Today I have encountered a big confusion on building my annual goals spreadsheet review where some of the goals I have used SMART method of saying "This goal BY 21st JUNE 2012". As usual, some of these were missed out the deadline of the goals and caught up with the goal review.
I wanted to remove this "BY 21st JUNE 2012" as it was rekindling the guilty conscious in me of NOT completing them on time. Using my programmer brain, I obviously wanted to clear these "by.." goals (71 of them) at one go instead of manual editing. Obviously the Pattern Matching functionality came into my mind to perform the same.
In my perl and shell scripting background, I would have used "BY (.*) 2012" to do this simple change. However, the excel spit up the error when I used the same construct in the find and replace box. In my google search on the context, I saw the TILDE (~) symbol being used as "finding the next literal" and with that I have resorted into "BY (~*) 2012" but it did NOT work. With my extensive trial and error, I found the solution and felt stupid to have missed it.
What was the solution with fixed my issue?
It was simple use of *. Yes, the "BY * 2012" has fixed the issue and learnt that Excel support plain *(for everything - being greedy), +(Only the specified characters), ?(Only the next character). With that, I did the following.
1) Press CTRL+F to invoke FIND and REPLACE dialogue box.
2) on the find what, I have entered "BY * 2012" and did a find all and checked entries.
3) I did REPLACE ALL, to replace all of the matching entries after validating the entries in the step(2).
Wondering how come we complicate the things ourselves that are kept so simple out there? Did you get into similar thoughts recently? Share it!!
I wanted to remove this "BY 21st JUNE 2012" as it was rekindling the guilty conscious in me of NOT completing them on time. Using my programmer brain, I obviously wanted to clear these "by.." goals (71 of them) at one go instead of manual editing. Obviously the Pattern Matching functionality came into my mind to perform the same.
In my perl and shell scripting background, I would have used "BY (.*) 2012" to do this simple change. However, the excel spit up the error when I used the same construct in the find and replace box. In my google search on the context, I saw the TILDE (~) symbol being used as "finding the next literal" and with that I have resorted into "BY (~*) 2012" but it did NOT work. With my extensive trial and error, I found the solution and felt stupid to have missed it.
What was the solution with fixed my issue?
It was simple use of *. Yes, the "BY * 2012" has fixed the issue and learnt that Excel support plain *(for everything - being greedy), +(Only the specified characters), ?(Only the next character). With that, I did the following.
1) Press CTRL+F to invoke FIND and REPLACE dialogue box.
2) on the find what, I have entered "BY * 2012" and did a find all and checked entries.
3) I did REPLACE ALL, to replace all of the matching entries after validating the entries in the step(2).
Wondering how come we complicate the things ourselves that are kept so simple out there? Did you get into similar thoughts recently? Share it!!
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