I found a free tool that will automatically, intelligently let you format tables of data or databases: Magic/Replace
Basically, you feed it columns of data, and make a change to the first row. And then it will do it’s best to intelligently copy your changes throughout the data.
So I can take data in yyyy/mm/dd and change it to read mm-dd-yy. I can force all capitals or remove all capitals from people’s names. I can remove the punctuation from phone numbers and pull the area code into a separate column. I can take a list of e-mail addresses and replace the @ symbol with “- at -” to try and avoid the spam-bots.
All in all, it can help you avoid a lot of painful slicing and dicing of data via complicated functions.
The best introduction is to watch the introductory video and play with the sample dataset.
Tips: In some cases it helps to use copying and pasting rather than deleting and re-typing. Also, make any complicated change in several smaller steps so that you’re sure it works out: it seems easier to lead the website to the correct action when you do small changes.
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