[FRIAM] Find String in Spreadsheet

[Gary Schiltz]

Instead of digging into the guts of Excel with Visual Basic, I think
it would be about as easy (and maybe more fun) to import the
spreadsheet into a database that you could query. If I were to take a
first crack at it, I would first export the Excel file to a comma
separated values file (CSV file). Then install MySQL and MySQL
Workbench. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a Workbench option to
import a CSV file as a new table in the current database. Then you
could write plain SQL queries to look for the data you want, or go as
far as writing some Java code using JDBC to do the queries.

Or instead of MySQL and Workbench, you could try LibreOffice Base (the
database component) to accomplish the same thing. This would be the
open source equivalent of using Microsoft Access.

All this from memory and speculation, of course (isn't that what us
FRIAM'ers are best at?)..

Gary

On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:20 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks, Brent.
>
> Stanford published a spreadsheet with about 200,000 researchers.  Each row contains name, institution name, country, etc.  I want to be able to search for the data about a given individual, the people associated with an institution, etc.
>
> I used to program macros in VBA but I only did it for a few months and that was about 15 years ago.
>
> Frank
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 9:03 AM Brent Auble <brent at auble.net> wrote:
>>
>> If you just want to find something, using the Find option from the menu will work and it should give you the option of searching within the current sheet or across all sheets in the workbook. If there are multiple results, it should pop up a docked window at the bottom of the spreadsheet to show everything it's found.
>>
>> However, if you want to do it programmatically, I'm not sure if any of the built-in functions (formulas) will handle that well, mostly because of the complexity of handling multiple results. Excel functions try really hard to just return single values so they can populate just the cell they're in. There are some exceptions, where a formula will run and put its results in multiple other cells, but those are uncommon because they can indiscriminately overwrite existing cell values.
>>
>> The is likely a capability in the Visual Basic language used for scripting Excel to handle searching, but it's not something I've used before (despite having done a good bit of Excel VBA in the past).
>>
>> What are you trying to accomplish?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Brent
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 10:42 AM, Frank Wimberly
>> <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I used to know Excel pretty well but that was decades ago.  I want to find a given string, say "Wimberly" in a large spreadsheet.  How do I do that simply?  FIND function wants to provide the location within a larger string of a substring.  I want something like the Unix "grep' command.
>>
>> --
>> Frank Wimberly
>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz
>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>> 505 670-9918
>>
>> Research:  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
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