Everything is Crap » excel

Doing math on a selection of cells in Excel

kris — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:05:33 +0000

Why do I keep forgetting this? To do math on a selection of cells in Excel (like making all the numbers negative for example)

type the new number in a blank cell (-1 for this example),
copy it
select the cells you want to do the math to
pick paste special
pick the correct math function under "Operation" (Multiply for this example)
Click ok

Convoluted Matching using Expression Web and Excel

paul — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:28:00 +0000

Today, I was able to take a list if the customer names and account numbers from a text file and associate them with the account numbers in an excel file. First, I filtered the list (accepting only lines with a "-" in them). replaced…

{.*}{[0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]}{.*}

…with…

1t2t3

…in Expression Web. Then, I pasted that to a separate worksheet in the excel file. From there, in the excel's main worksheet I was able to use the following formula…

=IF(ISERROR(MATCH(A56,'Company Names'!B:B,0)),"",INDEX('Company Names'!A:A,MATCH(A56,'Company Names'!B:B,0),1))

What this does, is it returns the name of the company on the "Company Names" work book by matching the account numbers. It's quite convoluted, but it works. Break it down for yourself and you'll get it. Whew. That was fun.

Filtering e-mail addresses from a huge mound of plain-text

paul — Wed, 30 May 2007 23:47:00 +0000

I'm faced with a mailbox full of bounced/undeliverable messages and from that I need to extract all the e-mail addresses that need to be removed from our home-spun mass-mail program.

After messing around a whole bunch, installing a whole mess of different editors and tools that I downloaded from the internet, and wasting a lot of time I finally came up with a solution that works for complex search and replace operations yet uses only the tools that I already have: Excel and Expression Web. I was able to export a mailbox from outlook containing hundreds of messages, and I was able to strip the unique e-mail addresses for each message. Here's the steps I took (minus the figuring out and messing around that I did)…

To make the e-mails useful I exported them into a CSV. From there I took just the message text and pasted that into Microsoft Expression Web. To isolate the e-mail addresses from the rest of the garbage, I searched for this…

[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]#@[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+

…and did a "find all." After that I took my search results and pasted them into a new document and then did a replace funciton where I replaced…

.*[ t<("']{[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]#@[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+}.*

… with …

It worked, but there was some problem recognising usernames that had a dot in them. There were, naturally, a lot of duplicates, so I pasted that list back into excel and performed this…

=IF(COUNTIF(A1:A670,A1)>1,"",A1)

…in the column next to the e-mail addresses. That told me whether or not there are duplicates below the current line. I filled the formula down to the end of the column. I copied that column and pasted as values into the next column, then I sorted the values and I have a list of e-mails with no duplicates, ready to be used.