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@dargor17 said:@MascarponeRun said:I don't think you need anything other than Excel - people don't realise how good Excel is at importing/working with data. Just off the top of my head, I'd import only the unique records in the column you want from the config file directly - I'd have to check if that's one step or two - and then sort (by clicking the sort button...). Not sure if Excel would automatically trim the apostrophes, but if not that's the work of seconds - and an example of where Excel can leave you feeling a bit dirty is that you may be able to cut out that step by treating '' as a column delimiter.There's one thing I'm missing: if I want to do this kind of thing in Excel, I would have to go through the "import data from text file" wizard, click lots of buttons to make it behave the way I want it, import the file, and repeat the procedure the next time I want to import a file. With grep+awk+sed (also head+tail to eliminate useless headers and trailers) I can write a script and use it for any file I want without wasting any more time. That really makes a difference if I have to import the files often, doesn't it? I'm saying because I don't really like going through the crazy logic of awk and stuff, and I would much prefer to use excel, but it doesn't really seem a viable option to me.
In the first place, you could write a script to do the same in Excel. But the bigger point is that the more you use Excel, the more you realise that there must be a solution to that, and google it to find out what it is. It's a common enough problem that Excel has to have some way to deal with it.
I suspect the functionality you should actually be using is data-linking - if all the files are in the same format, you'd just change the source and be done, having set up the import parameters the first time.