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AnalogDigital Engineering |
 Rated
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| Refinate © 2001 |
Sort and Count Items (Including Delimited Items) • Find and Manage Duplicates • Rearrange Lists • Join Cells • Split Cells • Log Changes • Much More Refinate is for everyone who works with lists. Use it to verify, modify and create lists. A unique strength of Refinate is its ability to operate on "regular" comma-delimited items as well as indexed items such as R1, R2, R4-12. This makes it especially well-suited for working with product assembly lists (BOM) that include reference designators. And for this reason, some features are described in terms of how to use them when working with assembly lists. Refinate works with any list pasted or
opened into Excel. Simply drag the
mouse to select items of interest and click a button to: Revision 2.0 of Refinate has many new features but perhaps the most significant new feature is Query. It will automatically find, tag and bring to focus each fault so that it can be edited, deleted or just left with a tag for later reference. A history of edits will be logged into a visible comment tag at each edited location and these comments can be included in the print-out. This automated feature is closely related to the new manual Query feature. Now, you can locate any item even if the indexed item (e.g refdes) resides within a hyphenated range (Excel's normal FIND would not see it). This Query feature has made it possible to eliminate the step of "painting" commas at the end of each cell. Just select the cells of interest and click to count and/or re-format them. Refinate dramatically cuts back the tedious work and errors when modifying and verifying listed information. |
| Get Refinate for Excel 97 or newer. |
For a picture of the very basic operations, see The Basics.
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You do not need to commit to a database program -- no formal structure is required. |
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You do not need to change your document style. Just verify the integrity of the list if that is all you want to use it for. |
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Nobody else in the process flow needs to use Refinate except you, and your worksheet file can be used by anybody else. |
How is it useful?
Refinate can quickly
rearrange lists of text, locate duplicates, count delimited items and find items
that Excel's FIND can not find. It adds functionality to Excel so that you can
now work with comma delimited text/numbers including indexed items that might
also be represented as hyphenated ranges (e.g. R1, R3-R12). An “item” is any
text or number which is separated by a comma within a cell, or an item is the
whole cell content if there is no comma present (whether a comma is present or
not, hyphens can be used to represent multiple items). Lists put into Excel need
not be comma delimited and Refinate has features that will convert back and
forth between delimited and not delimited.
Drag the mouse to select an entire (or partial) list and then you can find all
duplicates while counting all items. Refinate’s new Query feature can
automatically locate and tag problem cells. Changes made will be logged within
the comment tag and can be seen on-screen and in the print-out if desired. You
can use the Query feature to find any space delimited or comma delimited item.
It even locates indexed items within ranges (e.g. R8 will be found in a cell
containing the text R3-12).
Type a list of do-not-include items and a new list will be generated with those
items omitted (ideal for creating or verifying different assembly versions based
on a master list).
Highlight a list of numbers (or indexed items) and Refinate will show the range
so that you can find missing numbers (e.g. 1,2,3,4,6,7,8 can be shown as 1-4,
6-8). It shows missing parts on a BOM, for instance.
Use Refinate to sort delimited items within each cell of a column of cells so
that it becomes possible to compare lists against each other that previously had
no columns that could be sorted identically. For those who work with printed
circuit board netlists, there is a netlist sorting function included which takes
advantage of this ability.
Use the One-row-per-part feature to convert a list into record format and the
door is then opened to using Excel functions in a simplified manner (sorting,
using comparison equations, formatting, column widths, printing, etc.). This
feature can filter out redundant items which appear on every row belonging to
the same part (such as is found in some BOM lists).
Refinate provides a parsing feature that goes beyond Excel’s normal ability.
More options are available for how text is split into cells. Now you can define
up to two strings of any number of characters as parsing delimiters. Control is
provided for splitting lines at consecutive space characters as well as at
specified single space characters. Leading spaces are handled automatically.
After text is split into cells, Refinate provides the ability to quickly rejoin
cells as needed – including the ability to gather and move to one line every
cell highlighted.
As with any good tool, you will find many creative ways to use Refinate to produce the most reliable worksheets quickly.
Get Refinate for Excel 97 or newer.
Click here to send requests and comments.