Spreadsheet Nastiness: Your guess is as good as mine

In my last post, Half Way Plus, I happened to call the spreadsheet I am working on "nasty."  And I wasn't trying to be funny.  It really is rather nasty.  I'm sure people have had to deal with much worse, but this is by far the worst spreadsheet I have had the misfortune to work on.

The spreadsheet I am working from was pulled from an old, no-longer-supported database (File Maker Pro).  The information had been entered by student workers (I am assuming) just by using whatever they were given from the School of Music: the sound cassette tape and/or the program.  Yep, sometimes just the cassette tape, no program.  The info that was to be entered was pretty rudimentary: date, performers, composer, title, and notes.  From what I can tell, each of these categories was just one box and recordings were entered by work performed.  So for example, if a recital had four pieces on it, there are four entries in the database.  The notes would be repeated each time unless there was a note specific to one piece that wasn't applicable to the other pieces.

But sometimes, apparently, the information available wasn't very ... um ... comprehensive.  To put it nicely.  Check out this one recital:

"Who knows?"????  That's what someone entered under Performer?  And why is everything else in this same field as well.  Very weird, right?  But wait ... it gets better.

The composer field contains three composers as well as the weird note: "Your guess is as good as mine on this one."  This is the only entry for this recital, so instead of entering information for each piece on the recital, there is just one entry with all three composers listed together.  Obviously there was little to no info so I guess this was the only way to do it.  But really, you have to wonder what was going on in the person's head who was entering this info.

Finally, the last two fields:

Apparently no title was entered (how could there be??), the notes ended up there instead, and the notes field is just funny.  All this info was in the very first available field and then pieced out throughout the rest of the fields.  I don't understand why.  Was it a flaw in the database program being used?  Was it user error?  A combination of both?  Obviously there was some issue with the person doing the data entry, that goes without saying.

I have no explanation on this one.  I will have to actually go pull the recording to see if there is any way to decipher what this could possibly be.