"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:4b16914f$1@news.povray.org...
> OK, so today I confirmed that you can in fact export data from the Windows 
> event log into a plain CSV file. Which is great.
>
> (Unfortunately, sometimes event descriptions contain line breaks, which is 
> not so great.)
>
> Anyway, I wrote a small Haskell program that deletes any multi-line 
> events, and then another which grabs only the events I care about and does 
> some trixy parsing of the event description to pull out the data I 
> actually want. The result is a big CSV file containing a list of printer 
> events - date, time, user, printer and page count.
>
> (There is *one* event in the log that says something like "document %4 was 
> printed on %6, byte count: %7, page count: %8". Which is really not 
> especially helpful...)
>
> So now I have a CSV file that contains the date, time, user, printer and 
> page count. Just import that into Access and produce some stats, right?
>
> Wrong! Access apparently can't parse any of the dates. Despite them all 
> being perfectly valid dates (and it even *detects* that this column should 
> be a date column), it fails to parse every single last one. >_<
>
> So I used Haskell (which is really the wrong tool) to produce some 
> statistics the hard way - by manually scanning the CSV file, reparsing the 
> data and writing the results into yet *another* CSV file.
>
> And now, finally, I have a chart showing me how many pages each printer 
> printed on a given day. Which is all I wanted in the first place!
>
> Mmm, apparently that printer in the corner hasn't printed a single damned 
> page since July... Yep, it's definitely spare. :-)

Have you tried importing your CSV file into Excel first, then moving it to 
Access? I've found that it sometimes does better with external data. It's an 
extra step, but it may give you cleaner data, and may make the process 
easier to do the next time, if there is one.

--
Jack

Post a reply to this message