comma separated amp; Tab separated

Robert129 · Post by **Robert129** » 27 Mar 2012 00:38

If I created Census entries in v2 with Comma Seperated in the Auto text field and now want them to be Tab seperated is there a way of doing that automatically?
Robert

ID:6040

rodit · Post by **rodit** » 27 Mar 2012 04:19

I have done the same thing and would be interested to see if there is a way of fixing it up. I didn't find the Tab separation until I had a fair number of Comma separations.

Roger

Post by **tatewise** » 27 Mar 2012 10:14

Consider carefully what you want to replace each Comma with.
Simply replacing each Comma with a Tab will not necessarily give you the neatly tabulated effect you might expect.
It will probably need manual editing to get the desired tabulated column layout.

There is a Knowledge Base article on how to Tabulate Multiline Text in Records and Reports that discusses the options and solutions including Ancestral Sources.

There is no simple way to find only the Comma characters in the Text From Source fields of Census Source Records.
A global Find & Replace will find Commas in many, many other fields.

The new FH V5.0 has a Plugin feature that could be programmed to find just those Commas and replace them with whatever you want.
It might even be able to guess the number of Tabs needed to achieve a tidy column layout, but it would not always guess correctly.

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