Search and Replace in OpenOffice Calc

I am currently busy mining through thousands of lines of research data that mostly contain time tags. I imported them into OpenOffice Calc where they have the following format:

05:23:33:97

denoting hours, minutes, seconds and hundredths of seconds. However, even when you define your own time format in the cell properties, OpenOffice refuses to do any calculations unless you change everything to the

05:23:33.97

format. As it’s a very menial and time consuming task to change one period over thousands of lines, there must be a way to have the program do it. Well, I finally found it (using the search function in the OpenOffice forum). Hagar de l’Est brought me on the right track. The solution for my particular problem is:

Search for: (..):(..):(..):(..)
Replace by: $1:$2:$3.$4
In the More Options, check the Regular expressions.
NB: Search in field should be Values.

Now just highlight all the cells with time tags and have the Search and Replace function blast away anything that gets in its way.

The digital hunt

Today, the 3G iPhone is officially being thrown onto the Swiss market and I witnessed a phenomenon that I never saw before: continuous updates on sold out stores.

It was naturally clear that macprime was going to somehow report on the new 3G iPhone launch. However, with the “power from the streets” this didn’t turn out to be just a plain report as you’d see it in a newspaper, instead the news on sold out stores continuously came in through the feed reader. In other words, the booty has become the hunting weapon for social shopping.

People who didn’t get their iPhone in the midnight sale started to stand in line in front of other stores as early as 3:00 a.m. to be the first in the morning. When I rode my Tram to work I could see people in front of the Orange store lining up just to get into the store. When I get home from work, probably no shop in Zurich will have any iPhones left.

We are excited to announce

Duh, listen to your customers first. This will make Google loose any credibility on the “Don’t be evil” business culture.

It’s hard to lag

Short news are quite often the most telling news.

We knew it

No, it’s not photoshopped.