The new version of ASAP Utilities, 4.6.1 has just been released!

A few nice additions have been added and a few bugs were fixed.
We also fixed the startup error that sometimes occurred due to a bug in Excel 2010.

• Download ASAP Utilities 4.6.1
• View the changes.

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed their feedback and tested the pre-release!

PS.
For the few of you that use or want to use the 64 bit edition of Excel 2010, ASAP Utilities doesn't support that yet.

ASAP Utilities version 4.6.0 (June 7, 2010) has just been released!

• Download ASAP Utilities 4.6.0
• View the changes.

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed their feedback and tested the pre-release!

I'm proud to tell you that the new version of ASAP Utilities, 4.5.9 has just been released!

We have added a few new tools, made several improvements and fixed a few bugs.

• Download ASAP Utilities 4.5.9
• View the changes.

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed their feedback!

Based on the requests from many users, we have added several tools that will speed up your work in Excel.
Furthermore we have improved many tools and fixed all known bugs.

You can read what's new and download the pre-release from:
http://www.asap-utilities.com/faq-questions-answers-detail.php?m=224

One of the many improvements: Select cells by date

We have added a few new tools, made some improvements and fixed a few bugs.

• Download ASAP Utilities 4.5.8
• View the changes.

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed their feedback!

Setting the width and height in centimeters or inches can be helpful if you use the Excel for drawing purposes, such as creating a flowchart or when you design your garden or want to see if your furniture fits in your new apartment. The nature of a spreadsheet with it cells makes ideal graph paper.

I have created a macro to do this for myself years ago when I used to make a lot of flowcharts. Recently I was asked if it could be done in ASAP Utilities, so that was for me the reason to add it to the ASAP Utilities toolset.

With the new tool "Set the width and height of cells in centimeters or inches" you can now quickly set the row height and column width in centimeters or inches:

Due to limitations of how precise you can set the width and height in Excel the actual width and height might differ a tenth of a centimeter/inch. Furthermore I have experienced myself that despite the cells are square, in my printout the height of the cells seem to be a bit smaller then the width.  This also happened if I drew a rectangle of 1 by 1 centimeter.
When I looked for more information about this when writing this post, I found the following articles which are interesting to read:
http://excel-tips.blogspot.com/2004/12/square-cells-in-excel.html
http://www.mrexcel.com/tip071.shtml

Download and use

You can read more information and download the pre-release of the new version from:
http://www.asap-utilities.com/faq-questions-answers-detail.php?m=220

You can start this new (experimental and only in English) tool via:
ASAP Utilities Options » New tools in development (experimental, English only)
and then click on the button "Set the width and height of cells in centimeters or inches":

You could already identify or remove duplicated records with a workaround by merging the cell contents into a temporary added column and then use ASAP Utilities' "Conditional row and column select, hide or delete..." tool on this new column to remove the duplicated rows. But that involved a few extra steps and it isn't as fast as this new utility.

In the new version of ASAP Utilities you will be able to quickly remove all duplicated records from your sheet:

Besides removing the duplicates from a single sheet, you can also choose the option "Remove the records from Dataset 1 that are found identical in Dataset 2". This can for example be used if you have two sheets with addresses and the persons on one of the sheets have already be contacted. You can then remove those from the first sheet to get a list of people that still need to be contacted.

You can also choose the following options:

• Case sensitive.
  If you choose this option then the comparison is made case senstive. This means for example that "Bastien" does not equal "BASTIEN".
• Ignore leading, trailing and excessive spaces (example: "bastien" equals "  bastien")
  If you choose this option than it doesn't matter if some cells have irregular spacing. This can be useful if the data isn't always entered properly. Especially trailing spaces sometime cause problems when it comes to comparing lists.
• Hide the rows instead of removing them

Download and use

You can read more information and download the pre-release of the new version from:
http://www.asap-utilities.com/faq-questions-answers-detail.php?m=220

You can start this new (experimental and only in English) tool via:
ASAP Utilities Options » New tools in development (experimental, English only)
and then click on the button "Manage duplicated records":

In the new version of ASAP Utilities you will be able to quickly export your data in parts to new worksheets.
You can for example export the information of each car brand to a new worksheet. Whenever the tool encounters a new brand in column A, a new sheet is created and the information of that brand will be copied there:

With this tool you can quickly split your data into multiple parts on different sheets.  You can do this either by value, for example to create a new sheet for each company, or you can specify the number of rows to create per sheet.

We have also received the request for this tool from people that used workbooks with over 500 000 rows (Excel 2007) and then needed to open the information in Excel 2003 or earlier. By default when you save the file in Excel 2007 in Excel 2003 format, you will then get a warning such as the following and you will lose data:

In order to save the file with 500 000 rows you had to split the information into several sheets with a maximum of 65536 rows because that is the maximum amount of rows that a sheet in Excel 2003 can contain.
Now, with this tool you can do that much faster.

Download and use

You can read more information and download the pre-release of the new version from:
http://www.asap-utilities.com/faq-questions-answers-detail.php?m=220

You can start this new (experimental and only in English) tool via:
ASAP Utilities Options » New tools in development (experimental, English only)
and then click on the button "Split data table into multiple worksheets".

Export the sheets as separate workbooks.

If you need to save each worksheet as an individual file, then you can use the following tool to do this:
ASAP Utilities » Export » Export worksheets as separate files...

Combined with the new tool mentioned above this is a powerful and time-saving combination.

Let's say we have the following example.
In this case the author has used the shortcut Alt+Enter to put the last name on a new line.
But now we need it together on a single line, with a space between the first- and last name instead of a line break.
Instead of:
Bastien
Mensink
we need
Bastien Mensink, etc. etc.

Method 1, with Excel only

If you want to replace these line-breaks with for example a space, you can do this with Excel's find/replace command.

In the "Find what:" box you can enter the line-break code, which is character number 10.
To do this, press and hold the Alt key, and then enter the numbers 010 from the numeric part of the keyboard.
On my computer in the box there is then a small dot blinking when the cursor is still in the entry box.
To enter the numbers you need to use the numbers from the Num-lock part of the keyboard (with the numbers above the letters on your keyboard it doesn't work). If you have data imported from another source, sometimes the line breaks are also represented by character 13 instead of 10.

In the "Replace with:" dialog you can enter a space to have the line-breaks replaced with spaces. You can also leave that blank to have the line-breaks removed.

Method 2, with ASAP Utilities

You can use the following tool from ASAP Utilities to remove or replace the line-breaks:
Text » Advanced character remove or replace...

In the dialogue you can click on the "Line breaks" button to remove or replace the line break characters in the selected cells:

Method 3, with ASAP Utilities

You can use the following tool from ASAP Utilities to remove or replace the line-breaks:
Range » Find and/or replace in all sheets...

To search for the line break you can enter the code {lf}, to search for the carriage return you can use {cr}:

You can use the following tool to do this:
ASAP Utilities » Export » Export selection or active sheet as new file...
Then choose "CSV (comma separated value) or customer separated" and specify the pipe-character (|) as delimiter:

Of course you can use with any character to create a specific separated kind of text file.