Super User Blog Editor Room

KronoS

15:35

Burrr... we need to light a fire in here

Feeds 163

19:29

2

Q: Calling all bloggers!

Do you have any of the following qualities? A love for writing long and details answers to common Super User problems A desire to test, document, and share with fellow Super Users awesome products (sometimes for FREE!) An interest in the weird, funny, or just plain cool technological subjects o...

2

somequixotic

20:48

eeeeeeeeeee

KronoS

So what's this idea?

somequixotic

I want to document a common "hack" / procedure that we use here at work from time to time that saves a ridiculous amount of time, and doesn't require any programming, just some clever regex

no Clippy, go away

basically I copy and paste one or more rows of text out of MS Excel, paste them into Notepad++, perform various regex, then paste back into Excel... during both the copy and paste operations, Excel converts row breaks to/from newlines, and column breaks to/from tabs, so in many cases where you'd have to update a huge amount of Excel data by hand, or write a macro, you can use this instead

I'll obviously provide a few examples and then suggest a site for further reading on doing more advanced regex, and document the caveat that it wipes out your per-character formatting if you have any and really need it to stay

but in general since our Excel data isn't formatted on a character by character basis, we have used this trick dozens of times to do mass replaces on data that's too complicated for the boring old literal find and replace available in Excel itself

and OpenOffice doesn't work well either because it has a tendency to corrupt your spreadsheet

@KronoS

KronoS

That sounds pretty interesting... I think though going more into detail about regex instead of this specific tool would be better

not saying that you can't/shouldn't document the tool, but go into more detail about what regex is and why it's so powerful

somequixotic

I've been using both Excel and Notepad++ for around 10 years and I didn't figure out until this year that it was possible to paste between them

KronoS

and maybe some simple commands (that you then implement into you "example" tool that you're developing along the way)

that make sense?

wait what?

you can copypasta between excel and notepad++?????

somequixotic

20:55

well I'm not developing any specific tool or anything -- what I'm doing is explaining how to make practical use of two different programs -- Excel and Notepad++ -- combined with regex -- to make super awesome automation

KronoS

:O

it does!!!!

somequixotic

4 mins ago, by somequixotic

basically I copy and paste one or more rows of text out of MS Excel, paste them into Notepad++, perform various regex, then paste back into Excel... during both the copy and paste operations, Excel converts row breaks to/from newlines, and column breaks to/from tabs, so in many cases where you'd have to update a huge amount of Excel data by hand, or write a macro, you can use this instead

updated several thousand rows that way by writing a 20-character regex that took me about 3 minutes to get perfect, versus updating the rows by hand or using worksheet functions or writing VBA that'd take me days, or hours, respectively

IMHO, regex and Notepad++ are an ultimate "typical office environment" superhero trick that you can pull on just about anyone who's not technically inclined, and get them to stare at you like you're Batman for the rest of the day

KronoS

This sounds pretty cool. Are there any posts on SU that are relevant?

somequixotic

Ordinary Person: Ugh, I have to update about 10,000 rows in this stupid excel spreadsheet because they changed the inventory part number naming convention!

Superhero: Don't worry my dear, regex is here! [^\t]+\s([A-Za-z]*) .... blah blah ... and.... done!

Ordinary Person: YOU'RE MY HERO!!!!

@KronoS I don't know.

KronoS

See if there are any. It'd be interesting to link to them. Otherwise, I say get a rough draft of what you're thinking put together. Have you logged into the blog system?

somequixotic

21:11

@KronoS Yes

I don't have permission to post or anything like that but I'm staring at the logged in dashboard

KronoS

That should be changed now. You should be able to create a post. You won't be able to publish it though. (Otherwise me and nhinkle would be out of a job ;)

howdy @nhinkle what are your thoughts on @somequixotic's idea?

nhinkle

Haven't seen it yet. Let me see...

@somequixotic you're pretty much describing why everybody here thinks I'm a genius.

(Here being at work)

Awful VB6 program with no API or interface to get info out of, and I need to copy-paste 50 bitmaps from the program into a folder? AutoHotKey! Boss walks up... I'm sitting 5 feet from the computer as it literally runs itself copy-pasting images. "What... HOW?"

So yes, writing about that sort of thing would be excellent.

KronoS

lol

nhinkle

@somequixotic you could speed that up quite a bit by just making a macro that lets you type in a regex and then executes it on all the data in the spreadsheet.

Just one macro once that accepts a regex in a dialog box and executes it on whatever. Store it in your personal macro workbook and it's available always.

somequixotic

@nhinkle true, but maintaining macros is a little annoying to me, and I don't particularly like the VBScript/VBA regex engine

also, Notepad++ has additional features like opting whether to count . as a newline, and using backreferences in the replacement

also, some corp environments are so darn locked down that group policy disables all macros, but perhaps somewhat ironically, in most of the environments I've been in that are that restrictive, you can still download and run portable apps like notepad++

it may be useful to provide the alternative of how to do it using VBA but I don't see that as being superior to copy-pasta into notepad++

or really, any preferred text editor with a regex engine (although I have to admit notepad++'s one is really quite robust)

don't want to clutter up the article overly much with lots of different ways of doing it though, so maybe I'll just stick to one way, and mention that there are other ways too of using regular expressions, that way people can explore some other possibilities if they don't like the Notepad++ solution for whatever reason

nhinkle

21:22

Fair enough. I guess it depends on what your workflow is like.

somequixotic

the general concept of using regex, which by itself is not actual programming, to save you a ton of time in Excel, is, TBH, a novel concept to many people who use Excel

nhinkle

Yeah - stick to one detailed example of how you do it, and then the last paragraph (or section or whatever) can be some ideas of other approaches to consider.

I'd be interested in doing a general series on "how to become a super user" or something like that, which would teach people things that we think are obvious, but people who hadn't seen them before would be like WHOA THAT IS SO HELPFUL HOW DIDN'T I KNOW IT!

KronoS

@nhinkle I like that process

somequixotic

I'll also spend considerable energy warning people about how regex can have unintended results/consequences and to always take a backup

KronoS

@nhinkle That's a great idea actually

somequixotic

21:24

a coworker of mine, who's a newbie to regex, started using it and got burned with irreversible data loss due to a bad regex and the call wb.Save in VBA

nhinkle

For example: how many times have I seen people take a document, copy-paste the contents into a new word file, open an excel sheet, copy a value from a cell, paste it into one location in the word file, save, close, open a new file, paste in the contents, repeat, etc. Then I show them how mail merges work and their minds are blown.

somequixotic

I repeated to him, "I warned you" about 50 times :P

nhinkle

@somequixotic I am quite thankful that all of our network drives at work have hourly backups that we can directly access through the file system because I do sometimes do stupid things like that.

somequixotic

@nhinkle we have a (less robust but still useful) daily backup of our network drive at work, and just last month we had a guy who was working off his C:\ drive lose a week of work on a stupid, stupid thing

he was completely 100% finished his work in this enormous Excel spreadsheet

he then goes to make a new one because he had to do the same thing with a different set of data

nhinkle

And didn't make a copy after all?

somequixotic

21:26

he clears out the data in the original sheet and instead of doing Save As (to start over with the same columns but blank data), he hit Save

not even Piriform Recuva could get that data back

it overwrote the same sectors as the file originally consisted of, with the empty sheet

nhinkle

Ouch.

somequixotic

and by the time he came to me asking me if I could help him recover, he'd already closed Excel, so Ctrl+Z didn't work

nhinkle

"Something went wrong! Quick, close everything!"

somequixotic

lol

nhinkle

If you were super skilled you could try dumping the contents from RAM if it was still there.

somequixotic

21:27

he knew the second he hit the save button that it was wrong

nhinkle

BTW do you read /r/talesfromtechsupport? I think you might enjoy it.

somequixotic

he isn't an idiot, he just did a really stupid thing, had an uber brain fart

I've read selections from there linked to by @CanadianLuke in the past

nhinkle

@somequixotic I'ds say the stupid thing was doing all your important work on a non-backed-up C: drive.

somequixotic

I'm not actually tech support though, I'm a programmer / web app tester / security tester

nhinkle

Doesn't mean you won't be amused :P

somequixotic

21:28

@nhinkle well, yeah, exactly that; and his boss let him know that much

Ivo Flipse

@somequixotic I use Notepad++ for a lot of that basic stuff too

somequixotic

he won't make the same mistake again lo

made him stay late to get it done in two evenings

nhinkle

Ivo! Hi - long time no see.

somequixotic

btw I also do technical writing at work, so I'm pretty good at being professional and writing clearly when I want to be; my chatting style is VERY lax compared to what I'm capable of

don't think you'll need to do a whole ton of editing on my post once I write it

Ivo Flipse

@somequixotic You may want to explain some basics about regex too while you're at it

somequixotic

21:30

@IvoFlipse well actually @KronoS suggested that the article's "meat" (the majority of the content) should focus exactly on what are regex and the concepts that go into them

the whole "let's apply this to making sweeping changes in an Excel spreadsheet by pasting into Notepad++!" is kind of a side-show

KronoS

I think that's your best plan of action

somequixotic

after all, regex are useful in myriad situations that involve neither Excel nor Notepad++

although I have to admit

Ivo Flipse

@somequixotic lol that part has bitten me in the ass too

somequixotic

the very concept that you can copy and paste plain (unformatted) data back and forth between a text editor and Excel, is, itself, extremely cool

nhinkle

@somequixotic I believe you. We do like to do a quick check and make sure everything looks good, the formatting is right, there's a <more> tag (don't forget that!), etc. But based on your SU posts, I have no concerns about your writing skills.

somequixotic

21:31

that's not even taking regex into account

Ivo Flipse

@nhinkle I never used mail merge, if only because it sounds complicated

@nhinkle Hi to you too :)

KronoS

I've never even heard of mail merge TBH

somequixotic

today I had to do technical writing on a 35 page document that was co-authored by a person whose first language is Hindi and a person whose first language is Russian

that was a real treat, let me tell you

I think I had something like 700 distinct track changes edits.... :P

nhinkle

@IvoFlipse basically you take a word document (or outlook if you're doing email), you fill in your text, and then you point it at a database or excel sheet, choose columns from the datasource to enter into the word doc, and then it auto-generates as many word documents as you need to enter all the data from the spreadsheet. Perfect for making nametags, handouts for events or soliciations, "personalized" welcome letters or forms, etc.

Ivo Flipse

I recently used regexes to change my code, to go from camelCase to snake_case, that was a big mistake

nhinkle

21:35

@IvoFlipse what is snakeCase?

somequixotic

(should be noted that I have met people who learned English as a second language and speak/write it extremely well, but these particular people aren't the best at writing in English despite their efforts)

@IvoFlipse snakeCase? XD

snake_case ?

I hate MicroSoftCase the most. .NET APIs drive me up a wall

Ivo Flipse

woops, I had the names mixed up at first, my bad :)

apparently Google uses that in their naming convention, so I adopted it as well :P

somequixotic

@nhinkle huh... Something called "Mail Merge" sounds like something you'd use to merge emails in Outlook, and although I've heard it used before, I never thought it could be used for something like that

Ivo Flipse

@somequixotic lol, are you pointing at my its/it's? :P

somequixotic

you should write a blog post on Mail Merge -- that sounds useful for clueful users, and despite being a "professional" Office Suite user, I've never used Mail Merge

@IvoFlipse nah :P just saying my coworkers are poor technical writers and I had to make a ton of edits and it was exhausting

nhinkle

21:37

@somequixotic I probably will. I use it only about once a month or so, but when I do... damn is it helpful.

Ivo Flipse

@nhinkle A cousin of mine once made a script for my dad, that takes some fields from a database. I really had no way how to update that

somequixotic

I'll probably take a crack at this blog post this weekend; I'm too tired when I get home from work to expend even more mental energy

nhinkle

I'm behind schedule on some blog posts for Bikes.SE but I think I'll get on board this blogging about simple but drastically useful things campaign.

@somequixotic it is weirdly named. The idea is that you'd use it to merge data into a piece of mail which you would then print out. Like snail mail. For letters and such.

But you can use it for whatever, really.

somequixotic

lately my evenings have consisted of: come home, eat, do whatever needs doing around the house, listen to the baseball game on the radio (go O's!), tap away on my phone on Tapatalk on various forums, check Root Access to see if Ariane is bugging me, then nod off around the 8th inning of the game

Ivo Flipse

@nhinkle I think that's the key: keep it simple

KronoS

21:39

I'm hoping to get a Liquid Cooling system to review. With that I'm also going to do an overclocking for Super Users post

nhinkle

@KronoS that would be cool.

I don't have time to meddle with overclocking right now, but I'd sure be interested in reading about it.

KronoS

@nhinkle I don't know a how lot about it, but with funds very limited, so I figured I'd try to get the best that I can out of my current CPU

from what I've read online, it appears that I can get my 2.66 GHZ up to 4.0 GHZ

somequixotic

whoa

KronoS

ya

somequixotic

btw have you guys seen this? I think it's worth following at least..

mainly the SF chat guys started it, but I'm in with em too and I wanna see what the SE employees do in response if it gets enough followers and questions to enter the beta phase, if they just flat out can it or let it through

KronoS

21:44

@somequixotic those come and go. I don't think they'll ever make it through the SE approval

besides using /r/buildapc is better IMO

nhinkle

That's very much against the whole idea of stack exchange. Interesting concept though.

KronoS

reddit is a good platform for opinion based things like that

nhinkle

Hm. Just looking at the example questions, it looks like a disaster before it even takes off. Explosion on the launch pad, if you'd like to go with the Area51 analogy.

somequixotic

lol, the community moderator for SE closed a bunch of the example questions, but the community voted them all reopen :P

nhinkle

I think that tells you a lot right there.

I doubt that site is going anywhere. There've been lots of permutations on "hardware suggestion sites" and none of them got off the ground.

somequixotic

21:47

I have no problem saying that those questions are a bad fit for SU, or SF, or SO, or any of the other existing sites, but to say they're completely off topic for the SE network seems myopic imho.... I mean, for Christ's sake (no pun intended), we have a site about Christianity where 99% of the answers are opinions

KronoS

@somequixotic But they don't easily get outdated

nhinkle

I think some things are off-topic for the SE network. Stack Exchange doesn't purport to be the solution for everything. And opinionated open-ended questions are deeply un-SE

I mean come on, "what tools are used in your server room"? Uhhh that could go on for pages.

somequixotic

@KronoS actually, I've seen a preponderance of questions on SU, SO and SF, asked from 2010 and on earlier, that are enormously outdated, and not closed, and highly upvoted; the very nature of technology is that it gets outdated

give me an hour and I could dredge up 25 of them, and other than the fact that they just happen to be extremely outdated, not even slhck, The Destroyer of Questions, would close them for any particular reason, unless he accidentally stumbled upon them

even encyclopedic, theoretical knowledge gets outdated

ask me before QuickSort was invented, what's the fastest general purpose sorting algorithm, and it'd be something other than quicksort

Ivo Flipse

I'm torn on the subject, there are examples that are useful, because there are only a handful of legitimate approaches

But its hard to determine that a priori

somequixotic

ask me before 7-Zip was released, what's the best general-purpose compression algorithm, and it'd be something like Zip

nhinkle

21:51

30

Q: In defense of obscure, niche hardware recommendation questions

I see that Keyboard / mouse to use for a HTPC dedicated to the TV? was closed. While I don't totally disagree -- it is superficially similar to a shopping recommendation -- I think this question should be allowed, with some caveats. Here is why: It's a question targetted specifically to peop...

discussion specific-question

This may be worth revisiting, too.

Ivo Flipse

In most cases you'd have to know that there are only a few answers

Also, the quality of answers is hard to monitor, you don't want to get one-liners

somequixotic

right, and it's stupid to limit SE to questions where the asker must know a priori how many possible answers there are

for SU I don't see a particular problem with that, but the whole network? jeez

@IvoFlipse my long answer in rebuttal of "we'll have one-liners!" : discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/a/11566/62799

@nhinkle I agree that that particular question is awful

Ivo Flipse

@somequixotic Basically you'd have to do the same as Skeptics, where every answer needs to be like a review, else it gets nuked

somequixotic

the same as an existing site? whoa, that's totally unprecedented :D

(pardon my use of sardonic humor)

nhinkle

Well that digressed quickly.

somequixotic

21:57

sorry :/

nhinkle

It's fine, I'm just sayin' :P

somequixotic

sometimes I think SE tries to be too perfect, like (to use one of my many baseball references, being a baseball fan) a pitcher who pitches right around the strike zone but misses it by a few inches and ends up walking the bases loaded instead of getting a ground ball, a fly out and a K

too afraid to let the batter hit the ball, he ends up doing himself in.

Ivo Flipse

in Fake Programmers, 6 hours ago, by Grace Note

@IvoFlipse We have great communities to support us and provide top quality content that people want. That's what we did. ♪

That's Grace's response to why our traffic jumped up significantly

KronoS

@somequixotic You'd be surprised the stuff that SE does allow though. And I think that the strict set of rules are pretty few and far between

somequixotic

I think we're doing great on SU, and I don't think we need to make many changes to how SU or the blog operates right now -- we've got a nice, well-tested set of rules and community guidelines that work

but within the framework of SU, there's a lot of stuff that simply can't be made to fit within the SU community except maybe in chat, and telling people "go to chat" is so unreliable due to the times people are there, etc

KronoS

22:01

@somequixotic Thing is those rules and guidelines have changed drastically over time

somequixotic

yeah, they have... but it seems like, at least since I joined in mid 2012, things have been pretty stable

Ivo Flipse

Well I disagree with some of the changes that we've had, like I've had several useful questions deleted for god knows what reason

The solution wasn't closing/deleting of the question, but zealously deleting answers

sadly, that hardly scales, unless downvotes were free and -10 would mean your post gets put in a delete queue or something

somequixotic

I don't want everything under the sun to be on SU; that's not my goal... but I think SE has room to expand at least into allowing IT shopping questions on a cordoned-off site on the network; it's not like we're asking for a site about kitchen decor or dance moves

although it's probably more likely that we'll get a site about dance moves than IT shopping

le sigh

all it'd take is for some random SE employee to really, really like dancing, and then -- ping! -- dancing.se.com

KronoS

@somequixotic but why is IT shopping questions more important that kitchen decor and dance moves? Personally I rather like to dance ;)

nhinkle

@somequixotic I don't think Area51 works the way you think it does.

Ivo Flipse

22:05

5

Q: Is Zumba more effective than dance class for weight loss?

I've been hearing a lot about Zumba lately and I've been doing a little bit of research on it. From my understanding, many forms of dance can cause weight loss. I'm trying to find out if it is more effective than just taking dance classes. Obviously this would depend somewhat on the type of dance...

weight-loss cardio zumba

somequixotic

!(@*$^!@#$)!#@$^!#$%

KronoS

(Note: I actually suck at dancing. I pretty much look like a sea lion during mating season)

nhinkle

Also, IT shopping questions are always going to be very close to single-use. One person's very specific needs, that even if they're barely relevant to someone else's needs will be just that: barely relevant.

somequixotic

@nhinkle I dunno: is a good answer laying out the advantages and disadvantages of different models of graphics card going to only apply to one person? if the question is "should I get this or that, I have $120 to spend", that's fairly limited; if the question is "what are the price and performance differences between this series of graphics card?" that's much more generally useful

and yet, anything about "price" wouldn't be allowed on SU, so where would that be allowed? traditionally we've answered with "go to Root Access!" which I'm all happy about because I'm glad to help people, but what if I weren't there? you'd have one sad, lonely, user asking at 3AM for help on building their PC.

Ivo Flipse

@nhinkle What's a good consumer-grade router? is hardly single-use :P

KronoS

22:09

Thing is @IvoFlipse there will probably be more single use questions than non for sites like those

nhinkle

I think questions like that are better suited to a site that specializes in them, personally. Tom's Hardware maintains a monthly updated list of the best graphics card for your money. The DD-WRT site has a full list of all routers compatible with it, etc.

somequixotic

anywho, I too do not think that the IT Shopping site will make it off the ground -- but in a world that's better than the one we live in, it'd somehow find a way to make it, and not suck, and fit within the general universe of the types of sites and topics that SE is made for.

Ivo Flipse

I didn't say it was a good idea :P

nhinkle

Questions like that are going to get dozens of answers all saying more or less the same thing in different ways, with lots of upvotes on the ones that suggest things that The People like.

KronoS

@somequixotic "price" may not be suitable, but technology is:

4

A: Laptop Battery Technology

This is what everything related to a Laptop Battery means: Milli-Amp Hours (mAh) and Amp Hours (Ah) 1 Ah is 1000 mAh. So if you see a battery that states it's 7200 mAh it's just 7.2 Ah. (I'm guessing this was done as a marketing ploy). A 7200 mAh battery will supply 72 milli-Amps (7.2...

Ivo Flipse

22:09

Ironically enough, we could have had a blog post finished by now!

Meanwhile I'm off to bed

KronoS

@IvoFlipse night!

somequixotic

@nhinkle interesting philosophy; and while I might agree with how excellent Toms Hardware is, I also find that most of what's asked on SuperUser also exists on other sites, and yet SE persists in gathering questions on SU because the format (the site layout, the rep system, the votes, the moderation, etc.) gives it a certain quality that other sites lack, and a permanence that joe schmo's blogspot lacks.

if some things are simply better found elsewhere, that's okay, but it seems like anything that is on SE can also be found elsewhere, but SE does it better because of the way SE organizes its sites.

I was just thinking that maybe SE could also do IT shopping, you know, better. but maybe not.

KronoS

@somequixotic I think ultimately a really good product needs to stay within a single niche to stay really good. If SE gets into the "recommendation" scheme, things will change drastically. It's similar to larger companies that continually try to get into other markets and fail miserably.

somequixotic

unix.se --> linuxquestions.org; stackoverflow --> usenet or dozens of C#/C++/$FOO_LANGUAGE forums; math.se --> mathoverflow; and on and on and on... I think the SE equivalents of these other alternatives are more comprehensive, more informative, easier to search, the information that's presented is more reliable, etc.

KronoS

One example of the opposite is dropbox. They've stayed very close to their original product, and have only expounded upon it. This to me isn't an expansion, but more of a deviation from the high quality products that SE provides.

somequixotic

22:17

I don't think IT Shopping is a deviation, though; not really... while, sure, there is great potential for many questions on such a site to brush up against many of the guidelines that we ourselves set on SuperUser to determine whether a question should be closed/deleted or not, there's also great opportunity for a site that could gain a lot of traction as a source of knowledge for people looking to acquire computer "stuff". I just don't see how recommendations that may invite certain >>

problems, that all existing sites already have to deal with, makes it a "lower quality" offering than anything we already have.

A community's quality is not determined by its rules or what is considered topical there, but rather by the quality of the people who post there. I stand by that.

For proof you just need to look at the difference in quality of post between SU/SF, on the one hand, and 99.9% of SO, on the other hand

frankly, there are millions of questions on SO which are not closed, and probably never will be, which are absolutely horrid, and/or have awful answers, and nobody has the time or inclination to do anything about it. because that community has a critical mass of lower quality people than we do.

and yet the site, on paper, has basically the same rules as SU does.

by "lower quality people" I mean, chiefly, people who are worse at expressing themselves and communicating in a social/technical context, not, like, inferior in the eugenics sense or anything mean like that

regardless, I'm okay with the status quo and will happily write my blog, but I think someday SE may find their way off the well-trodden path and into some other interesting things that don't constitute a carbon copy of sites like SU or careers.SE.

it may not be today or even this year, but somebody is going to have ambition to take it to the next level at some point

going home, sorry for the long form writing.

KronoS

22:33

@somequixotic things is, that by allowing some of these ideas, may also allow more "lower quality people"

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Super User Blog Editor Room