2. The Power of "Find and Replace" & Delimiters (Your Best Spreadsheet Friend)
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2025 10:13 am
Why this is lazy: It front-loads a tiny bit of effort to eliminate massive headaches and manual work later. It's like spending 5 minutes organizing your desk so you don't spend an hour searching for your keys every day.
When you're faced with an existing, somewhat messy list in a text document or a single spreadsheet column, your lazy best friends are Find and Replace and Text to Columns.
Standardize with Find and Replace:
Look for common variations in phrasing or spacing.
Lazy Move: Replace " - " with "|" or "Product A" with "Product_A". Standardizing brother cell phone list separators or terms makes the next step trivial.
Text to Columns (The Magic Button):
If you've managed to get a consistent delimiter (like a comma, tab, or the pipe | symbol you just added), this feature in Excel or Google Sheets will instantly split your single column of text into multiple structured columns.
Lazy Steps:
Select the column with your messy list.
Go to Data > Text to Columns (Excel) or Data > Split text to columns (Google Sheets).
Choose your delimiter (e.g., "Comma" or "Custom" for |).
Click "Finish." Bam! Instant data.
Why this is lazy: It automates repetitive extraction. Instead of manually cutting and pasting, you're telling the software to do all the heavy lifting based on simple patterns.
When you're faced with an existing, somewhat messy list in a text document or a single spreadsheet column, your lazy best friends are Find and Replace and Text to Columns.
Standardize with Find and Replace:
Look for common variations in phrasing or spacing.
Lazy Move: Replace " - " with "|" or "Product A" with "Product_A". Standardizing brother cell phone list separators or terms makes the next step trivial.
Text to Columns (The Magic Button):
If you've managed to get a consistent delimiter (like a comma, tab, or the pipe | symbol you just added), this feature in Excel or Google Sheets will instantly split your single column of text into multiple structured columns.
Lazy Steps:
Select the column with your messy list.
Go to Data > Text to Columns (Excel) or Data > Split text to columns (Google Sheets).
Choose your delimiter (e.g., "Comma" or "Custom" for |).
Click "Finish." Bam! Instant data.
Why this is lazy: It automates repetitive extraction. Instead of manually cutting and pasting, you're telling the software to do all the heavy lifting based on simple patterns.