The Perceptus Back Story

A few times a year, a client of our will need our help in cleaning up a manually populated Excel file that has a couple of date columns.  Invariably, there is a hodge-podge of date entries, such as 2010-10-05;  june 10, 2010; or 8/4/2008.  We’ve finally made a tool to fix up the bulk of this so that Excel will detect it properly as a date value.

Perceptus introduces the  The Clean and convert a column of dates in Excel Numbers Wizard, on the Perceptus Web Tools mini-site.

We hope this tool saves some people besides ourselves some time.

We added a couple new tools to Web Tools by Perceptus today.  We also cleaned up the look of the site a little – it’s gone all the way from ugly to almost passable.  Similar to our blog, over time, the trickle of traffic to our web based text mangling site has grown, and it had earned a bit of our effort to tidy it up. Who knows, if this keeps up, we’ll have to keep adding more tools!

The new tools?

• The Whitespace Trimmer – Paste a blob of text. Every line  of text will be trimmed of spaces on the left and right and returned to you.
• The Blank Line Remover – Paste a blob of text.  Every blank line will be removed.

Like the rest of the site, the clipboard is your friend.  Run one tool.  Copy the result to the clipboard, and run another one of our tools on the result.

A little while ago my custom user script for Chrome stopped working. I’m currently using the “dev channel” at home. When I first switched to Chrome, that was the only version that supported user scripts (basically GreaseMonkey from FireFox integrated into Chrome).

My script is simple, it makes some font and color changes to a few websites that I view regularly to make them more legible (IMHO). I should bundle it into an extension some day…

Anyway, it took a bit of research to figure out what happened. Look here on the Google Chrome blog:

[r33013] Disable –enable-user-scripts. (Issue: 27520)
NOTE: You can now install user scripts by navigating to them. You will have to reinstall your current scripts (they aren’t migrated).

– http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2009/12/dev-channel-has-been-updated-to-4.html

So, scripts are still supported, but I have to install it again. I didn’t quite understand “navigating to them” meant, but it actually means exactly what it says. In the address bar browse the file system, e.g. go to here:
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User Scripts

Then double click on your .JS file, and a little extension installation prompt pops up. It’s pretty cool actually.

Hmm… now that Google Chrome regular version supports extensions, I might be able to take myself off the dev channel.

At Perceptus, we deal with the Canadian Dollar to US Dollar exchange rate a lot.  Doesn’t every small business in Canada? We need to convert our US revenues to Canadian CAD amounts for tax purposes, among other things.

We used to use the common websites like XE.com or X-Rate.com to get our historical exchange rates.  But those sites are too slow if you need to look up a half a dozen exchange rates from the past.  It takes several clicks to retrieve a single exchange rate for a date in the past.

So, I went looking for something better to use.  In fact, I was prepared to create a new tool for looking up historical Canada to USA exchange rates on the Web Tools by Perceptus site if I couldn’t find a satisfactory alternative.

Unfortunately for tools.perceptus.ca, I did find a reasonably good way to get a lot of old exchange rates in an efficient way.  The IMF website, of all places, has a great custom table generator.

Here’s the link: Http://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/ert/GUI/Pages/CountryDataBase.aspx

However, this link (until it breaks, anyway) will take you directly to every CAD to USD rate in the last 365 days in a nice and tidy table.  Just generate the table, and look up the rate you need for the date you need.

Nice!

Have you ever wanted to copy a chunk of text from a web page for logging in an Excel spreadsheet and have been supremely annoyed by the formatting and spacing and all manner of other things that make it untidy and tedious?

Well, we did.  So, a couple months ago, we added a new text mangling tool to our simple web tools page, we introduce, The Simplify to a single string – granted, we don’t have the prettiest names for our web tools.

It was originally designed to online transaction details from a bank web page that includes a small table, and turn it into a single string that we save in Excel for logging purposes.  It’s turned out to be useful for mangling all sorts of web snippets to make them Excel, Word, and even email friendly.

We strip all formatting, remove extra spaces, and modify table cells and line breaks by replacing the breaks with dashes (“-”).

It’s useful to us, and hopefully to you!  Enjoy.