Excel: Spreadsheets are for Numbers *And* Words

"Beyond Numbers: Manipulating Text in Excel"
PC Magazine (May 21 2009)

"Excel is great for crunching numbers, but it's also a simple database solution for many. Luckily, with a few handy formulas, Excel can learn to crunch your alpha-bits too."

"Common wisdom is that word processors are for text and spreadsheets are for numbers. The reality, however, is that while spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel let you work with numbers in every imaginable way, they're also quite adept at manipulating text. This ability comes in very handy, and Excel is often used as a lightweight database to manage a wide variety of data lists.

"Unfortunately, the text in your spreadsheets often won't be stored in a manner suitable to your needs. For example...."

This is a pretty good article for people who have Excel, could use a simple database, and don't have some combination of a large IT staff, programming skills, and unlimited time.

That first 'for example' shows how to take "a list of people's names where each name is stored as firstname lastname (for example, John Doe) in a single cell...." and turn it into something you can search and sort by last name.

There's specific advice for dealing with domain names, file names, zipcodes that start with a zero, and extra blank characters in your text.

A supervisor of mine once told me that he could do just about anything with a text editor and a spreadsheet. I didn't quite believe him at the time, but tried doing things his way, anyway. He had a point.

I've used Excel for quite a few off-label functions: including what this article describes.

This article is particularly helpful, because it shows some of the functions you'd need to use.

Word-Only Ads Can Stand Out With ASCII Art

"Using ASCII Art on Google Adwords - Brilliantly Innovative!"

This post, with a screenshot, shows how one company made their text-only ads stand out: and boosted clicks 47%.

Intellectual Property Rights: Creative Compiling,or Rip-Off?

The post about robots that I discussed recently, "Ten (10) High Technology Robots That May Change The World," posted by someone called Marvin, was accused of copying material, and maybe the entire post, from other sites.

One of the more recent comments read, in part "The comments on ripping off sites and copywrite etc, when are you people going to learn the whole interesting aspect of the internet is the fact it is unregulated and uncontrolled, by now people should realise there isnt such a thing as copywrite in the virtual world that is the internet."

That wasn't so much an accusation, as a celebration of lawlessness. And, I'm not at all sure that the claim that "there isnt such a thing as copywrite in the virtual world...." is accurate.

Lack of enforcement, yes. Lack of copyright and other intellectual property laws and regulations, no.

I used a handy plagiarism-checking site, Copyscape, and found no indication that Marvin's post was a straightforward cut-and-paste of someone else's post.

I did, however, find that Marvin had copied rather extensively from two sites, at least:

• LiveScience.com : Image Gallery: Cutting-Edge Robots (text and image copied)
• Robots: An Exhibition of U.S. Automatons from the Leading Edge of Research (text copied)

Marvin's post is original, in the sense that the combination of text and pictures is unique to his post. However, he did use images and substantial sections of text from other sites.

Some of the pictures have their origin identified as part of the image, but that's the only acknowledgment I found in the post.

Other than one of the comments, which identified the source for some of the post's information.

I have no idea whether Marvin's post crossed the line, and violated the intellectual property rights of the authors of his post's components. I'm not saying that he didn't create a more visually pleasing and readable list than the sites he copied material from: just that his lack of acknowledgment is disquieting.

I do know that he danced closer to the edge than I'd want to.

Related posts on Apathetic Lemming of the North:

• Intellectual Property Rights: A Borderline Post? (August 22, 2007)
• Intellectual Property Violation: What to Do (August 15, 2007)
• Intellectual Property Violation: This Time With Laughs (August 10, 2007)
• Copyright Material Ripped Off? You're not alone. (August 9, 2007)
• Plagiarism-Finder Site: Copyscape (August 9, 2007)
• Another Abuse of Copyright: If This Isn't Illegal, it Should Be! (August 9, 2007)
• Copyright: a List You Shouldn't Myth (August 8, 2007)
• Copy, Steal, Rob, Whatever: Another Violation of Intellectual Property Rights (August 3, 2007)
• Copyright Infringement, YouTube, and Video Sharing (July 28, 2007)
• Sploggers: Intellectual Property Thieves (July 28, 2007)

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