Brings up old memories reading this. I remember my first job about 20 years ago at NEC as a data entry operator. It was 8 hours each day of taking a bunch of mal-formatted CSV files from some reports the previous day and importing it into excel and drawing graphs. I was just getting into learning C at the time and ended up writing an importer (parsing and formatting in C and ODBC to write back to excel along with excel macros to draw graphs). Very hacky and ugly but got the job done. It got the 8 hour job done in about 30 minutes - most of which was detecting patterns in the input and adding rules for those, which was fun in itself.