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General discussion

i need a second opinion - urls, spreadsheets, headaches.

May 13, 2008 3:31PM PDT

i have to work through such a frustrating process to put together the track listings for my podcast, i need help if anyone has any patience to read through this.

every episode i have to type out the playlist, but i also dig up the links to where people can buy the tracks. sometimes the links get very long and hard to keep track of.

so i have a spreadsheet in google docs with the columns like track title, artist, label, and then another column for the url.

now this is the frustrating part. i have to then take the url and insert it into the track title.

so i export the spreadsheet as a text file, open it as a word document, then i cut the URL, and paste it as a link to the track title.

then i have to take the word document, export it as html, then take that snippet and post it on my blog.

a few too many steps wouldn't you say?

Discussion is locked

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(NT) Can't you copy (ctrl-C) from the google doc on your screen?
May 14, 2008 11:51PM PDT
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..
May 15, 2008 12:54AM PDT

no, google docs doesn't allow you to insert links into the spreadsheet last time i checked, but open office does allow you to do this. however all the export options on open office make it difficult to get the nice clean html code afterwards that i'll insert into my blog

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Not sure I understand the problem.
May 15, 2008 8:28PM PDT

Perhaps I am missing something here, but are you trying to display a track title as a url link to a site where the tracks can be played/purchased?

If so, does Google Spreadsheets allow you to enter this directly into the title cell? eg;

=hyperlink("URL","title")
(example: =hyperlink("www.tech-recipes.com","Tech-Recipes")

What have I missed in your post?

Mark

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i told you it was confusing
May 16, 2008 2:06AM PDT

i'm not sure if google docs allows you to enter that directly into the cell but typing out that code for each track seems a bit much don't you think?

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I'm lost.
May 16, 2008 2:25AM PDT

It seems to work for me. I used CTRL+V to paste into the cell.

However, I'm lost on this so I am bowing out. I don't understand the relationship between Google Spreadsheets, OpenOffice, Your blog, CoffeeCup HTML editing and exporting/importing text/html. So I can't help.

Mark

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More details please.
May 15, 2008 9:05PM PDT

- Why use a spreadsheet on google. What's wrong with OpenOffice Calc?
- What is the output of ctrl-C on that cell in the spreadsheet? There are two cases here for both types of spreadsheet: formatted as text and formatted as hyperlink, so that's 4 answers combined.
- Once you have the url as text, what's wrong with copying it and and pasting it into your blog? Does the blog software accept it as text and make a hyperlink of it (like the software of this forum does)? Does the blog software only accept a link in html format (like <a href="url">description</a>.
- Why copy/paste? Why not simply enter the full anchor tag (as shown above) yourself?

Kees

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May 16, 2008 2:10AM PDT

openoffice calc is good for entering links but the export options have too much meta data in them.

yesterday i tried exporting as a text file from google docs and opening into an html editor where i cut the links and pasted them into the track titles, which worked nicely.

so i guess what i need to do is find a way to export from openoffice into coffeecup html editor very smoothly and then i will have eliminated a few steps.

but the ultimate would be if i could have some sort of script that says "take column 4 on every row, and cut the contents and paste into column 1 as a link". that's probably taking it a bit too far on the laziness level though, but hey that's what scripts are for sometimes.

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Seems like a simple formula.
May 16, 2008 3:19AM PDT

Not a macro.