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Now that I have the basics of TOM figured out, I have been working on trying to make my TOM jobs more organised and easy to follow. In quantum the different sections are clearly defined - you have a run file, an edit, a file for your axes, and one for your tabs etc. I was finding that trying to group things in the same way in TOM was not really working, and things ended up being very muddled and hard to follow. Instead of grouping the syntax by question (i.e. doing everything that you want to do to a question in the same place, sorting it, adding means, changing the text etc) I now have started grouping the syntax by task. So once I had added the tables, I then wrote a separate section at the bottom for sorting - and in this section I sorted all the questions that I wanted sorting in one go using a subroutine. I then did the same thing for means - any questions that I wanted to add means to I just did in one go using another subroutine. My aim was to come up with a skeleton template which I can use as my basis for any job - if there is no sorting needed on a job then I simply do not add any tables to this section - easy! I have also starting using more include files - while to begin with I don’t want to have too many include files confusing my script, I have found that just putting an include file which holds all of my functions and subroutines helps to tidy things up. The other advantage to this is that I can just include the same subroutines file in almost every job - when it is an include file if I end up not referencing any of the subroutines then it doesn’t really matter, and it means that once I have written a subroutine to complete a certain task I then don’t have to write it again - it can just be reused. A massive time saver!

Senior DP Consultant, Rebecca Cole works as a Senior DP consultant and heads up the Innovations Unit at Cobalt Sky