Although I do not do a lot of this sort of thing much any more, I remember spending many an hour in Excel fighting with various bits of data that I exported to make subtle edits to thousands of rows. After a little bit of experience I began to build Visual Basic scripts, or Macros, that would allow me to do these tasks in an automated fashion.
Boy do I with I had Dabble DB‘s Magic/Replace tool back then.
Magic/Replace allows you to paste a huge block of data, make as many changes as you’d like to a single or set of rows, and it will "remember" the changes you make to the data and apply those changes to the entire set of data. I know that doesn’t sound interesting but it is quite awesome.
Having "Magic" in the name of a product is rarely warranted. But I believe in this case it is. Be sure to check out the video demonstration to get the full effect of how good Magic/Replace really is.
Source: Magic/Replace.
Via: Simon Willison.
