Discard CONCAT and use TEXTJOIN

Don't miss how the new TEXTJOIN formula available in MS Excel 365 is an improvement over the old CONCAT formula.

TEXTJOIN gives you the option to add delimiters in between a combined range of cells, and choose what to do when there are empty spaces in the range.

The beginning of the formula begins with the delimiter that you select:

. . . this is followed by TRUE or FALSE - TRUE stops empty spaces from being included - FALSE will add them in. Conclude the formula with the range you want to combine.

It is possible to combine multiple ranges with TEXTJOIN

=TEXTJOIN("; ",TRUE,A2:F2,A3:F3)

When a hyphen is not a hyphen

The Tip of the Night for May 5, 2019 discussed hyphen-minuses, which look similar to hyphens but which are not actually the same character and will not be interpreted as such by Excel, Relativity, and other applications.

When parsing out Bates numbers to review, or just finalizing the Word version of a brief to be filed, you should also be on the lookout for non-breaking hyphens. In this example, we have two phrases which both contain dashes that, to the naked eye, appear to be the same character.

If you search for a hyphen in Word, it will find them both. However, if the same text is copied into NotePad:

. . . the dash in the first phrase disappears. If you copy the text into Excel you can see a small difference:

The dash in the second phrase is a little shorter and thicker. The Excel UNICODE formula for the dash from the first phrase shows its alt code to be 8209 - different from the alt code for a hyphen-minus, which is 0045, and different from a standard hyphen (alt code 8208).

It can't be a hyphen because Excel will not let the first character in a cell be a hyphen.

The dash from the first phrase is a non-breaking hyphen ‑ . These can be located in Word by searching: ^~

. . . in Find:

This search in Word will find nonbreaking hyphens but not hyphen-minuses, hyphens, en dashes, em dashes. The purpose of the nonbreaking hyphen is to keep words with hyphens from being separated onto different lines. The second sentence here uses a nonbreaking hyphen:

But they certainly make life difficult for those of us who want to do things like copy out and parse dozens of references to trial exhibit numbers which contain dashes (e.g., PX-1278, DX-217, etc.) and run searches on them.

ROSE - RelativityOne Staging Explorer

ROSE, RelativityOne Staging Explorer, has been discussed here in the past [see the Tip of the night for September 23, 2021, describing the transfer pane; and the Tip of the night for April 9, 2022, which related some of the then current parameters for ROSE. Here's some new information:

1. ROSE can currently simultaneously import three jobs per workspace and up to 16 per instance of Relativity.
   

2. If date formats used in an import file are not recognized by Relativity, it will flag them as shown below, but it will not be necessary to reformat them in order to continue with the import.

3. If the delimiters used in a .csv file are entered incorrectly, ROSE will flag on which rows these errors appear on - see below.

4. It includes an option to exclude those annoying .tmp files which were generated by MS Office.

5. While ROSE includes an option to auto map data coming from particular custodians with folders in the workspace for those custodians, it can only detect names in the 'last name, first name' order.

6. After a browser's cache is cleared, the regional settings will default back to those for the United States.