Rufus - How to create bootable media with ISO files

If you have a flash drive or disc from which you want to access a program when booting up in BIOS, the data can be saved in an .iso file - which acts as a virtual drive. The .iso image file holds the data in binary format. However you cannot download an .iso file and simply copy it to a flash drive, the standard way in Windows Explorer. To save an .iso file to a flash drive, use a free utility named Rufus, which is available here. Use the portable, or standalone version, which does not need to be installed:

[FWIW, I scanned it using Bitdefender and it was clean.] Rufus will run from the downloaded executable file and give you the option to select which flash drive you want to add an .iso image to

Rufus may take 15 minutes or more to copy an .iso file to flash drive. I used it to add the .iso file for Hiren's BootCD PE to the flash drive - it downloads from the site as a single file, 'HBCD_PE_x64.iso'. [Hiren's includes several data recovery tools, and I needed to use it to check if the drive of an old laptop I was decommissioning had been successfully wiped.].

It will take Rufus longer than an hour to add a 3 GB file to a flash drive.

When the Hiren Boot .iso file is added, you will see multiple files and folders.

I inserted the flash drive into the laptop that I wiped, and pressed F12 [the laptop was a Toshiba - other hardware may require another function key] to enter BIOS - the firmware. The flash drive was recognized:

. . . .Hiren's BootCD PE successfully ran:

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.