When You Need it Yesterday:Killer Excel Hacks with

ASAP UtilitiesWendolyn VermeerMetadata Librarian, Cal Poly Pomona University LibraryOctober 14, 2014

SCIUG 2014

Reasons to use ASAP Utilities

• It does things that Excel simply cannot• Excel Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is

taught in upper division engineering courses at Cal Poly Pomona…most of us aren’t born with the knowledge!

• You need the data cleaned up and ready to go yesterday

• Stuck in spreadsheet purgatory

Meet Casey. Casey is tired of spreadsheet purgatory

ASAP Utilities Plugin for Excel

ASAP Utilities Ribbon in Excel

Example #1 – Total the number of titles in the NOTE field of an order record

Copy and paste into Excel

• Sure, you could export payline data from the order record in Create Lists. Or, you could simply:

• Ctrl + a in the order record to select all• Ctrl + c to copy• Ctrl + v in Excel to paste

Pasted Data

Make the Magic Happen

• Select Column I• ASAP ribbon Text 14. Delete all text

characters (a-z) in selected cells• Highlight resulting numerical values in the

column (or highlight the entire column)• Home ribbon AutoSum button (Σ)• Ctrl + ↓ to jump down to the cell with the sum

Example #2 – Master ISBN list to YBP, so that dups are not included in our DDA pool

Create List of ISBNs; export to .txt file

YBP can’t use the list in this state

NEITHER CAN WE

Make the Magic Happen

• In the .txt file, ctrl + a to highlight all and ctrl + c to copy

• In Excel, right click in cell A1 and Paste Special Text

• Double-click on right edge of Column A to auto-adjust its width

• Right click in Column A Format Cells Number Decimal places: 0 OK

More Magic

• Home ribbon Align text left• ASAP ribbon Text 10. Delete leading,

trailing, and excessive spaces• ASAP ribbon Columns & Rows 12. Delete

all empty rows • Space out Columns B, C, D, E & F to make room

in the cell for ISBN-13s

More More Magic

• Data ribbon Text to Columns Delimited Semicolon Finish

• Ctrl + a to select all• Right click in Column A Format Cells

Number Decimal places: 0 OK• Home ribbon Align text left• ASAP ribbon Text 10. Delete leading,

trailing, and excessive spaces

Example #3 – The ARL E-Journal Count

Page 32 of 2012 CSU Annual Stats instructions:Using the SFX Knowledgebase to obtain ARL E-Journal Count

“As with the SerialsSolutions best practices, use of SFX makes the basic assumption that “All of

your institution’s electronic serials, both purchased and not purchased, are being tracked within

the… knowledgebase,” and Government Documents numbers are counted separately. Print

serials numbers need to be separately de-duplicated so that only unique titles in print are counted.

Serial ‘databases’ are not included in this count. Libraries with holdings greater than 65K titles

before de-duplication will want to use Excel 2007, which allows over 1 million rows.”

Total Unique Title Count for E-Journals

Make the (Knowledge Base) Magic Happen

• Get the pertinent ISSNs out of SFX using Export Tool Advanced Export Query

• Local *and* Chancellor’s Office servers• Delete all other columns except for the one that

contains print ISSNs• ASAP ribbon Columns & Rows 12. Delete

all empty rows

Make the (ASAP Utilities) Magic Happen

• Export ejour ISSNs from your ILS with some fine-tuned Create Lists

• ASAP ribbon Text 12. Advanced character remove or replace

• Click button for “a,b,c..”• Check boxes next to parentheses and hypen

OK

More Make the (ASAP Utilities) Magic Happen

• ASAP ribbon Columns & Rows 12. Delete all empty rows

• Ctrl + ↓ to jump to the last cell, click once in that cell, scroll to top, shift + click in A1 to highlight

• Ctrl + c to copy, ctrl + v to paste into column of ISSNs from SFX

• ASAP ribbon Range 17. Clear duplicated values in selection (leave one original)

• ASAP ribbon Columns & Rows 12. Delete all empty rows

(you have to ASAP delete all empty rows just one more time!)

Can’t find the right tool?

TONS of examples and help at the ASAP Utilities site

Casey is very pleased with ASAP Utilities

Now he can nap.

…andnap.

Thank You!

Thank You!Wendolyn VermeerMetadata LibrarianCal Poly Pomona University Librarywcvermeer@csupomona.edu909-869-4990

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