Find & Replace line breaks in MS Word
As a designer I’m quite often working on text files here & there and sometimes cutting & pasting data from various sources into MS Word means that the formatting is all wrong (tip: paste into notepad first to strip formatting then paste that output into Word) or there’s no formatting at all.
For instance – I want to find out how many items there were in this small business news page.
Rather than count line-by-line there’s a labour-saving technique to be had with Find & Replace in Word. So I copied the main page content into Word and had a one-line output. Seeing that every item began with either ’2007′ or ’2008′ I simply executed find ’2007′ and replace all with ‘^p 2007′ and find ’2008′ and replace all with ‘^p 2008′
^p
So I replaced all the year dates with linebreaks and ended up with 79 lines/articles
Life saver 
Make Google results pages easier to read
When you search Google you tend to get a ton of extra data the sometimes you’re really not looking for.
Normally you see, in a Google results page, the following data:
[title]
[description]
[link]
When you’re looking for something in a hurry e.g. checking out other competitors in the SEO game, you often need to peruse the results pages fast!
So how do you compact Google search results?
I just happened to stumbleupon DaveN’s blog whilst Googling for the pros & cons of having a UK website at a US IP address and I noticed his greasemonkey scripts page.
Now I haven’t used Greasemonkey in a while but it’s a handy little plugin for the Firefox web browser.
On Dave’s page there’s a totally handy little Google search compactor script for Greasemonkey.
Really handy, give it a try.
Microsoft to buy Yahoo?
Oh no. It looks like Microsoft have made an offer to buy Yahoo!
Microsoft have apparently offered $44.6bn or £22.4bn, in cash and shares.
It sounds like a good deal for shareholders who’ll get 62% over the closing value of the share on Thursday (31st Jan) night when the shares are down 46% on their high of last year.
But will this be a good thing for search & the Internet or not?