Paste Special

While I was looking at monitors on NewEgg, I came across their comparison function. They put a great deal of data into their chart, but it was a little hard to deal with, so I thought I would put it in a spreadsheet. So select, copy, paste, apply a little AEDIT magic, and presto we have a CSV file that can be loaded into a spreadsheet. Well, sort of. Google Doc's couldn't handle it, so I pulled out my copy of Calc, the Open Document Spreadsheet program.

Now I have the data in a spreadsheet, but the data is in columns. That is the data for each monitor is in a separate column. Can we put it rows? I've tried this before but I've never had any luck. This time I use the terms "row major order" and "column major order" when I do a search on Google, and it comes back with a link on using Paste Special in Microsoft Excel.

I've seen Paste Special before, but I had always ignored it, figuring it probably had something to do whether to copy formatting information or not, and I just didn't want to learn any more about Excel than I had to. You start down that road and pretty soon you are worrying about whether the shadows under your title fonts are dark enough. Bad, bad, bad.

But here is the Paste Special dialog box and there is one little check box marked Transpose! Just what the doctor ordered. Takes all your columns of data and puts it in rows, and vice versa.

Turns out there was an endless amount of information in the stuff I copied from NewEgg, so it would have taken a spreadsheet with a thousand columns to cover all the possibilities, most of which only applied to one or two monitors. So I abandoned that project. I had enough information for my purposes, and as I bonus I learned how to transpose a spreadsheet. That might actually be useful someday.

Update January 2017 replaced missing image.