Excel – Never type in data

Rule #2: Never type in data in Excel.

You rarely spend time creating voluminous data. Usually, you’re just processing it (copying, transforming, whatever).

Sometimes data is on a web page — typically tables. To copy such data, open the page in Internet Explorer and paste it in Excel. You won’t like the formatting. So copy the cells you just pasted, go to a different sheet, and Edit-Paste Special just the values (Alt-E-S-V-Enter).

Sometimes data is on a text file. You can open text files directly in Excel. Each line becomes a row. You can split lines into columns if there is a “delimiter” between any two cells. Just load a text file, select all the rows, and play with the Data – Text to Columns menu (Alt-D-E).

Sometimes, data is on a PDF file. Usually, such data is in a table. If you have Adobe Reader, tough luck. Just select and copy the table, paste it into Notepad, manually format it (painful), copy again from Notepad and paste in Excel. If you have Adobe Acrobat, it’s slightly better. You can use the “Select Column” tool to select and copy entire columns of the table in one shot.

Sometimes, data is on paper. Scanner often come with an optical character recognition (OCR) software. If not, Microsoft Office 2003 comes with a Microsoft Office Document Imaging tool has OCR. Just scan the image, open it in the Microsoft Document Imaging tool, go to the Tools – Recognize Text Using OCR… menu, and pray.

After all this importing, the data is never “clean”. Errors due to unintended delimiters, extraneous blank lines, etc are fairly frequent. I’ll talk about how to manage this when discussing Rule #3: Automate the task

4 thoughts on “Excel – Never type in data”

  1. “If you have Adobe Reader, tough luck.” Well, maybe not – if one holds down the ‘Alt’ key while using the pointer (arrow) select tool, it is possible to select and copy columns from PDF tables to Excel…

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