I’m a membership organiser with a community union and spend an inordinate amount of my time prepping excel spreadsheets with membership data. Is there anything out there I could use to split the entire data set into sheets with tables of, say, 20 members each, their contact details, plus boxes for whether or not they can attend this or that event?

  • It’s just software that reads a script (like what I posted) and executes the corresponding instructions. The most popular (AFAIK) interpreter is Bash.

    If you’re using Windows 10-11 (unless it’s a 32-bit version), you can either use the built-in Bash through the “Windows Subsystem for Linux” (instructions on how to enable it here; I’ve never tried it, though, and it installs a lot more than just Bash), or install something like Git, which includes a version of Bash. I’d recommend the latter (you can just download the “thumbdrive edition” to avoid installing anything).

    If you’re using MacOS (or whatever it’s called now), it’s a lot easier since it’s partially based on Unix (just use the built-in terminal emulator).

    Let me know when you’ve got Bash working (or if something went wrong)