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Excel stuff

Started by Joe, March 16, 2018, 07:21:35 AM

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Joe

Mac OS Sonoma 14.2.1 (c) | (retired)

The seven ages of man: spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills and wills.

pspdfppdfxhd

Quote from: DigiCorn on February 07, 2024, 02:23:53 AMDon't they have tech support for a reason? I once had a job... The Polar Express. It's a special event every Christmas season by the CSRM (California State Railroad Museum). They run an old train in honor of the movie (and play the movie on screens inside) for November and December 4x a day, 4 days a week. It's the hottest ticket in town; you have to be a member of the museum society for at least a year to get an advanced purchase. It usually sells out for the season in the first 5 minutes. Once upon a time, it was my job to make the tickets. The tickets CANNOT AND MUST NOT EVER be resold and if they find out you bought them from someone else, the tickets are immediately voided and unusable. There were 6 cars (IIRC). Each car's ticket had a different image. There were 4 runs per day. Each run had a different color. Each car had an assigned seat with a unique code/number. Each car had a different number of seats. Each ticket was imprinted with a different date and time. Then, we had a hologram sticker printed that had to be manually applied to each ticket to prevent counterfeiting. Essentially, IIRC, there were something like 56,000+ tickets to be printed, and each ticket was unique.

I did this in FusionPro, and before I even started the job, I had to program an Excel file - they didn't supply one. I usually got the job at the start of September, and the tickets went on sale the first of October, so it had to be deliverable after that. It usually took a day to create the Excel file, and then 2 days to program the code in FusionPro for the color background swap, the car image swap, the dates, times, car numbers and unique barcode. It ran digital on 120# stock 4/4 and had to back up perfectly with no skew. After approved, it took about 2 days to run, and about 2-3 days in bindery because they always miscut and we had to rerun random tickets.

Originally it was like 768 separate files (6 cars x 4 times a day x 4 times a week x 8 weeks) because I wasn't smart enough to figure out all the proper programming. Then I enlisted the FusionPro guys to help, and we got it down to a single file, but had to export it in 768 files, but luckily, that's one export. I don't even remember if these are the correct numbers, but I'm using it as an example of how complex the job was. Until you deal with something like this, I am the VDP God.
I hear ya, had a few doozies over the years but not as challenging as this. If you ever get back into it and they ask you for a backfield file if the job has a scanline on it, Joe (and now me) could help you.


DigiCorn

Quote from: pspdfppdfxhd on February 08, 2024, 06:27:50 PM
Quote from: Joe on February 08, 2024, 07:03:01 AM
Quote from: pspdfppdfxhd on February 08, 2024, 06:59:58 AMBitcoin?
Nope.
Carrier pigeon dropping off a bag of cash?
My old roommate owned a baseball card store back in the day. The property owners he leased the building from kept blocking the entrance to the store with dumpsters, and he kept calling and complaining and they never took care of the issue. One day he snapped and went around town to like 15 different banks and cashed in something like $1000 cash for rolls of pennies. Then me and him dumped pennies into trash bags and delivered it to the property management company to pay his rent on the shop.

The dumpster was immediately removed.
"There's been a lot of research recently on how hard it is to dislodge an impression once it's been implanted in someone's mind. (This is why political attack ads don't have to be true to be effective. The other side can point out their inaccuracies, but the voter's mind privileges the memory of the original accusation, which was juicier than any counterargument ever could be.)"
― Johnny Carson

"Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it."
– Nikki Sixx

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
― Ernest Hemingway