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.

Well, you can already do this in Excel.
Just select all or multiple sheets and then when you start the Spelling (F7) the spelling check will take place on the selected sheets.

The question I received this week:
I want to insert a blank row after every 3rd row in an excel file containing 1000 rows. Can you tell how..
Sure I can!

Initially you might think of the tool in ASAP Utilities to insert empty rows between every row in your selection. But that does it for every row, not every 3rd. However, with a small workaround it can still be done quickly.
With the help of a temporary column we enter the numbers 1 till 3 down to the bottom.
Then we select all the cells with the value 1 and then we insert the empty rows and finally remove the temporary helper column.

How it works:

1. This is an example of the initial dataset where we need to insert a blank row after every third row:
2. Insert a temporary column and select the cells all the way down to the end.
3. Then in the excel menu choose ASAP Utilities » Fill » Quick numbering of selected cells... and enter the information as presented in the screenshot below. The "restart counter after number" with the value 3 is what is handy here.
   
4. When you press the OK button you will see that the cells are filled with 1,2,3 down to the end.
   Then we select cells B3 down to the bottom and we use ASAP Utilities to select all the cells with the value 1. In the Excel menu choose ASAP Utilities » Select » Select cells based on content, formatting and more... and on the "Based on content" tab choose to select the cells equal to 1:
   
5. Now that these cells are selected we can use Excel to insert the empty rows:
   
6. The rows are inserted above every cell with the value 1 and then you can remove the temporary column:
   
7. And this is the result:
   

Food for thought.
The above approach shows how to insert an empty row after every 3rd row. You can easily use the same approach to insert it after every 4th, 5th, 25th etc., etc. or use it on columns. When you want to insert more then one row, for example 2 rows, you can use the conditional select to select the cells 'less then or equal to' 2. Then when you use the insert rows command in Excel two rows will be inserted.

And as always in Excel, this is just one approach to solve the problem.

At this moment our advise is to install the 32 bit version of Office, even if you have a 64 bit OS. In this post I give you a few reasons why we think it is in most cases the best solution. Until there is proof of great benefits, the 32 bit version seems to be the best for compatibility and you don't seem to anything significant.

First, according to Microsoft: "64-bit Excel, simply put, is for building really really (really) big workbooks."

There a few things to keep in mind before you choose to install the 64 bit version of Office 2010:

• Most add-ins don't support the 64 bit version of Excel 2010
• At this moment ASAP Utilities does not work with the 64 bit version of Excel 2010, it only works with the 32 bit versions of Excel. In order to support the 64 bit version of Excel 2010 we have to create a special 64 bit version for it. However, the current tool we use from MS doesn't support that (MS Office Developer edition). Furthermore, at this moment Office is still a beta version from which MS hasn't released all the details yet, which makes the development of a 64 bit version uncertain.  Besides we do need to use another program for the development of ASAP Utilities, which will probably be Visual Studio 2010, but that isn't released yet either. They way I see it at this moment is that it might perhaps be wise to see how many people will actually use the 64 bit version of Excel and then we can see if we can justify the extra time and money we need to put into the development of a special 64 bit version and maintaining both a standard 32 bit and a 64 bit version.
• The only major advantage of the 64 bit version at this moment seems to be that it can handle Excel files larger than 2 GB (2 Gigabyte!).
• No guarantee for speed. Unlike you might expect, the 64 bit version isn't twice as fast as the 32 bit version. Quote from the MS Excel blog: "I’ve heard some people comment that 64-bit Excel means that it’ll just run faster than 32-bit Excel. Well, that’s not true as a general rule. We have some tests that run a bit faster on 64-bit Excel, and other tests that run a bit slower on 64-bit Excel."

Interesting source to read:

MS Announcing the 64 bit version of Excel:
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/08/28/excel-2010-now-with-more-bits.aspx

Office 2010 Beta – 32-bit or 64-bit – The Choice is Clear
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/11/23/office-2010-beta-–-32-bit-or-64-bit-–-the-choice-is-clear/

MS Office 2010 website:
http://www.office2010themovie.com/

MS Office 2010 forums
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/office2010general/threads

MS: Understanding 64-Bit Office
http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2010/02/23/understanding-64-bit-office.aspx

If you have the French language version of Excel then ASAP Utilities will start the first time automatically in French (Français).
You can change the language in the options dialogue: ASAP Utilities » ASAP Utilities Options » Settings, language and contact information...

In ASAP Utilities you can now choose between the English, Dutch, German, Spanish and French language:

According to Wikipedia, French is globally spoken by about 77 million people as a first language (mother tongue) by 190 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. It is an official language in 28 countries.
By offering ASAP Utilities in more languages, more people can benefit from it in Excel.

Besides adding the new language, there also also a few improvements in this new version 4.5.6 that we're currently developing and of which you can download the pre-release.

French Excel 2000, 2002/XP or 2003 with ASAP Utilities in its menu

French Excel 2007 with ASAP Utilities in its menu