Ah, summer time… and the living is easy…

For someone, but it sure hasn’t been for me! It’s been an extraordinarily busy time this year doing all kinds of work around the house. There’s been much to do: woodwork, painting, electrical, and even interior design. Thus the significant lack of new posts around these parts lately…

As the work progresses and hopefully even comes to a close over the next while, I’ve seen a number of parallels between this type of activity and how we work with Monarch.

Be Safe

First and foremost, be safe. The last thing you want to have happen is to have a preventable situation occur. The worst case situation is that someone is injured or worse.

When undertaking new Monarch development, you may want to save your work as you go if you’re about to try a new approach. Perhaps you’re experimenting with different ways of trapping your data. If you change your mind and you want to revert to your earlier approach, saving your models and/or projects as you go with unique descriptive names will allow you to safely restore your work.

You may choose to remove your interim files once you determine your final solution, but then be sure to backup your work, or store it on drives that will be automatically backed up by your system’s regular backup process.

Learn New Skills

Many of us only do those tasks around the home with which we’re familiar. You know how to do every step, and you do it pretty well. But you may be nicely rewarded if you step out of your comfort zone a little and learn how to do some new things. Like changing that ugly old ceiling fan that was in the house when you moved in.

You should take advantage of the fact that it’s really difficult, if not impossible, to do any damage with Monarch when you’re working with it on your own. Experiment with a few features that you don’t regularly use and see if you can use a feature or two to your benefit in your work more frequently.

Do the Woodwork

Sometimes your carpentry skills are on display for all to see; sometimes they’re hidden from view. Either way, it’s usually important to do the best you can in this area, as other things often depend on how well you built your structure.

When working with Monarch, you can either make the whole job easier or more difficult and it all depends upon how you build your fundamental structure. Did you name your fields clearly and logically, or are you going to wonder what the field represents if you see it out of context, away from its original source?

Also remember that you can hide fields in the table view, so just because you extracted a particular field from the original data source doesn’t mean that you must export it if the field isn’t required in the export data. Use the Field List feature to easily hide, or display, a collection of fields at once.

Practice Makes Perfect

Almost nobody gets it right the first time, every time. But with a little practice and maybe even some encouragement, you’ll get the results you want.

The first time you work with calculated fields, you may struggle with building the calculation. What do all of those operators do? And what’s with all of those functions on the right side? Do I have to use all of these?

The next time you have a better idea of where you’re going with the calculation, and might look through the list of functions under a particular category for the purpose you have in mind. The time after that you may not remember exactly what the parameters are, but you know the name of the function that you need.

Eventually you reach the point where you can use a function like RSplit, which has multiple parameters, without even consciously looking at the function information.

You might struggle at first, but keep at it and you’ll improve and the job will be easier to you. Just ask my wife about her painting skills.

Painting A Masterpiece

Speaking of painting… When you’re painting a fence, you can pretty well just slop on some paint and move it around, and odds are that you won’t cause problems for yourself or do a poor job. But of course when you move inside the house, the rules change and you usually need to be very careful and meticulous.

It’s the same with Monarch when you’re building a template. Sometimes you just click and drag your mouse across a long field and it’s pretty straightforward. But then there are other times when you need to be very careful, like if you’re trying to capture a series of single character fields, all of which are side by side. Then you might be better off to leave your mouse alone and paint your fields with the keyboard, using the Insert, arrow and Enter keys., rather than feeling like you’re fighting with your mouse.

With the cursor in the Sample line, hit the Insert key to enter “painting” mode. Now use the left and/or right arrows to change the width of the field, and hit Enter to finalize the field. For small fields, you may find this approach to be easier than using a mouse for painting fields.

Interior Design

Now if we’ve learned anything from the seemingly endless home improvements television programs, we know that just because all of the fundamentals are done, it doesn’t mean that the job is finished. You want to make it all look as nice as possible, especially if you’re thinking about selling the home.

So you rearrange the furniture to make the room either more comfortable or more functional. You add finishing touches to give it a more polished appearance, like hanging draperies in addition to, or instead of just blinds in the window.

Those finishing touches in Monarch might range from better formatting for your numeric values, altering the sequence of the fields in the table, or choosing a pleasing color scheme for your summary.

More Power Tools!

Perhaps more than ever I’ve learned that it’s critical that you use the right tool for the right job. That sounds a lot like time well spent extracting, transforming and loading data with Monarch to me.

You might not be jack-of-all-trades around the house, but use these basic topics as your foundation and you’ll certainly know how to excel with Monarch!