Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with crossreference

How to cross-ref two lists in Excel and remove duplicates?

GilloD — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 08:10:10 -0800

Excel-filter: I've got two sheets of data (Firstname, e-mail, lastname, customer #). I'd like to look for and remove any duplicate entries. More inside. I'm updating our customer e-mail newsletter mailing list. No one has done this in about a year. In that year our list of 20,000 names has dwindled to about 15,000. I have that list of 15,000 with bounces and unsubscribes removed. There are a few operations I want to perform to bring the list up to speed:

-People can opt-in to our newsletter when they buy something. This flags their customer entry in the shipping/inventory software but does NOT add them to the mailing list. I pulled a list of everyone who wants to get the e-mail from the last 6 months. I just want to cross-ref this list with the existing list AND with unsubscribes to make sure they didn't get in another way or have opted out since.

There are a couple of operations that happen in there. All of them come back to the same basic principal- To look at a sheet, or two sheets, and cross ref them looking for duplicates. If there's a duplicate, delete one of them.

This seems like it should be easy but I'm having a hell of a time. A Google search brings up lots of expensive add-ons but no real advice. Excel-ers of the world: HALP!

Replacing my favorite thesaurus now that it's more "efficient"?

Gucky — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:03:53 -0800

Recommendations for a good, verbose online thesaurus for wandering through words? thesaurus.com seems to have changed how they serve search results and my working style is screwed. I use thesaurus.com for hours a day. Their overly detailed results, as well as weird and obscure words that aren't even defined on dictionary.com, were perfect for the way I work (in naming).

I take a few days off, however, and "smart" has 8 results? I used to get pages of entries that were even vaguely related to smart, allowing me to travel interesting pathways and ideas.

I've tried Merriam-Webster's thesaurus and it works the limited and terrible way thesaurus.com does - great for the practical writer, not so great for a word wanderer. onelook.com is great for some applications, but their "limit to a specific concept" is wonky at best. Paper thesauri(?) are fairly useless for this purpose. Word Menu is a little more useful, but limited and slow, as I'm quicker with a mouse than paper.

Are there any tools that work in that wander and get lost way, particularly with a lot of words? Is there some way to get the way-too-prolific results from thesaurus.com again?

Lowercase cross-references in Word 2002/XP?

mnsc — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 02:08:18 -0800

How do I get (and keep) lowercase cross-references in Word 2002/XP? The problem is this:
I have a document with figures named something like: Figure 1 - Diagram of insanity

I want to reference the figure in the text like this, "for my recent mental health, see figure 1". But if insert a cross-reference the normal way by Cross-reference on the Insert menu, I get, "for my recent mental health, see Figure 1".

I have solved this with a macro that loops through all cross-references and changes the text to lowercase. The macro looks something like this:

For Each storyRange In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges

    For Each field In storyRange.Fields

        field.Update

        If field.Type = wdFieldRef And field.Result.Words.Count

This works fine and the references stays that way even if I save and close/reopen the document. But now I have noticed that when I try to print the document, all cross-references update and the text returns to the unwanted casing. I have tried toggling the "Update fields" checkbox at Tools > Options... > Print tab > Printing options but without any change in behavior. Is this a bug(feature)? Should I write the above macro in some other way? And if this is unsolvable (upgrading Word is not an option) is there a macro that replaces all fields with plain text versions? I guess I could resort to saving a copy of the document and execute this macro every time I want to print.