On Sunday 15 October 2006 9:42 pm, Richard Detwiler wrote: > I have a somewhat obscure problem that I'm struggling with. I'm the > newsletter editor for a local club. I do the newsletter in OOo Writer. A > big part of this newsletter is listing results of our events (athletic > competition). I obtain these results from our web site, which has them > in a space-delimited form such as the example below (they "look right" > when they are in a fixed width font like Courier): > > 1. Zachary Smith 17:42 > 2. Matthew and Jennifer Brown 31:02 > 3. Elizabeth Jones 35:00 > > I can pull them into the Writer document as is, but the problem is they > almost never fit into a column with the number of spaces that are used > on the web site. I find it best if I replace the string of spaces with a > tab stop, so I have better flexibility in moving the tab stop around to > get things to look "right" in the newsletter. > > So far I have been manually highlighting the string of spaces and > replacing them with a tab stop. This is quite time consuming, since > there are a lot of events and many lines of results for each event. > > One alternative I tried is copying the results into a Calc spreadsheet, > and using the add-on Text to Columns feature to separate them into > columns. The problem with this is that Calc insists on converting the > times into a non-meaningful (to me anyway) decimal; for example 20:00 > (which is 20 minutes) is converted in 0.83 (which I assume is the > fraction of a day that 20 hours is). This happens even if I pre-format > the entire sheet to text format. I've figured out how to convert this > decimal back into the right number of minutes, but the problem then is > that it is in minutes and decimal minutes (21.5 for example) instead of > minutes and seconds (21:30). I know I could figure out a way by going > through a number of operations to get 21.5 to read 21:30 again, but at > some point, this becomes more work than manually replacing the spaces > with tabs would be. > > Doing a find and replace in Writer can help a bit but the problem is > that the number of spaces varies all over the map from line to line. > > Does anyone have any suggestions on processing this information that > would simplify things? Thanks very much.
you mean other than switching to linux so you have standard tools to do this before you import it into oo.. you should be able to do this with regexp first get this document http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/index.html download the OpenOffice.org2.x User Guide in pdf format.. check out page 45 which shows the list of regular expressions.. This will allow you to search for more than one space and replace it with a tab.. We hope that OO will someday support all regex expressons that linux supports.. good luck with your project you should have it working in no time.. Fred > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
