Line Breaks in Excel - Text to Columns

The admin office needed to have an excel spreadsheet of homeowner addresses to send postcards for an annual meeting.


Initially the request was for address labels. However, the print shop wanted to use a file to print the names and addresses directly to the postcard, not to an address label.


Using the Member Labels by Ownership report I could retrieve the billing address which I couldn't by using the Property Ownership Details report. I also tried different reports in the Membership module with less than stellar results.

The Member Labels by Ownership report can be exported to an excel spreadsheet but the layout is simply the same 3 across label formation that Avery labels use, just dropping them into excel cells. Not very useful as there are 3+ lines in each excel cell.


Normally I would use Text-to-Columns but the line breaks in the individual cells are problematic and don't fit the usual rules.

Ctrl+J to the rescue - https://trumpexcel.com/split-multiple-lines/

Since there were 3 columns I separated them into 3 separate worksheets, split the data into columns and then copied and pasted sheets 2 and 3 to the end of sheet 1 after reviewing and cleaning up the few 4-line addresses.

Access Browsing History in Chrome

Chrome is my go-to browser but I realized today that I needed to access browsing history to find a webpage that I wanted to favorite. Initially I tried searching for the information with no success. It had taken me quite a while to find the information in the first page and I didn't want to lose it!

Thank you How-To Geek for their article "Access Browsing History in Chrome the Easy Way" - https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/8424/access-browsing-history-in-google-chrome-the-easy-way/

Keyboard magic - Ctrl+H.

Microsoft Word Letterhead Template - Those Pesky Background Images!

A co-worker asked for help in converting some PDF files to Word. No problem, I have a program for that. I figured one and done...except that the resulting Word files looked horrible! The original author had used multiple graphics, backgrounds and fonts. For something like this I would a different program to recreate the document to its original form but the co-worker wanted to use Word.

After considerable research I opted to strip out and simplify the graphics to one background and create a Word Template so the background could be used for multiple documents.

99Designs, hands down, had the best step-by-step instructions to create the template, insert the image, size and center it - https://99designs.com/blog/design-tutorials/tutorial-microsoft-word-letterhead-template/, something I was not able to do just by inserting the image into the background of the document itself.

Websites Hosted on a Single IP Address

Today I wanted to look up website hosted by a single web host, or at least the same server a website I support is on...and found this helpful article - http://www.activeresponse.org/discover-all-websites-hosted-on-an-ip-address/

The shows to how do it in Bing – simply use the following syntax:

ip:XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

Works like a charm. Maybe get a cached site or two but I have more information than I did before!

Xenu's Link Sleuth

I have been searching for a tool to check broken links on our HOA website. Most are inadequate...maybe they only check a webpage at a time or provide few clues where the broken link might be. It's been a struggle.

Courtesy of an article on WP University, 5 Tools to Check for Broken Links on Your Wordpress Site, I downloaded and tried Xenu's Link Sleuth.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a free Windows app that scans entire websites for broken links. Provide a URL and it takes care of the rest. It runs a comprehensive scan that checks for broken links, images, frames, backgrounds, stylesheets, and scripts.

The first time I ran it, I found broken links that were embedded in the code that I was able to find and remove. These errors were a result of not changing a link properly so were dirty code rather than a broken link on the website. Still, clean code is better code.

Now I can scan the entire website in minutes and happily do it more often!

Stop Hotmail "Active Preview" Display

I send out a custom newsletter to over 2,300 emails daily. In the email there is a link to Resident Photos in Flickr. Instead of treating the link as a link, Hotmail uses "Active View" to display the pictures. This pushed our classified advertisers and announcements further down forcing the user to scroll at the onset of reading.

In order to display our Classified Advertisers more prominently, I found a post on stackoverflow which suggested shortening the url uses goo.gl service.

Worked like a charm!

Text Editors

Lifehacker post for the five best text editors.

http://lifehacker.com/five-best-text-editors-1564907215

• Sublime Text
• Notepad++
• Vim
• Atom
• Emacs

Notepad++ has been my "go to" text editor. Easy to use and free, I've never needed anything else.