Cleaning a gmail contact csv extraction for Excel purposes

My wife put all her contacts in Gmail but needs them for publication in a excel array. She was never able to have one line per contact. This simple stuff is not yet super easy because of incompatibility of application interpretation.

I need to drill into gmail help to find a thread about the issue, which is partialy solved.

At the end I propose the following process to suppress the return in the field "notes" that creates the mess:

You need a gmail account, word, excel.

1. Export you gmail contacts in export for other app mode (contact.csv)
2. open contact.csv with word
3. suppress the automatic correction option during the key in of quotes. You should have alway " but no <<>>. That may occur in French word for example.
4. put in macro of word this macro (for word 2007 to be changed if necessary) which basically suppress the return everywhere it is not needed, suppress the tabulation which creates also some mess and get you a clean file
5. copy paste this file into excel
6. into excel convert the data : delimited / comma separator
7. You should get your data cleaned.

Put a comment if you need more explanation.

Leica announcement on 9/9/9

I cannot resit to the news of a webcast by Leica announcing "the next generation of Leica Camera". We have just to wait a little more than a week.

Courage

Touch ! and Touch ?

Today, on my RSS, pop up the Sony Ereader Touch edition will be available in France. Great. I saw a few weeks earlier that Sony introduced two devices and focus my attention upon the epub support. A last ! Sony is understanding format issues for it's readers. I did not notice at this time that one on the device was able of touch.

But is it really touch? Yes. Touch means nowadays mean finger and stylus touch, especially in ereade-like devices. Finger for navigating and quick commands, stylus for detail work (highlighting, note taking...).

While discussing with an absolutly non geek guy about music into CD / LP or mp3, he repeats all the times : I need to touch it, that is what I need. He prefers get his music on a CD player that via an network device, with superior audio quality (as long as you use wav, flac or any uncompressed format). This need to touch, he the key in music but also in the reading experience. Most of the people cannot imagine reading without flipping the pages. This promess is about to be fullfilled with this kind of device. (Af course this has to be experienced, but with a lot of device in the field we will have a good experiment)

You can see it in action there :

It is very impressive.

The next question now is again in which format notes are stored for later use on a pc or a new ereader in a few years from another producer. That is not said and we can suspect that is not taken in account. You have to see the "eBook Library" program help. This programs is mandatory to sync your reader to your PC. What ! a program again ! What a mess ! This should be build in within the OS or use the OS properties. Sony has not the chance to have an iTunes to help the end user to plug and manage all its devices.

Now after thinking a little bit, for 300$ you need a netbook and get nearly everything a netbook does minus your standard programms, web / mail access ... In a netbook the only feature you don't have is the touch capabilities for this price. Then, my guess is that we will see a child of this two devices in the near future. From Apple ?

Touch pen made easy

In an another attempt to put some touch upon our PC a firm just launched duo : a pen wich works upon every screen up to 22". Here is a little video.

For the touch, we have to wait a little bit more.