Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2016 November 3

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November 3

Adobe products for students

Which non-free adobe softwares are meant for students. If I am looking for time pass, not professional or business works. 1.39.39.187 (talk) 14:06, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Many schools use site licenses with Adobe to provide students access to non-free products. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:06, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Transparent cell copying in Excel

In Windows Paint, it's possible to copy/paste blank space: if you check "Transparent Selection" in the "Select" dropdown, all pixels that are precisely the same color as the secondary color (i.e. the one that's created when you use erase) will get ignored when you copy/paste part of the screen. If your background color is white, you can copy

 1 1

into

1 1

and get

1111

That's all very convenient, but I'm trying to work with Excel. In this program, it seems that empty cells are always treated as "actively" empty, i.e. comparable to being treated as white pixels in Paint instead of being totally ignored, as in my example. Is there a possibility of copy/pasting "blank" or "transparent" cells in this manner, so that when I paste an empty cell onto a cell with contents, the target cell remains unchanged? Basically, I'm in a situation with the following cells:

1 1 1 1 1 1
 1 1 1 1 1 1

I'd like to end up with a single row of 111111111111 without retyping everything or copy/pasting individual cells (this is a highly simplified version of my real situation), but I've not been able to figure it out with Google or by talking with my library reference desk. It's always been easy to do this with vertical stuff, e.g. taking

1
 1
1
 1

and putting it into a single column (just move it to Notepad; empty cells become tabs, and use find/replace to delete the tabs), but Notepad doesn't have a way to get rid of line breaks as it does column breaks. Nyttend (talk) 18:14, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

• Try this. Select the column or row you want to paste into. Right click and select "Paste special". Select the checkbox that says "Skip Blanks". Select "OK." This seems to work in Excel 2013. --Jayron32 18:26, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

• Works, all right. It totally avoids the risk of transcription errors while saving a ton of time. Thanks a lot! Nyttend (talk) 18:36, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

A more spreadsheety solution would be to create a new row, enter "=Concatenate(A1,B1)" in C1 and drag across. If they are really "1", then "=A1+B1" or just pressing the Sigma button will do.

If you want to get rid of line-breaks in text, consider using Notepad++ which has regex search and replace.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:58, 3 November 2016 (UTC).

Thanks for those, too. The situation actually wasn't just ones, and I've encountered other situations in which I didn't want an empty cell to get pasted on top of a cell with contents, so this route the thing I needed best in the long run. Nyttend (talk) 22:51, 3 November 2016 (UTC)