quick link in excel

[OpenIT Solutions]

Hi,

Anyone tried copying a quick link in a supplied mdg file such as the bpmn mdg into a seperate csv file for editing in Excel ?

When i open in Excel its treated as one record, ie all on one row. The record separator (
) seems to be ignored.

Any suggestions on a fix so i can edit the quick link easily in Excel ?

Regards,


Jon.

[qwerty]

No "quick" solution.

You can use Notepad++ to pre-/post-process the record separator from &xa; to \n and back. No chance without this step.

You can also change ";" to "\t" (tab) so copy-paste works with either spreadsheet.

Excel is picky and inconsistent regarding separators. Somewhere (in the past) it was possible to specify the separation char. OpenOffice is much easier to handle here.

q.

[OpenIT Solutions]

Hi,

I tried a search/replace of 
 with \n in the csv file i created; still loads as a single row in Excel.

I could be doing something silly with the search and replace - do i just use ctrl-f in Notepad++ select the replace tab and paste in the two string above ? Or do i need to escape \n somehow on the search/replace dialogue ?

Thanks,

Jon.

[qwerty]

The ctrl-f in notepad++ has a Search Mode "Extended" down left you need to check. That will handle \n as newline and \t as tab.

(The regex option works similar but should only be used if you are familiar with regular expressions).

q.

[Geert Bellekens]

Jon,

On a windows machine you better replace that string with

Code: [Select]

\r\n (carriage return + line feed)

Geert

PS. This is somehow becoming a Notepad++ topic

[qwerty]

Geert is right. Each OS has it's newline-flavour. And windoze uses \r\n.

I guess, sometimes we need to discuss also peripheral topics like this. When working with profiles I found notepad++ a valuable tool: editing like the discussed, conversion of base64, re-indenting, ability to edit large xml...

q.

[Geert Bellekens]

I happen to like Notepad++ too.
Here at work I've even written an add-in that allows us to edit postconditions of operations directly in Notepad++.
For historical reasons we use our very own pseudo-code language in postconditions, and the ability to customize syntax highlighting in Notepad++ really made a difference for us.

Geert

[OpenIT Solutions]

Thank you both. All sorted now.