Batch replacement in Excel takes forever - normal?
Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 6:01 pm
Hi,
I've now purchased AFR, because searching and replacing in non-Office files is blindingly quick and accurate and I believe that alone to be worth the price. However, I would like to be able to search and replace within Office files and am still having trouble with xls files (haven't tried doc files yet...). I just ran a batch replacement on an xls file (one file, lots of discrete units of text to be replaced in one column that is common to the three worksheets that make up the workbook) and let it run for 13 hours before killing it via Task Manager. When I killed it, it was "running" rather than "not responding". To clarify, I let it run over night with highest priority and with no other software running. The terms being replaced were species names, e.g. Homo neanderthalensis and the replacements were abbreviations e.g. H.n.
Is it normal for Advanced Find and Replace to take so long? I am running Excel 2000 on a WinXP Pro Sp-2 Centrino notebook with 1024MB RAM and am not using regular expressions.
Thanks,
Mike
I've now purchased AFR, because searching and replacing in non-Office files is blindingly quick and accurate and I believe that alone to be worth the price. However, I would like to be able to search and replace within Office files and am still having trouble with xls files (haven't tried doc files yet...). I just ran a batch replacement on an xls file (one file, lots of discrete units of text to be replaced in one column that is common to the three worksheets that make up the workbook) and let it run for 13 hours before killing it via Task Manager. When I killed it, it was "running" rather than "not responding". To clarify, I let it run over night with highest priority and with no other software running. The terms being replaced were species names, e.g. Homo neanderthalensis and the replacements were abbreviations e.g. H.n.
Is it normal for Advanced Find and Replace to take so long? I am running Excel 2000 on a WinXP Pro Sp-2 Centrino notebook with 1024MB RAM and am not using regular expressions.
Thanks,
Mike