Forum Discussion
Formula challenge: re-shape and cleanup
You're tasked with re-shaping and cleaning up the fictional Faber College alumni list to be used for a mail merge. Going from this: To this: To spice things up, the First and Last n...
Speaking of how people would do the removal of 'bellman' records I noticed in a couple of solution I thought it could be more efficient if that step was moved up earlier. If I read the code right, it looked like it could be done before the splitting of the first and last name in some cases which means that name splitting step would act on a slightly smaller set.
It has been an interesting exercise; we have learnt something about the limits of HSTACK, but it has also pushed me into trying strategies that were previously only possibilities. I had to modify your named Lambda to apply it at the start of my formula without invalidating the existing version
NoBellλ
= LAMBDA(arr, col, FILTER(arr, CHOOSECOLS(arr, col) <> "Bellman"));Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to return to an existing formula and modify it using modern methods. A traditional formula nested 7-deep would not be fun though, to be fair, there would probably have been a whole raft of helper columns to ease the pain.
For me, the function that I am most likely to reuse is
Applyλ
= LAMBDA(λ, x, λ(x));Lambdas don't have to be long to be useful!