Am having problems in coding - how short or long should a meaningful code be? How best may I create families? Is it normal to take a lot of time on coding?

Can't answer your first question properly because it depends on so many different factors. However, from a practical perspective, I'd make the coding as detailed as possible because you can always merge them later - be systematic about it. Family codes, again, depend on you data, but one family could concern, for example, pain codes. You can then export the family to Excel and do some really tidy count tables.

Thank you so much. I thought I was having so many codes, and was wondering whether I was doing it the right way. I also appreciate the idea to link to excel, and see the amazing result therefrom.