I found a great new resource! Well, it’s new to me at least, but looks like it’s been around a while. It’s called The Excel Addict and it’s just jam-packed with all kinds of tips, tricks, and things that are probably in the help file and user guide, but that you’ll never go look up.

Anyway, go check it out. It may not be a flashy, fancy, “pretty” site, but who cares?! The information in it is fantastic. In fact, I’m gonna add this one to my sidebar, I like it that much.

I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent filtering lists of duplicates… whether they were keywords, stock & option symbols, or anything else, handling duplicate values is a VERY common task in Excel. In the past, I’ve used many different methods to identify or remove them, all of which were, frankly, a big fat pain in the arse.

So you can likely imagine how I about jumped out of my skin when I found out about The Duplicate Master. I swear I’d like to find the author of this FREE utility and give him a big wet sloppy kiss.

OK, if you don’t already have Excel and you do ANYTHING on the computer that involves keeping track of things, analyzing things, or sorting things, why on earth would you ever put yourself through NOT having Excel?? Whether you like Microsoft or hate them, it doesn’t much matter. Excel rules, period. So what the heck… here’s a link where you can Get Excel. Just a plain ol’ Amazon affiliate link, but don’t feel obliged to buy it there if you’d rather get it locally. Get it wherever/however you can find it for the best price. Personally, I have a friend who works for MS so I got it for an employee price. Hey, it’s all about using WHATEVER advantages you’ve got.

I’ve had a version of this spreadsheet in my toolkit for a month or two now, but I polished it up a bit and decided to release it “into the wild” so that others might benefit from it. No real documentation with it, but it should be fairly obvious to anyone comfortable with the basics of Excel.

Paste your keywords in cel A1 as a list, and they will populate A1 to Axxx. The output you want to copy & paste into RSS2Blog will appear in column F.

You may or may not know about the CONCATENATE function in Excel. Basically for those who don’t, what it does is allow you to “stitch” things together from different cels. For example, if I were to put the formula:

=concatenate(a1,b1,c1,d1)

into a cel, the results would be the contents of those 4 cels (a1 through d1) all together in one cel. But, what if those cels each contained a word? The results might be messy, like this:

word1word2word3word4

What if I want spaces between the words? Well fortunately that’s easy… it would be something like this: