Saturday, March 08, 2008
Testing a String for Proper Case
Have you ever needed to check a string in a worksheet cell to see if it is in proper case? By "proper case" I mean that the first letter of each word in the string is capitalized and the other characters are lowercase. For example, you may have a list of people’s names (maybe for a mailing list) and you need to be sure that the names are written properly (e.g., John Smith, not john Smith or John sMith). It seems that this should be easy in Excel, but it isn’t obvious (at least there is no easy, built-in function that you can use to validate the string). In this post I will demonstrate three
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Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Dealing With Unusual Date Formats
I’m sure that you have all been through this: You go to a Website (or a database, probably from a mainframe) to get some data. The problem is that the dates are formatted in some obscure way that Excel doesn’t understand. In this post, I’ll give you an idea of how to convert these dates into something that you can work with.
Yesterday I was working on a project that involves charting some economic data series. Frequently, charts of economic time series show shaded areas that indicate a period of recession (I’ve got a post that shows how to do that). So, I needed to know the dates for
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