Alright folks, had this ridiculous task yesterday trying to round up all the players whose names start with “O” for my fantasy league. Thought it’d be easy. Spoiler: it wasn’t.
The Dumb First Try
Started by opening that massive spreadsheet with everyone’s names. Just scrolled like a maniac hunting for “O”s. My eyes crossed after ten minutes only getting through three teams. Found Ohtani quickly though – bright spot. Realized this was garbage when I nearly missed O’Neill because his name was spelled with that apostrophe nonsense.
Switching Gears
Remembered the filter option. Clicked that funnel icon feeling smart. Selected “Name” column, typed capital “O” into search. Boom – only got last names starting exactly with “O”. Missed all the “O’ ” guys completely. Almost threw my coffee at the screen. Added another filter with lowercase “o” – same disaster.
Then tried typing just “O” without capitalization. Big mistake. Pulled up everyone with ANY “o” in their name. Suddenly had Ortiz, Roberts, Gomez – like five hundred extra players. Total mess.
Cheating With Text Tricks
Got desperate. Made a new column called “First Letter” with this ugly formula: =LEFT(B2,1). Copied it down the whole list. Now could filter by that column. Finally! Filtered for “O” there. But wait… still missing Ohtani? Oh right, his cell had extra spaces before his name. Stupid data entry errors.
So I fixed it with the TRIM function before extracting the letter. Finally saw all the O’s together:
- Ohtani
- O’Neill
- Olson
- Oswaldo
- Ohtani (again because he counts as two players!)
- Odorizzi
The Painful Reality
Thought I was done until Cooper texted asking where O’Day was. Damn it! Forgot special characters don’t sort right. Had to add apostrophes to my filter manually. Took another twenty minutes fixing exceptions. Made me realize sports data is dirtier than my kid’s baseball glove.
Final Takeaway
Simple letters become nightmares with real-world data. Next time I’m just googling “all players with o” like a normal person instead of playing spreadsheet detective for three hours. Lesson learned: never trust raw data, and always check for that sneaky apostrophe crap. Coffee’s cold now – thanks baseball.