TSV Splitter - Segment your Excel/Google Docs spreadsheet data in seconds not hours.

Have you ever had to work on a spreadsheet where you've got a thousand or so rows and you need to select all the ones marked "shop payment" or something and assemble them into a separate spreadsheet for analysis? It's a right royal pain to do by hand.

I don't know if this a problem many people face but recently I've found I've been doing a lot of analysis of spreadsheets..sales figures, survey results, accounts, sorting paypal shop payments and that sort of stuff.

The situation I often encounter is often something like this: you've downloaded your paypal history for the last year and need to sort incoming shop payments of several different types from outgoings, private payments and whatever else. If there's a thousand records to do it's literally hours of work but if you want to work with those records specifically then each row needs to be cut and pasted. Very, very, very tedious and often for mundanely similar data.

So as I was doing my monthly accounts and was looking at literally a thousand records of paypal history whcih all needed sorting as in/out as well as by 3 different currencies. It was a pretty much dead-set several hours of cutting and pasting and I thought:

"this is well over two hours work... i bet I could write an asp script which sorts them for me in less than two hours."

And since it was *anything* other than doing accounts and had a halfway shot of working I gave it a go... and I'm glad I did.

Whilst it actually took a bit longer than the two hours to write, since then it's actually proven invaluable for me with all sorts of processing tasks and has earned its place in the top drawer of my my toolbox. The beauty of it is it works whether you're using ms office, open office or google docs or whatever.

It seems to be possible to copy/paste data between google docs, excel and openoffice, so you can just select the cells you want from ms office or open office spreadsheet and paste them into the splitter, then hit "process" and it imports your data. Set the number of columns you need and you can either just select rows by checkbox (already a lot less clicks-per-record than cut/paste in office) or use a search function.

The search is additive. So if you search for "hamsters" and then "gerbils" you will have records for both hamsters and gerbils, all in the original sequence. This is so that you can easily select cross-currency transactions from paypal records - where there is a "convert gbp to euro" action and then a "buy in euros" action, and you want to keep them together.

Whilst it's pretty simple it does actually allow you to easily import data from a number of different sources and segment it for analysis, even if it's just "how much did I earn from x this month", but it's also working fine for detailed ad-tracking and the like. What would have taken me 2-3 hours now literally takes 5mins. Import, search, check and process.

Once you're happy with your selection hit process one more time and it will output the selected and unselected values into the textareas below the list of records. Cut and paste them back into your office program and enjoy segmenting your data in a fraction of the time (for free)

Segment your spreadsheets for free HERE