How to Split Excel Data into Multiple Columns Without Getting It All Jumbled Up

December 31, 2021

Suppose you’ve asked someone for some information. You were hoping for a nice, neat table, but what they’ve sent you back is, well, messy. Maybe the columns aren’t broken up the way you expected. Or maybe you don’t even have any columns, and it’s just several rows of information pasted into an email.

If you need to sort your data, run a mail merge, or do anything useful with this information, you’re going to have to clean it up first. Fortunately, Excel has a tool for just this type of problem: Text to Columns.

Let’s take a look at how to use that tool along with the Find/Replace feature to organize a stubborn set of data.

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Getting into the Spirit of Shortcuts

December 29, 2021

Because we’re nerds, my fiancée and I like to keep track of our score every time we play Spirit Island, a fun but complicated cooperative strategy game. Calculating the score requires looking up a difficulty rating in a table, a fair bit of counting, and some math.

While none of that is especially hard to do, the process could go a bit quicker if most of the work (aside from the counting) could be done automatically.

As it turns out, this is a great job for Apple’s Shortcuts app!

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It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity!

After the pandemic canceled our Winter Break travel plans for the second year in a row, this meant that my fiancée and I would have a lot more time on our hands than expected.

That, combined with some exceptionally dry knuckles, was just the excuse I needed to try my hand at a new electronics project. My goal was to answer the following question: How dry, actually, was the air in our apartment?

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