I have a very large spreadsheet where I need to replace a word in one column with text from another on a large scale.
I need to replace one word (in this case it is [Rate]) with information from a different column.
ex: Fixed rate of [Rate] per kilowatt hour.
finished product: Fixed rate of 0.0652 (number found in different column) per kilowatt hour.
Is this possible on a large scale? There is 800 something of these that I need to update but my work application is rather slow and if I can streamline this it will save me hours of time.
Use the substitute function:
The information page is found at:
Syntax
SUBSTITUTE(text,old_text_or_reference,new_text_or_reference,inst)
Text:the text (as string) or reference in which you want to replace
Old_text:Text to be replaced in the string
New_text:Is the text or reference you want to replace old_text with.
inst: Not a compulsory variable. Is which consecutive number of the occurrence of the old_text that you want to replace.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-nz/excel-help/substitute-function-HP010062578.aspx
Related
I have some text which I receive daily that I need to seperate. I have hundreds of lines similar to the extract below:
COMMODITY PRICE DIFFERENTIAL: FEB50-FEB40 (APR): COMPANY A OFFERS 1000KB AT $0.40
I need to extract individual snippets from this text, so for each in a seperate cell, I the result needs to be the date, month, company, size, and price. In the case, the result would be:
FEB50-40
APR
COMPANY A
100
0.40
The issue I'm struggling with is uniformity. For example one line might have FEB50-FEB40, another FEB5-FEB40, or FEB50-FEB4. Another example giving me difficult is that some rows might have 'COMPANY A' and the other 'COMPANYA' (one word instead of two).
Any ideas? I've been trying combinations of the below but I'm not able to have uniform results.
=TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE($D7," ",REPT(" ",LEN($D7))), (5)*LEN($D7)+1,LEN($D7)))
=MID($D7,20,21-10)
=TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE($D6,"$",REPT("$",2)),4))
Sometimes I get
FEB40-50(' OR 'FEB40-FEB5'
when it should be
'FEB40-FEB50'`
Thank you to who is able to help.
You might get to the limits of formulas with this scenario, but with Power Query you can still work.
As I see it, you want to apply the following logic to extract text from this string:
COMMODITY PRICE DIFFERENTIAL: FEB50-FEB40 (APR): COMPANY A OFFERS 1000KB AT $0.40
text after the first : and before the first (
text between the brackets
text after the word OFFERS and before AT
text after 'AT`
These can be easily translated into several "Split" scenarios inside Power Query.
split by custom delimiter : - that's colon and space - for each ocurrence
remove first column
Split new first column by ( - that's space and bracket - for leftmost
Replace ) with nothing in second column
Split third column by delimiter OFFERS
split new fourth column by delimiter AT
The screenshot shows the input data and the result in the Power Query editor after renaming the columns and before loading the query into the worksheet.
Once you have loaded the query, you can add / remove data in the input table and simply refresh the query to get your results. No formulas, just clicking ribbon commands.
You can take this further by removing the "KB" from the column, convert it to a number, divide it by 100. Your business processing logic will drive what you want to do. Just take it one step at a time.
The attached image (link: https://i.stack.imgur.com/w0pEw.png) shows a range of cells (B1:B7) from a table I imported from the web. I need a formula that allows me to extract the names from each cell. In this case, my objective is to generate the following list of names, where each name is in its own cell: Erik Karlsson, P.K. Subban, John Tavares, Matthew Tkachuk, Steven Stamkos, Dustin Brown, Shea Weber.
I have been reading about left, right, and mid functions, but I'm confused by the irregular spacing and special characters (i.e. the box with question mark beside some names).
Can anyone help me extract the names? Thanks
Assuming that your cells follow the same format, you can use a variety of text functions to get the name.
This function requires the following format:
Some initial text, followed by
2 new lines in Excel (represented by CHAR(10)
The name, which consists of a first name, a space, then a last name
A second space on the same line as the name, followed by some additional text.
With this format, you can use the following formula (assuming your data is in an Excel table, with the column of initial data named Text):
=MID([#Text],SEARCH(CHAR(10),[#Text],SEARCH(CHAR(10),[#Text])+1)+1,SEARCH(" ",MID([#Text],SEARCH(CHAR(10),[#Text],SEARCH(CHAR(10),[#Text])+1)+1,LEN([#Text])),SEARCH(" ",MID([#Text],SEARCH(CHAR(10),[#Text],SEARCH(CHAR(10),[#Text])+1)+1,LEN([#Text])))+1)-1)
To come up with this formula, we take the following steps:
First, we figure out where the name starts. We know this occurs after the 2 new lines, so we use:
=SEARCH(CHAR(10),[#Text],SEARCH(CHAR(10),[#Text])+1)+1
The inner (occurring second) SEARCH finds the first new line, and the outer (occurring first) finds the 2nd new line.
Now that we have that value, we can use it to determine the rest of the string (after the 2 new lines). Let's say that the previous formula was stored in a table column called Start of Name. The 2nd formula will then be:
=MID([#Text],[#[Start of Name]],LEN([#Text]))
Note that we're using the length of the entire text, which by definition is more than we need. However, that's not an issue, since Excel returns the smaller amount between the last argument to MID and the actual length of the text.
Once we have the text from the start of the name on, we need to calculate the position of the 2nd space (where the name ends). To do that, we need to calculate the position of the first space. This is similar to how we calculated the start of the name earlier (which starts after 2 new lines). The function we need is:
=SEARCH(" ",[#[Rest of String]],SEARCH(" ",[#[Rest of String]])+1)-1
So now, we know where the name starts (after 2 new lines), and where it ends (after the 2nd space). Assuming we have these numbers stored in columns named Start of Name and To Second Space respectively, we can use the following formula to get the name:
=MID([#Text],[#[Start of Name]],[#[To Second Space]])
This is equivalent to the first formula: The difference is that the first formula doesn't use any "helper columns".
Of course, if any cell doesn't match this format, then you'll be out of luck. Using Excel formulas to parse text can be finicky and inflexible. For example, if someone has a middle name, or someone has a initials with spaces (e.g. P.K. Subban was P. K. Subban), or there was a Jr. or something, your job would be a lot harder.
Another alternative is to use regular expressions to get the data you want. I would recommend this thorough answer as a primer. Although you still have the same issues with name formats.
Finally, there's the obligatory Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names as a warning against assuming any kind of standardized name format.
Is there a built in function, or a simple UDF that can identify the pattern in the information below and remove the duplicates?
Assume the following is all within a single excel cell:
80154, 80299, 80299, 82055, 82145, 82205, 82520, 82570, 83840, 83925,
83925, 83986, 83992, 84315, 80154, 80299, 80299, 82055, 82145, 82205,
82520, 82570, 83840, 83925, 83925, 83986, 83992, 84315
There are two sets of data (starts with 80154 ends with 84315). I want to end up with only one set, but I want to do it to 50,000 lines. The final output should be just the BOLD text. Also, sometimes the data repeats itself 3 times, again, I just want the unique set of data.
NOTE: I can't just remove duplicates, because sometimes there will be duplicates in the set that I need to capture in the final output. For example, (A,A,B,C,A,A,B,C) needs to be reduced to (A,A,B,C).
This finds where the first 20% is repeated and cuts the string at that point.
IF it does not find a duplicate it will return the whole string.
=IFERROR(LEFT(A1,FIND(LEFT(A1,LEN(A1)/5),A1,2)-3),A1)
Play with the 5 till you find the proper length of string that will get you the correct answer on all your strings. The higher the number the smaller the string it compares.
Also if it is cutting off too much or not enough, like leaving the , at the end adjust the -3 up and down.
I have a single column of text in Excel that is to be used for translating into foreign languages. The text is automatically generated from an InDesign File. I would like to clean it up for the translator by removing rows that simply contain a number ("20", 34.5" etc), or if they contain a measurement "5mm", "3.5 µm", etc. I've found many posts (see link below) on how to remove a row with specific string, but none that use search strings, such as those I typically use with GREP searches: "\d+" and "\d.\d µm"
How would I do this? I am on Mac iOS if that helps.
Note that I would need to delete the row if the cell only contains a number or a measurement, not if the number is contained within a phrase, sentence, or paragraph, etc.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/30569969
It may not be what you are looking for, but how about just sorting the column and remove the rows starting with numbers? It is a manual approach but from what I understand this translation process only happens from time to time. Am I right?
I see two possible issues in your question:
How to work with regular expressions in Excel?
How to delete rows in a loop?
Let me start with the second question: when you want to create a for-loop in order to remove items from a list, you MUST start at the end and go back to the beginning (it's a beginner's trick, but a lot of people trip over it.
About the first question: this is a very useful post about this subject, it's too large to even give a summary here.
Let's say I need to replace any cell that has a value of "outgoing" with multiple cells such as (0), (1), (0), (0), (2), in Excel. Is there a way to actually make this happen? I am doing this for a research project. Every item in my data needs to be coded on five different scales. There are 30-or-so items make up for almost half of the data. It would be enormously helpful to be able to simply replace the high frequency items with the five values at once.
I am not sure I completely understand the result you are looking for but here goes:
How about using the Find and Replace functionality to replace all instances of "outgoing" with "(0),(1),(0),(0),(2)" and then use the Text to Columns functionality to split the single column with "(0),(1),(0),(0),(2)" in to five separate columns, thus each value would be in its own cell.
You would need to split based on a delimiter (probably ",") and you should do all your replacing before you start splitting. Obviously you should test on some sample data first - Find and Replace is not your friend if you are not certain about your data set.