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Refinate Revision History |
Known Issues:
• If Excel trips up on an "Excel compatible" spreadsheet that was generated by another program, copy the spreadsheet's data and use Excel's Edit_Paste_Special_Values to paste it into a fresh worksheet. You can also save the source spreadsheet to a CSV file and then reload that into Excel. If it is not possible to perform those procedures, then paste a text copy of your source file into Excel and use Refinate's TextToColumns action. You can also get good results from copying and pasting html formatted data into Excel.
• It is possible to have so much text in a single cell that Excel will not display it all (when greater than 1024 characters). You can see all of this data either in Refinate's display or in Excel's formula editing box at the top of the sheet. A trick for getting the extra data to be displayed and printed in its cell location is to set Draw to snap-to-grid and place a textbox (from the Drawing toolbar) over the "large" cell. Turn off Refinate's Sort/Duplicates option. Move the cursor to the "large" cell behind the textbox. Click Refinate's Get/Test. Then right-click-paste into the textbox. Make the row tall enough and the column wide enough to show all of the text in the textbox.
• If there is excessive amounts of text within one cell, a fault will be shown when the "one-row-per-part" action is applied while the Count Ranges mode is turned on. If this fault appears, turn on the Ignore Ranges mode instead. There is a minor difference in that spaces are not inserted after commas in this mode. The "Comma-Space/-Set action can be used to add spaces after conversion if desired. Other actions also add spaces by default once Count Ranges mode is turned back on. After the "one-row-per-part" conversion has completed, the Count Ranges mode can be turned back on.
• Since one of Refinate's purposes is to modify information and place it back on the worksheet, there must be a minimal uniformity of cells such that they should not be merged cells within the input area and, preferably, not in the output area. Refinate will automatically unmerge cells within the input selection when actions from the drop-down box are applied. Avoid using merged cells anywhere on the worksheet that Refinate might need to interact with.
• Refinate works with text, numbers, and formulas as inputs but it only outputs text and numbers -- not formulas. It does retain formulas in their original location if the process chosen is not one that overwrites the original location. However, initiating Refinate's TextToColumns or Parse-Semicolon/-Set will convert the top corner cell selected into the formula's result if it was a formula -- even if the user cancels the action at the following prompt. This will not normally cause a problem since, typically, the applied action is the one intended to be carried out fully without cancelling. This will be fixed in a newer revision so that the conversion of a formula into its results only occurs after the action is fully applied so that there will be no change to the formula if the user cancels the action.
• Notes about processing time when Sort/-Duplicates is turned on: Since duplicate checking is for comma delimited items and not whole records, this often means you should be selecting cells in only one column. If a message pops up warning about the size of your selection, take this opportunity to consider whether you have selected more than necessary. If processing is taking longer than you care to wait, hold the Ctrl key and press the Break key to abort the process. When you are checking for duplicates in a long list of single entries per cell, Refinate's duplicate checking will run quicker if you first sort the list based on the column of interest using Excel's Data_Sort. Only the first 254 unique duplicates can be listed in the comment box when GoTo Duplicates is turned off. To generate a list of more than 254 unique duplicates, turn on GoTo Duplicates and hold the Enter key down until complete. Then paste that result into cells.
Revision History:
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2.05 July 22, 2002: (2:35 PM EST) with Help file 2.0c. After Rev2.00, in Count Ranges mode, when cells of mixed refdes with multiple prefix lengths were processed, the sort order might not have been correct (sorts in order of occurrence). For example: R1,RL5,R2,R3 might remain in that order instead of R1-R3,RL5. This has been remedied. |
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2.04 July 19, 2002: (11:00 PM EST) with Help file 2.0c. These changes for handling numbers generally means that now a right-click-paste places number_values from the display_box, whereas a display_box button will paste text_numbers. Use Refinate's "Number-Values" action to convert cells with text_numbers into number_values. The "Paste-Dsply-to-Cursor" action will now paste text numbers. Query edits will place text numbers. After revision 2.02, text_numbers were changed automatically into number_values during some operations (typical effect was the removal of any leading zeros). Remedied. After revision 2.00, if "Ignore Ranges" mode was turned on, the "join_refdes" option of the "one-row-per-part" and the "Netlist" actions might not properly join cells. Remedied. Other minor fixes were made. |
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2.03 July 2, 2002: (2:00 PM EST) with Help file 2.0c. Remedied a rare miscount of duplicates. It occurred when a duplicate followed immediately after a different duplicate which had the same ending as the whole new duplicate word. For example, if there were more than one "stop" and more than one "top" and no other duplicate words that sorted between them, then "stop" was not shown in the counts of duplicates. |
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2.02 June 21, 2002: (7:10 PM EST) with Help file 2.0c. Under some conditions, a ^ (caret) character or a " (quote) character was inserted in front of text. This has been remedied. The Number-Values action will now strip off spaces and also the HTML non-breaking character 160 prior to evaluating whether text is a number. Duplicate counts now include the total of all occurrences of the items instead of counting only the extra duplicates (duplicates were counted as total - 1). Use this feature to count how many times an item is included within the selection if it is listed more than once. |
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2.01 June 18, 2002: with Help file 2.0b. Same revision of Refinate can now be installed/uninstalled using the setup program ("refinate.exe"). The zip version is available also ("refinate.zip"). |
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2.01 June 5, 2002: (4:50 PM EST) with Help file 2.0b. Be sure to come back to check for new revisions. When clicking PasteV or Paste> or the Subtract button, the message about Subtract_Dsply will now be displayed when appropriate. The Help file has a minor edit to describe how to use Gather-1-Delimit/Cell to gather and split comma delimited items into multiple cells. |
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2.00 May 14, 2002: (3:17 PM EST) with Help file 2.0a. Major revision. A new, sophisticated, "Refinate Query Item" will locate single cell entries or comma delimited or space delimited items by manual request and it will automatically locate cells of duplicates (or other faults) and allow immediate edits. A comment box with a log of cell edits is automatically generated to track edits performed using Refinate Query. The Query will locate items that fall numerically within hyphenated ranges (e.g. when seeking R5, a cell with R2-R8 is found and when seeking the number 5, a cell with 2-8 will be found). Because of the new Query feature, there is no longer a need to place commas at the end of cells to support Excel's normal find dialog (commas were needed so that a search for R1 didn't also find R10, R11,… R100 etc). PAINT no longer places commas at the end of cell text. PAINT now has some preset column width choices when wrapping text. The rules that reference designators must abide by have been changed so that the widest variety of text can be processed without sacrificing the ability to find faults. Due to this change, any text and number combination is allowed as a prefix and only the trailing numbers (if there are any) are used as a designator index. Now Refinate can handle reference designators without prefixes as long as the first refdes in a cell has a prefix. To process this style, first use "Set Prefix" to automatically put prefix on all refdes based on the first refdes prefix of the cell. And then after processing, use Clr Prefix to remove all except the first prefix. Hyphenated ranges can be processed even if the prefix following the hyphen is omitted and Clr Hyphen-Prefix will change any hyphenated ranges to that format (not required). Examples: [R1-R3, R5] or [R1-3, R5] are counted the same (4). R1-3,5 can be automatically converted to R1-R3, R5 or to R1-3, R5. [R01x1-R01x3, R01x5] or [00345y1-3, 00345y5] will all be counted as 4 per cell. [0,6,3,7,4,10,2,1,5] will be counted as 9 item and it will be displayed as [0-7, 10]. The Set Comma-Space action will insert commas wherever there is a space in the selected range to quickly convert from space delimited to comma delimited (w/ other enhancements). Spaces are no longer filtered out of text while processing, so now cells with syntax faults can be automatically located by Refinate Query. When selecting a range to translate using One-row-per-part, the source range can be selected first and then the cell to bold can be selected afterward by holding the Ctrl key and clicking on the first reference designator cell. Then run One-row-per-part. Faster performance and many other tweaks and improvements including new parsing assistance and cell/text re-arrangement functions. |
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1.01 June 24, 2001: Initial release |