Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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It's funny how, in the computer field, some things lead to strange and unexpected detours. A few weeks ago, I highlighted Camtasia as a screen capture utility from TechSmith.

At the same time I got Camtasia, the company sent me SnagIt, a screen capture program about which I'd heard favorable things from other authors. Being a stubborn male, I had decided I didn't need the product for my writing, and I put it on the shelf. (I had a system and didn't want to mess with it, you know how it is.)

But I heard enough good buzz about SnagIt that I decided to give it a spin, and lo and behold, I noticed an interesting feature in its screen capture capability. Among the formats in which SnagIt can capture a screen window is to save it as comma delimited text based on columns in the window.

This got me to thinking, which is always a dangerous thing. If you're as fanatical about backups as I am, you have stacks of CDs and DVDs filled with folders and files from eons ago, completely disorganized. Eventually, I have stacks of burned backup CDs and DVDs, and have no idea what's on them.

Oh, I know, I can print labels, but it's hard to put the contents on a CD label. Now, I thought I might have a better way to organize my massive collection of backups.

First, I configured SnagIt with a profile for text window capture, in which the columns would be converted into comma-delimited text.

Figure 451

Then, I opened a Windows Explorer panel and used the View > Details to show my files and folders on a backup CD.

When I press the Hot Key combination in SnagIt, the panel in which my mouse is located will be captured to a text file.

Figure 452

I can save the file on my desktop with a *.txt suffix, and capture the rest of the window if necessary as a second file: disc1.txt and disc2.txt.

Figure 453

Now I can leave SnagIt and open Excel. In a new workbook I click Data > Import External Data > Import Data.

Figure 454

I change my Files of Type dropdown list to All Files so I can select the disc1.txt file to import and click Open.

Figure 455

When I do this, I get a Text Import Wizard which lets me format my text pretty close to what I to want.

First, I choose delimited.

Figure 456

Then, I make sure I set the correct delimiter type: namely, comma, which is what I put in my SnagIt profile.

Figure 457

When I finish the Wizard and complete the import, it's not quite perfect, but I can work with it. I can change the name of the first column to simply Name (of file or folder).

Figure 458

There may be a few items in the wrong place that need to be moved, but I can do tha by a simple cut and paste into the proper fields.

Figure 459

NOTE

In this first attempt, the File or Folder name and type are combined. In the second one, they weren't. This is just the way SnagIt happened to grab the columns.

For this type of simple Excel database, it's hardly that important, but you can tweak it to the extent that you are anal and need to make this perfect.

Once you've made the columns the same number, you can combine the two screen captures quite easily by copying and pasting, so that you have one large table for your entire disc. (If you were insane, you could go through and also do the subfolders.)

But at least now you can search and even sort through this backup, which is catalogued entirely in one worksheet.

Here we're sorting by date and expanding our selection so that the corresponding name cells move along with the dates so that we could find the most recent or oldest files.

Personally, just having the folders and files alphabetized in such an organized way is heaven for me.

Figure 460

We can add more discs each as its own worksheet, and simply number the discs to correspond to the worksheet names!

We can find any referenced file by simply searching through the Excel workbook for it, locating its worksheet, and looking in that disc.

To take it a step further, we could also do something similar in Access. The New Table > Import Table command allows us to use a import Wizard similar to the one in Excel. By cleaning up, we can create nice tables for backup folders and files.

Figure 461

Obviously now we can use a different system, by generating reports based on queries of our backup tables. Yippee!

The basis for all of this is, of course, the little SnagIt program, which captured the screen in the comma delimited text format for us. If you like this scenario you'll have to obtain SnagIt, so that you can do a set of data backups and catalog them in Excel or Access.

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