Sunday, June 04, 2006

Survey Says..: Using Excel to Get Your Points in the Right Case


I just finished migration some Land Desktop Desc Keys into Civil 3D 2007. I went to test it, and the file that I tried to import had the raw descriptions in mixed case. Some caps, some not....

That causes problems since Desc Keys are case sensitive.

A quick way to change the case of any list is to open the file in Excel. Excel will open a .txt file and it understands delimiting by comma or space.

Make a column next to the mixed case column and use this formula :

=UPPER(cell)

For example, to turn the code "ep" into "EP" and "ep" lives in cell A1, I would make a formula that said

=UPPER(A1) and it will return "EP"

Great way to fix those accidental field errors.

1 Comment:

R.K. McSwain said...

Another method.

Open the file in notepad.
Press Ctrl+A to select all.
Press Ctrl+X to cut the contents to the clipboard.
Open Microsoft Word.
Press Ctrl+V to paste the text into Word.
Press Ctrl+A to select all.
Choose Change Case from the Format menu.
The text will still be selected, so press Ctrl+C to copy this updated text to the clipboard.
Back in Notepad, press Ctrl+V to paste the updated text
Save the file.