I have to do an analysis on an online membership database within excel, but for
ID: 3535905 • Letter: I
Question
I have to do an analysis on an online membership database within excel, but for some reason, some of the cells under the Gender column remain unfilled. Instead of manually filling each cell in, I would like to be able to do it automatically, where a code checks male and female naming dictionary and, if the first name of the member matches a male entry in the dictionary, to enter "Male" or "Female" in the corresponding cell (and if the code can't find the name to leave it blank - I would elect to do this instead of using, say, the male dictionary and making all names that can't be found female because some of the names are foreign and probably can't be found in the dictionary) I do not have any coding experience, so if I could get guidance of some kind (a viable programming language for this task, general outline of the code, how to search multiple web pages, etc) before starting this project, I would highly appreciate it!
Hint: You have a better possibility to earn the best answer if you are thorough (for instance, providing your sources or bits of example code to supplement explanations, ie: anything that cuts time short of writing the entire code).
Explanation / Answer
First of all, you would need a database or some data source that has the reference to names and genders. If you have access to that, here's what I would do.
Write a script that opens the excel file (excel files can have connection strings and be read just like any other database table), and when you loop through each row, do a comparison to the name in the excel cell to the reference data, determine the sex, and insert that data into a row in a new excel file. I'm mainly familiar with C#, but any language should be able to do it.