Use Excel 2013 Flash Fill for Repetitive Tasks

[sgalbincea137]

Recently we changed out retention policy on our DataDomain backup systems to free up some space. Unfortunately, the process for deleting the EMC Networker backup sets, called "Save Sets" involves a very tedious command line string - and you have to delete them one at a time. Using Excel 2013, I was able to dump out a column of Save Set IDs that needed to be deleted, and using Flash Fill from Excel 2013 I was able to create a batch file to do the heavy lifting for me.

Here is an example:

1. The command to delete a single save set and its clone is "nsrmm -dy -S <SaveSetID>/<CloneID>"

2. I export a list of Save Set IDs and associated Clone IDs from Networker into a two column Excel 2013 sheet

3. In the third column, I paste in the command "nsrmm -dy -S" all the way down

4. In the fourth column, I type out the completed command, including the SaveSetID and CloneID from the first two columns of that row (e.g. nsrmm -dy -S 1979008759/1375030088)

5. Now, the magic: when I start typing the complete command in the second row, Excel figures out what I am doing and fills the rest of the rows in the fourth column with the correct commands!

6. From there, save as a batch file and run!

This method was used to prune over 5000 save sets from our DataDomain, I don't want to think about how long that would have taken any other way. It can be used for many tasks where a more complex for loop might not be the best solution compared to a simple, repeatable batch file.