posted on March 12, 2006 12:12:48 PM
I'm switching my inventory between a couple of different systems. I have loaded everything into Excel, but I need to get all my product descriptions into a single line with no carriage returns, line breaks, etc. I don't mean a visible line in excel, I mean actually deleting all the "Enters" in the field <BR> will still be there.
How can I automatically "smush" all that html into a single line? Is there way to SEARCH & REPLACE all the "enters" with a null string?
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posted on March 12, 2006 12:27:55 PM
I would guess that you can use "find and replace" function. In the "find" bar hit ENTER and in the "replace" bar hit SPACE or DELETE.
posted on March 12, 2006 12:32:11 PM
No, that's just looking for the word "ENTER". I need it to actually find the special character that represents the enter key.
I know it can be done, I just don't know the character code.
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posted on March 12, 2006 01:31:36 PM
Use a text editor to search for the line delimiter "\r" and/or "\n" and replace with a null. You can easily grep it. Same for removing all the html markup codes...
posted on March 12, 2006 01:34:38 PM
I'm not sure that you can do this in "straight" excel. You might need a VB macro to do it: a replace function to remove vbCrLf. If I get a chance later, I'll put one together.
Excel itself doesn't allow for a find & replace for special formatting characters. However, Word does. Here's the process:
1) Copy your text into Word
2) Choose Edit->Replace from the menu bar
3) In the "Find What" field type: ^p (this is the special character for paragraph mark)
4) Leave the replace field blank
5) Press the Replace All button.
All your paragraph marks will be removed, and you can paste the text into Excel, where it will appear as a single line of text.
posted on March 13, 2006 10:34:25 AM
I'm not at that computer right now, but I will give it a shot and report back. That sounds like the kind of solution I can understand!
Thanks!
Dr. Arcane, revelator of mystical secrets http://www.drarcane.com
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posted on March 20, 2006 09:43:33 AM
Someone on eBay suggested the perfect answer. Anyone else in this situation should be able to use it too, so I'm posting the answer here.
use the =CLEAN(A1) function.
It deletes all non-printing characters in a cell, including tabs, newlines and carriage returns.
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