Agate-related question

I have a friend (no, really) who has moved downstream to a paper where they are getting all their AP copy off of Exchange. All well and good, but you deskers probably know what the problem is: Sports agate.

You pull NL standings, for instance, off that way and it ain't tabbed. Whee!

Anybody know of a macro or a script that you can run to clean that up? They're doing it by hand right now, I guess, and it's terribly time-consuming.

The real answer is for them to pull a line in to the paper and start getting the datastream, but I'm trying to help her with at least a short-term solution.

 

I'm sure the answer is mostly site-specific, and there are easier ways, but ... you could copy the standings from AP Exchange, create a new spreadsheet in Google Docs or Excel, paste in the standings, export them as CSV, open that file in Notepad and paste it into a file in your system. Then search for commas and replace with tabs. Kludgy, but it might work in the short term.

 

You could write/have someone write a script to remove all the extraneous characters, then have a dummy set up that you could eyedropper the remaining text with. That, of course, relies on having InDesign or some other program that has a similar tool. And of course, the script would require having someone capable of writing scripts, and methinks a place that is using APExchange for agate probably doesn't have that.

 

Both clever ideas ... glad I don't have to do those things.

It's an 11,000 daily. Not sure why they aren't using the datastream.

 

Because the idiot who wears the publisher beanie heard from one of his idiot publisher friends that it might save him $35 a week?