Speeding up Chrome

There are some simple steps you can take to make sure that your Google Chrome browser is operating at optimum speed so you can run jobs in Relativity and other web based applications at the best possible speed. Chrome is notorious for taking up a lot of memory. See the Tip of the NIght for April 6, 2021.

First access Chrome's Task Manager by clicking on the three dot menu, and going to More tools . . . Task Manager:

In Task Manager, sort in the 'Memory footprint' and find which tasks are taking up the most memory.

You may find that some extensions added to the browser, and some processes listed as subframes are taking up a significant amount of memory. You can end these by clicking on the blue 'End process' button at the bottom of the window.

You should be careful about shutting down subframes. They are used to prevent some sites from improperly reading data input into another site.

You should see task named GPU Process taking up a lot of memory. This is used to render graphics on a web page, and should make online browsing faster.

Google recommends shutting down tasks which are designated as Background pages. These are html pages utilized by extensions.

The amount of memory that Chrome uses can increase greatly if you have a lot of tabs open. There is an extension called Auto Tab Discard which can be used to essentially hibernate other open tabs. The tabs will still appear to be open in your browser, but they will not take up as much memory. Auto Tab Discard appears as a small power button icon on the top toolbar in Chrome. (Be sure to click the puzzle piece icon on the far right of the browser so you can manage which extensions are displayed, after installing Auto Tab Discard.)

Auto Tab Discard will give you the option to 'discard' tabs to the left, to the right, or all other tabs other than your current one.

When these options are toggled on, the tabs will not close, but a small snoring 'zZZZ' icon will be added to them indicating that they are in a suspended mode.

Auto Tab Discard will retain data input on a page, and your position on a page. I tested it tonight and confirmed that it will not log you out of Relativity.

As soon as you click back on a discarded tab, it will automatically reactivate.

Pull from the right of a cell until the first instance of a delimiter is reached

You can use an Excel formula to pull all of the data from the right side of a cell until the first position (from the right, the last from the left) of a delimiter is reached. So in this example, we are extracting all of the data after the last instance of a forward slash. Each cell in column A contains a different number of delimiters - holding differing total number of field entries - so using the Text to Delimiters tool won't parse out the last name (which always comes last in the cell) into a single column.

=RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-FIND("|",SUBSTITUTE(A2,"/","|",LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"/",""))),1))

This formula can be made to work by swapping in any delimiter in place of the forward slash (/).

So the formula works first by getting a count of the length of the cell when all references to the forward slash are replaced:

LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"/","")

. . . this pinpoints the location of the last delimiter so it can be replaced with a unique delimiter - the pipe | .

SUBSTITUTE(A2,"/","|",LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"/","")

The FIND formula gives the location of this unique delimiter so the RIGHT formula can pull the text from this point.

=RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-FIND("|

See more detail son this solution here.

This last post of 2021 will be the last time that I update this blog on a nightly basis. I have posted each night with only a handful of exceptions since April 10, 2015, but I need to switch to a more reasonable schedule. While I have no shortage of new litigation support tips, I need to take a break. It takes a great deal of effort to prepare and distribute these posts. Going forward I will post at least once each week, but not necessarily any more than that. I've missed a lot of sleep over the past six years working on Litigation Support Tip of the Night, and 2022 looks like it will be one of my busiest years at work ever.

I hope this blog is helping a lot of people out there get their work done faster and shortening some late nights of your own. Litigation Support Tip of the Night will continue . . .

Counting up attachments using IF . . . THEN

Tonight's tip explains how to use the IF . . . THEN formula to add a new document number each time an attachment is referenced in a file name column. If we being with data like this:

. . . and we want to add a formula in column D which will lead to this result:

We can enter this formula in cell D2 and pull it down using CTRL + D

=IF(LEFT(C2,9)="file name",LEFT(C1,15)&".0001"&".pdf",C2)

This will only work if the attachments are consistently identified in column C with a file name beginning with 'File name', and you have one attachment for each parent document.

If you have more than one attachment, add a helper column in column E to get a count of the number of attachments for each document. In cell E2 enter:

=IF(LEFT(C2,9)<>"file name",0,E1+1)

This IF . . . THEN formula checks to see if the first 9 characters in cell C2 are not equal (<>) to 'file name', and returns 0 if they are not, marking each parent document. If there is an attachment referenced in cell C2, it instead adds 1 to the value already entered in cell E1. Assuming that the worksheet has the metadata sorted so that each parent document appears before each of the child documents associated with it, this will tell us which number each document is in the family.

In column D we can then enter this updated formula:

=IF(LEFT(C2,9)="file name",LEFT(D1,15)&".000"&E2&".pdf",C2)

. . . which will give us these results:

The IF . . . THEN formula looks for instances where the adjacent cell begins with 'file name', and if it does enters the first 15 characters from the cell above (the parent file name minus the file extension), three leading zeroes, and the attachment number referenced in column E. If column C indicates that it's a parent and not an attachment, the formula simply enters the value in cell C2.

The IF . . . THEN formula looks for instances where the adjacent cell begins with 'file name', and if it does enters the first 15 characters from the cell above (the parent file name minus the file extension), three leading zeroes, and the attachment number referenced in column E. If column C indicates that it's a parent and not an attachment, the formula simply enters the value in cell C2.