Help with mass edit
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Can someone please provide me instructions how to mass edit something I have a column in excel which has LastName, FirstName. How do I mass edit muitple lines removing “LastName,” out of it?
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@Rob-Puleo said in Help with mass edit:
I have a column in excel
You do realise this is a forum for Notepad++??!!
If you were to have the file in a CSV format (a common import/export file type that Excel uses) then Notepad++ should be able to “mass edit” it if there was enough structure to the various fields.
You would need to create the CSV file and then represent part of it in this forum so we can see what’s needed. Then someone could create a regular expression to help you with the mass edit. Once edited in Notepad++ you would then need to import back into Excel.
When posting examples. insert them into the window where you are typing the post, then after highlighting them use the
</>button you see immediately above the window. This will create a black box around the example text which protects it from the posting engine possibly altering the text.Alternatively you could perform the edit entirely within Excel, but that isn’t something this forum will help you with.
Terry
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If you are asking how to edit an Excel spreadsheet in the Excel application, you’re asking in the wrong place: this is a forum for the Notepad++ text editor.
If you mean you exported a CSV from Excel and are editing the text of the CSV in Notepad++, then it should be reasonably easy with a regular expression-based search/replace function.
How exactly that regex will look is determined by what your data really looks like. Saying “column” for a spreadsheet data column is meaningless in Notepad++, because it’s a text-editor.
For example, if your CSV looked like this:
LastName, FirstName, Other Info ... Jones, Peter, SuperHelper ... Puleo, Rob, QuestionAsker ... Doe, John, FakePerson ...I could use a Replace entry like:
- FIND =
(?-s)^.*?,\h*(.*)$ - REPLACE =
$1 - Search Mode = Regular Expression
- Replace All
to get
FirstName, Other Info ... Peter, SuperHelper ... Rob, QuestionAsker ... John, FakePerson ...But I am 90% confident that my first guess won’t work for you, because of your vague problem description.
Please note: if you want a better answer than what I just gave, you are going to have to carefully read and understand the following paragraph, and follow its advice. If you do not, you are not likely to get anything useful in answer to your question.
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Do you want regex search/replace help? Then please be patient and polite, show some effort, and be willing to learn; answer questions and requests for clarification that are made of you. All example text should be marked as plain text using the
</>toolbar button or manual Markdown syntax. Screenshots can be pasted from the clipbpard to your post usingCtrl+Vto show graphical items, but any text should be included as literal text in your post so we can easily copy/paste your data. Show the data you have and the text you want to get from that data; include examples of things that should match and be transformed, and things that don’t match and should be left alone; show edge cases and make sure you examples are as varied as your real data. Show the regex you already tried, and why you thought it should work; tell us what’s wrong with what you do get… Read the official NPP Searching / Regex docs and the forum’s Regular Expression FAQ. If you follow these guidelines, you’re much more likely to get helpful replies that solve your problem in the shortest number of tries. - FIND =
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@Rob-Puleo I know it’s a notepad++ forum and you provided the steps to export to CSV to use Notepad++. That is what I was looking for and thank you for your help!
