All articles with 'text processing' Tag

Often I wish Microsoft had spent the effort and time on a data genie (and a set of powerful formulas) that can automate common data cleanup tasks like extracting duplicates, makings lists unique, find missing items, remove spaces etc. Alas, instead they have provided features like clippy which are intrusive to say the least. So […]

Sorting text is such a day to day activity that it always surprises me why Excel hasn’t provided a simple spreadsheet formula for doing it. Of course you can use the sorting menu command (menu > data > sort) but this requires manual steps (or VBA). Most of the times we get raw textual data […]

In our Utopian imaginations all the data would have been standardized and shareable across systems and people. But alas, the reality is totally different. We seldom get data in the format / way we desire it to be. In other words, the ingredients are all there, but for us to prepare the dinner, you must […]

Spelling mistakes are a thing of day to day carporate life. Most of the data in spreadsheets is entered by people and hence prone to having spelling mistakes or alternate spellings. For eg. a person named John could have been spelled as Jon. And when John calls you back to confirm his reservation and you […]

In shuffling a list of items in excel I have described the technique of using random numbers generated by RAND() to sort a list of items. The technique had one disadvantage though, every time you need to reshuffle the list you have to press F9 to recalculate the rand() and then go to menu > […]

Often when you are working on 2 incompatible systems and try to import data from one to another, excel can be a handy tool. I have used excel plenty of times to generate SQL insert / update statements which I could later execute on the database console. Here is a tutorial if you ever have […]

Often when you are processing text using excel it is important to split the text in to multiple parts based on a delimiter. For eg. you may want to divide this|needs|to|be|split in to five parts this needs to be split. There is a simple way to do this in excel, using “import text” option. But […]

Often when you are processing customer records or doing mail merge, it might be useful to get initials from a given name, like JFK for John F Kennedy. You can do this using simple text formulas (left(), mid(), find()) combined with if(). Here is how: Assuming cell B3 has the full name, then this is […]

Google docs spreadsheet app is going mainstream with each passing day. Recently they have introduced split() formula to divide text in to multiple cells using a user specified delimiter. The syntax for this function is =split(text value, delimeter), for eg. =split(“pointy haired dilbert”, ” “) would result in 3 individual cells with “pointy”, “haired” and […]