Posts Tagged ‘table’

The Fastest Way to Lookup Multiple Historical CAD to USD Rates

Friday, August 21st, 2009

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!

Create a single line of text from a table for logging

Monday, June 15th, 2009

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.