Adam Howitt's Blog

Feb 19
2007

Reason 1 billion to use Firefox 2

At : 4:13 PM | Link | Coldfusion | Comments (9) | Send | 1447 Views |

Nope, not the automatic conversion of RSS feeds to friendly pages offering subscription options.  Not the automatic spell checking of text inputs on a form.  I'm talking about excel style table controls.  Tim Yager, our Texas transplant at the office, just discovered that if you are viewing a table in Firefox 2 and hold down the Control key you can select cells from the table or drag a selection of cells.  Unlike the old behavior where a whole row from the table is selected as you drag down a column, the behavior becomes similar to Microsoft Excel where you can drag only a column or series of columns.

It took us a little experimentation to distinguish whether this was some nifty javascript in the CFDUMPs we were viewing or a browser feature.  Turns out it works on any tables but it's damn handy for CFDUMPs of query results.  Thanks Tim.

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  1. Sorry - I should've told you about that one a while ago - I've been using that trick to copy paste into Excel when I need to do a calculation. Tis quite handy indeed.

    Posted By Jeff Kenny : Posted At 2/19/07 8:43 PM
  2. How are you pasting into excel? It Even when I try the "paste special" option it doesn't work. Regular paste puts the whole thing into a single cell.

    Paste as text (through the paste special option) puts everything into separate cells but puts all rows/colums into a single row, sequentially

    So I basically have to paste 1 row in at a time using the "Past as TexT" in the "Paste special" right click menu. Kind of time consuming.

    Posted By ChezdarTheN00b : Posted At 3/27/07 11:41 PM
  3. Liar liar pants on fire.. Sitting on a telephone wire. You can't paste into MS Excel using this. Pointless flagellation. Pwned beotch.

    Posted By ChezdarTheN00b : Posted At 4/6/07 10:22 PM
  4. I'm glad to see that the internet hasn't lost its ability to allow people to make pointless, childish attacks on people they don't know. It's really great.

    Anyway - I never said it wasn't time consuming or that it was a direct copy/paste match, but its far less time consuming than copy/pasting 1 bit at a time. Here's what you can do:

    Step 1: Ctrl+drag over the column you want in Firefox (yes, 1 column at a time).

    Step 2: Paste into Excel. It will paste as a row, not a column. Don't worry - we'll get back to this. Repeat Steps 1 & 2 for as many cols of data that you need.

    Step 3: After you have all the data you need into Excel (in rows), select them all and copy. Now move a few cells down and choose "Paste Special" - you'll see a few new options now. Choose "Transpose" in that dialog. This will turn the rows into columns.

    Step 4: Grow up.

    Posted By Jeff Kenny : Posted At 4/7/07 8:49 PM
  5. Your a maniac. I don't have that kind of endurance, to do all that clicking.

    I just just right clicked on the table in IE and chose "Export to Microsoft Excel"

    Lo and behold it just worked.

    Posted By ChezdarTheN00b : Posted At 4/8/07 9:50 PM
  6. Here's a faster way for Chezdar.

    Step 1: Highlight the grid you want to copy (the entire thing).

    Step 2: Open Notepad or Textpad & pasted the data in there. It does paste in a tab separated format.

    Step 3: CTRL+A to highlight all the text you just pasted.

    Step 4: CTRL+C to copy all the text.

    Step 5: Go to Excel and paste the grid in the original layout.

    While this works, it's not good enough for me. If someone out there know how I can get rid of the Notepad step, please speak up!

    Thanks

    Posted By Paul N : Posted At 4/13/07 5:12 PM
  7. How to copy from Firefox to Excel.

    Here's a way that avoids the Notepad step that I listed in my last post. Instead of clicking and dragging the mouse to highlight the sells of the grid that you want, you have to use CTRL. Here are the steps

    Step 1: Hold down the CTRL key and click just outside the boarder of your grid. Either just above the grid, or on one of the sides. The entire grid should become highlighted.

    Step 2: CTRL+C

    Step 3: Open Excel and hit CTRL+V. You should get the entire grid pasted and formatted the same way you see it in Firefox.

    Here is a good URL to practice with http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

    Posted By Paul N : Posted At 4/23/07 12:37 PM
  8. Think the fasted way to copy parts of a table (the way described above works only for whole tables) is:

    1) select data in FF 2) Ctrl+C 3) goto excel 4) paste special 5) paste as text

    and the table is now correctly pasted :-)

    Posted By haytjes : Posted At 7/31/07 4:05 AM
  9. Rather than all of the copy/paste magic, I prefer to save the html and open it directly into Excel. Then I just copy and paste from excel to excel... works every time for me.

    Posted By mlewis : Posted At 10/3/07 4:49 PM
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