some shaping!

The final result

I am not too proud of the final result, but I am about being able to have something to present, which was something I doubt I would have right until the last minute…

Black and white since the Trust that I worked with was the Black Country Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.

See you tomorrow and I hope with a better mood and final result!