I use and value a good spreadsheet application the way chefs use and value good knives. I have countless occasions to do ad-hoc data processing and conversion, and I tend to turn to spreadsheets even more often I turn to a good text editor. I know a lot of ways to get the job done with spreadsheets. But recently I learned a new trick. I’m delighted to share it with you here.

The situation: you have an HTML document, with a list of linked text. Imagine a list of projects, each with a link to a project URL (the names aren’t meaningful):

The task is to convert this list of formatted links into a table, with the project name in column A, and the URL in column B.  The trick is to use an OpenOffice macro, which exposes the URL (and other facets of formatted text) as OpenOffice functions. Continue Reading »

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