Converting from feet, inches and fractions to inches and decimal p

[Dee]

Morning,

We have a program that exports a table from Auto-cad to Excel, using a
program called TableBuilder. It exports using feet, inches and fractions eg
6'-5 1/2" or 4'-0".

I'm looking for a way to convert this to inches and decimal points and all
the -, ', " removed.
for example 6'-5 1/2" will be 77.5 and 4'-0" will be 48

Any ideas? It's a huge spreadsheet and doing each conversion individually
will drive me nuts.

Cheers in advance

Dee

 

[Pete_UK]

It will be a complex formula (almost finished), but to avoid problems
with converting cell references can you tell me which is the first
cell that this will apply to in your sheet, eg F2, and which column
you want the formula to go into? Then I can give you the exact formula
which you will be able to copy/paste into your sheet.

Pete

 

[Dee]

That would be amazing! The first cell this needs to applied to is D5 and the
same column D.

Thank you in advance

Dee

 

[Pete_UK]

Hi Dee,

I can see on Google Groups that you have replied, but I can't read
your reply,and I couldn't find it at all on the microsoft discussions
site - any chance you can post it again to see if I can read that one?

Pete

 

[Pete_UK]

It's alright - I can see now that your first cell is D5. You can't put
the formula in the same column as it will overwrite the data that you
have, so make use of an empty column (eg column H) and put this
formula in H5:

=IF(ISNUMBER(FIND("
",D5)),LEFT(D5,FIND("'",D5)-1)*12+MID(D5,FIND("-",D5)+1,2)+MID(D5,FIND("
",D5),FIND("/",D5)-FIND(" ",D5))/MID(SUBSTITUTE(D5,CHAR(34),"
"),FIND("/",D5)+1,3),LEFT(D5,FIND("'",D5)-1)*12+MID(SUBSTITUTE(D5,CHAR(34),"
"),FIND("-",D5)+1,2))

This is all one formula, so be wary of spurious line-breaks that the
newsgroups sometimes introduce (usually showing up as hyphens).

I've tested it out on your examples and also on 14'-11 23/64", which
returns the correct result of 179.359375, so it seems to work. Format
the cell with the appropriate number of decimal places, and then copy
the formula down.

If you don't want this extra column in your sheet, you can fix the
values from the formula and then paste them over the original values
in column D and then delete column H.

Hope this helps.

Pete

 

[Dee]

Hey Pete,

Thank you again. I'll give it a go later today, when I'm in work.
Regs

Dee